Marry the Devil, Bury the Truce

Chapter Seven Thirty Days

Word of the attack reached her father by mid-morning, the way word always traveled fastest through the parts of the city that ran on fear instead of law. Tori found out he'd called three times before Dante finally handed her the phone, expression unreadable, and stepped back to give her what little privacy the study allowed.

"Vittoria." Her father's voice came through tight, strained in a way she rarely heard from him. Salvatore Marchetti didn't panic. He calculated. But something in his tone tonight sounded closer to fear than she'd heard since her mother's diagnosis, years ago, back when the world still made a kind of sense she could navigate. "Tell me you're safe."

"I'm safe," she said, though the words felt hollow in her mouth. "No thanks to you."

Silence stretched on the line, long enough that she wondered if he'd hung up.

"I need to see you," he finally said. "Today. Alone."

"Alone." She laughed, short and humorless. "Papa, someone tried to have me kidnapped last night from inside a house full of armed security. You really think I'm walking anywhere alone right now?"

"This isn't a request, Vittoria. There are things you need to understand, things I should have told you before the wedding, and I can't say them over a phone line that might not be secure."

Dante's eyes sharpened from across the room, clearly hearing enough of the conversation to track its shape. He held up a hand, silently mouthing to ask him about Cassius.

"Who is he, Papa?" Tori said, watching her father's reaction even though he couldn't see her face. "The man at Mama's funeral. The one who's been circling us for ten years. Cassius. Who is he?"

The silence that followed was so complete she thought the call had dropped.

"Papa."

"Not on this line," her father said, voice dropping to something raw and frightened that she'd never once heard from him in twenty-four years. "Come to the house. Bring your husband if you must, though God knows that man's family is half the reason we're in this position to begin with. But come today, Vittoria. Before the thirty days run out. Because if what I think is happening is actually happening, none of us are safe, not you, not me, not even the Salvatores, and I would rather you hear the truth from me than from a monster who's been waiting a decade to collect it."

The line went dead before she could respond.

Dante didn't like the idea of the Marchetti estate, that much was obvious from the tight set of his jaw the moment Tori relayed the conversation. He paced the length of the study twice, tablet forgotten on the desk, mind clearly working through a dozen scenarios where walking his new wife into enemy territory ended badly for everyone involved.

"It's a trap," he said finally. "Has to be."

"Or it's the truth," Tori said. "You heard what I heard, Dante. He sounded terrified. My father isn't terrified. Not even when creditors circled him for years. Whatever he's about to tell us, I don't think he's the one setting this trap."

"That doesn't mean Cassius isn't using him to set one anyway. Your father's been compromised for a decade, Vittoria. Willingly or not, that makes him a liability, and liabilities get used by the people who control them."

"Then come with me." She crossed the room, closing the distance between them before she'd fully decided to, driven by an urgency she didn't entirely understand herself. "You said it yourself. Whatever Cassius wants, it's bigger than either of our families alone. If my father actually knows something, we need to hear it before those thirty days run out. Together."

Dante studied her for a long moment, something shifting behind his eyes that she was starting to recognize as the moment he stopped calculating and started deciding.

"Fine," he said. "But we do this on my terms. Full security detail, armored car, and if anything about that house feels wrong the moment we walk in, we're gone before you finish your first sentence. Understood?"

"Understood."

"And Vittoria." His hand found her chin, tilting her face up toward his with a gentleness that still managed to feel like a command. "If your father tries to separate us once we're inside, if he asks for one moment alone with you, you say no. Whatever trust existed between you and him died the moment I found that contract with a date on it that predates every promise he ever made to you about this marriage being for survival."

Tori swallowed hard, throat tight with an ache she hadn't expected. "He's still my father."

"He's still the man who sold you," Dante said, not unkindly, but without softening the truth either. "Those two things can both be real, Vittoria. But only one of them should decide how much you trust him today."

The Marchetti estate looked smaller than Tori remembered, the way childhood homes always seemed to shrink once you'd spent time in houses built to intimidate rather than comfort. Ivy climbed the east wall the same way it had when she was a girl, and the fountain in the courtyard still ran slightly crooked, water arcing left instead of straight up, a flaw her mother used to say gave the house character.

