"Would you prefer I was?"
"I don't know." His gaze holds mine and doesn't let go. "Would you prefer I expected it?"
The air between us does something. It's not metaphorical, it's physical, a charge that sits in the six inches of space between my body and his and makes me aware of every one of those inches in a way that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the fact that I have not stood this close to a man who looked at me like this in four years and my body has clearly decided that four years is long enough and is now staging a full revolt against everything my brain is trying to tell it.
Stop. You are at your own wedding reception. Your father just sold you to this man. You do not get to want him. You especially do not get to want him like this, like you're already thinking about what his hands would feel like if he?—
I make myself breathe normally.
"I didn't know you had a sister," he says, and the shift in subject feels almost like mercy.
"Why would you."
"I know the De Luca family tree. Your father. Vittorio." A pause. "You. Nobody mentioned a younger sister."
"Laura's been kept out of everything." I gesture at the reception, the guests, the whole machine of it. "My father prefers it that way."
"To protect her or to keep her useful later."
The question lands somewhere I wasn't prepared for and I have to work not to let it show. Because the answer is the second one and we both know it. Hearing it said out loud does something specific and ugly to my chest.
"We both know," I say.
I don't like how clearly he reads things. I don't like that he asked that question and watched my face while he did it, like he already knew what it was going to find there.
"She's nine," I say. "She doesn't need to be part of this yet."
"Yet," he repeats.
We go quiet. Around us, the reception carries on, all laughter and expensive wine pretending.
My father is across the tent talking to someone I don't recognize, already calculating his next move, already somewhere else entirely. He hasn't looked at me once since the ceremony. Delivered and received and filed away.
It should not still hurt. I am twenty-four years old and I know exactly what I am to him. I have known since I was old enough to understand what the word asset means. It should not still land like a fist every single time.
It does though.
"You didn't answer me," Rafael says quietly. "Earlier. At the altar."
"You asked if I wanted to stop the ceremony. I said no."
"That's not what I asked." His voice drops. "I asked if you wanted me to stop this. There's a difference."
"Is there."
"Yeah." He's looking out at the crowd, not at me, and somehow that makes it easier and harder simultaneously. "One's about the ceremony. The other's about everything that comes after."
My throat tightens. "And what comes after?"
He turns to look at me and opens his mouth and —
"Gia."
My father's voice cutting through the space between us like a blade.
Rafael goes still beside me.
My father approaches and this time there is something adjusted in how he moves toward us, something recalibrated, careful in away that was not there before the church. He stops a beat further back than he normally would. I notice this. I don't know what to do with it but I notice it.
