Marry the Devil, Bury the Truce

The corset strings bit into Tori's ribs one pull at a time, and she counted them instead of breathing because counting was easier than thinking about what came after the last one. "Breathe out," Rosa said, for the third time. "I have been." Tori's voice came out thinner than she meant it to. "There's nothing left." Rosa's hands paused at her back. In the mirror, Tori watched the old woman's face soften for half a second, the way it used to when Tori was small enough to be picked up after a nightmare. Then it closed again, the way everything in this house closed when it got too close to the truth. Tori turned back to her own reflection because she couldn't stand looking at Rosa's pity a second longer. A stranger looked back at her. Ivory silk, pinned curls, a face powdered pale enough to hide that she hadn't slept. She didn't recognize the woman in the mirror, and that felt like the most honest thing about the entire morning. Her phone buzzed on the vanity. A text from her father: Car leaves in twenty minutes. Don't make this harder than it needs to be. She read it twice, hands going cold. It's harder than it needs to be. As if she were the one making choices this morning. As if there had been a single moment in the last six months where anyone had asked her what she wanted instead of telling her what she owed. "He's waiting," Rosa said quietly. "Let him wait." Tori pressed her palm flat against her stomach, willing it to stop twisting. "Rosa. Tell me the truth. Just once, before I walk out that door. Is there any version of this where I don't go through it?" Rosa's silence lasted a beat too long. "That's what I thought," Tori whispered. The drive to the cathedral blurred past the tinted window, black cars, and black umbrellas crowding the steps like a funeral procession that had gotten the wrong invitation. Tori's hands shook in her lap, and she pressed them flat against the silk to stop it, an old trick, the same one she'd used at her mother's funeral, at every family dinner where her father's temper ran short, at every moment in her life when falling apart wasn't an option. Breathe. Count the exits. Survive the next five minutes, then the five after that. Her father met her at the base of the cathedral steps, straightening his cufflinks instead of looking at her. "You look beautiful," he said. "I look like something you're delivering," Tori said. "Don't pretend this is a compliment." His jaw tightened. For one unguarded second, something crossed his face that might have been shame if she let herself believe her father was still capable of it. "This marriage saves this family, Vittoria. One day, you'll understand that." "Then explain it to me now," she said, voice cracking despite every effort to keep it steady. "Explain why I found out about my own wedding from a lawyer instead of from you. Explain why you can't look at me on the one day you're supposed to be giving me away." He didn't answer. He offered his arm instead, the same way he'd offered it at every formal event of her life, a gesture that had once felt like protection and now felt like a hand closing around a leash. She took it anyway. She always did. The doors opened, and the organ swallowed whatever she might have said next. The aisle stretched longer than any aisle had a right to be, gold light spilling down from the cathedral's high windows, roses she hadn't chosen lining pews full of people who would smile at her and mean nothing by it. Tori kept her eyes forward, because if she looked at the crowd, she would see her father's face beside her, and if she looked at that face, she was terrified of what her own would do in front of three hundred witnesses. He was waiting at the altar. Taller than she remembered from the one dinner their families had forced them through months ago. Broader. Colder. Watching her walk toward him the way a man watches something he's already decided belongs to him. Her stomach dropped somewhere around the fourth pew and didn't come back up. She reached him. His eyes swept over her once, quick and assessing, and something in that look made her chin lift despite the tremor in her hands. "You look like you're walking to your execution," he said, low enough that only she would hear it. "Aren't I?" she said back. Something flickered behind his eyes. Not softness. Calculation, sharp and immediate, like she'd said something worth filing away. "Depends," he said, "on how well you learn to survive in my house." The priest's voice rose and fell somewhere above her, words she couldn't fully process because she was too busy doing the only thing that had ever kept her steady: cataloguing the room. Exits. Faces. The particular tension in her new husband's shoulders, like a man standing guard rather than getting married. I do, she heard herself say, and the words tasted like a door closing behind her. I do, he said, and his voice didn't shake at all. The ring he slid onto her finger was cold, heavier than she expected, and she stared down at it instead of up at him because she didn't trust her own face not to break. Somewhere behind her, her father was smiling for the cameras. Tori smiled, too. She'd had a lifetime of practice pretending everything was fine while something inside her quietly came apart, and today, apparently, was no different. But as the priest pronounced them married and the cathedral erupted into applause she didn't feel, Tori caught her new husband's eyes one more time; and for one unguarded second, something passed between them that wasn't performance at all. Something closer to we're both trapped here, and neither of us chose it. She didn't know yet how right that instinct would turn out to be, or how much more dangerous the truth was than a simple, ordinary sale.