Her father was waiting at the door before the car had fully stopped, and the sight of him nearly broke something loose in Tori's chest despite everything she now knew about the contract, the debt, the decade of lies. He looked older than he had at the wedding barely twelve hours ago, gray creeping deeper into his hair, shoulders bowed under a weight she was only now beginning to understand the size of.

"Vittoria." His voice cracked on her name. "Thank God."

"Don't," she said, stepping past him into the foyer, Dante close behind her, security fanning out through the house with quiet efficiency that spoke of long practice. "Don't pretend this is a relief for my safety, Papa. Not after what I found in that folder last night."

Her father's face went pale. "You saw it."

"I saw everything. The signature. The date. Four months before the engagement was ever announced." Her voice shook, fury and grief tangled too tightly to separate. "You didn't marry me off to save the family, did you? You sold me to a man whose name you were too frightened to even say out loud."

Salvatore Marchetti's composure finally cracked completely, and for the first time in Tori's memory, her father sank into the nearest chair like his legs had simply stopped working, hands trembling in his lap.

"His name isn't Cassius," he said quietly. "That's just what he calls himself now. Twelve years ago, before your mother died, before any of this started, his name was Alessandro Conti."

The room went very still.

Dante's head snapped up. "Conti," he repeated, voice sharp with sudden recognition. "As in the Conti family that controlled the docks before they disappeared from the city entirely?"

"They didn't disappear," Salvatore said, voice hollow. "They were destroyed. Wiped out in a single night, twelve years ago, in a conflict most people in this city have long since forgotten about or were never told the truth of to begin with." His eyes lifted to Tori, red-rimmed and haunted. "Alessandro Conti was the only survivor. The last son of a family that lost everything in a single bloody night, and Vittoria, the man who ordered that m******e, the man responsible for wiping out the entire Conti bloodline in one evening, was your grandfather."

Tori's knees nearly buckled. Beside her, Dante went rigid, hand instinctively finding the small of her back to steady her.

"That's not possible," she whispered. "My grandfather died before I was born. He was a businessman. A shipping magnate."

"He was many things," her father said grimly. "A businessman during the day. Something considerably darker after the sun went down. The Conti m******e bought our family the docks, the shipping routes, the foundation of everything we've built since. And for twelve years, the one surviving son of that slaughtered family has been quietly working his way back into position, rebuilding his fortune under a new name, waiting for the exact right moment to collect a debt that was never about money at all."

"Revenge," Dante said quietly.

"Revenge," Salvatore agreed. "And Vittoria, God forgive me, when he approached me eight years ago, offering to restructure debts I couldn't otherwise survive, I told myself it was just business. I told myself the past was the past and the sins of my father weren't mine to answer for." His voice broke completely. "But the terms he set eight years ago, the terms coming due in thirty days, were never really about money. They were about you. He wanted a Marchetti bride married into another powerful family, positioned exactly where he needed her, and God help me, I didn't understand what that meant until it was already far too late to refuse him."

Tori stared at her father, the room tilting sickeningly around her, a decade of buried history crashing down with the weight of every lie she'd been told to keep her safe from a truth too monstrous to explain to a grieving nine-year-old at her mother's funeral.

"What does he want from me," she finally managed to ask, voice barely a whisper. "If it was never about money, Papa, what does he actually want?"

Her father's eyes lifted to hers, and the answer, when it finally came, felt like the floor dropping out from beneath everything she'd ever believed about her own life.

"He wants what your grandfather took from him," Salvatore said quietly. "Everything. The Marchetti name. The Marchetti fortune. And most of all, Vittoria, he wants the one thing your grandfather never managed to take from the Conti family before he destroyed them."

"What's that?"

"An heir," her father whispered. "Alessandro Conti has spent twelve years alone, the last of his bloodline, and I believe with everything I have left in me that he intends to end that solitude by making sure his legacy continues through yours, whether you agree to it or not."

The silence that followed swallowed the entire room whole, and somewhere beyond the estate walls, thirty days had just become the only number that mattered in either of their lives.