Marry the Devil, Bury the Truce

Chapter Four What Enzo Knew

Enzo came back to consciousness the way men do when they know exactly how much trouble they're in: slowly, and with his eyes doing the talking before his mouth caught up.

Dante had him zip-tied to a chair dragged in from the hallway, wrists bound behind the wooden slats, blood drying in a thin line down his temple from where Tori's candlestick had connected. The estate's private security team, silent men in black who'd swept the grounds within minutes of the alarm, waited outside the door. Dante hadn't called the police. Tori noticed that immediately. Families like the Salvatores didn't call the police. They handled things inside their own walls, with their own rules, and the realization settled cold in her stomach: she'd married into a world where the law was whatever the man holding the gun decided it was.

"Enzo." Dante crouched in front of the chair, voice deceptively mild. "You've known Vittoria since she was six? Seven?"

Enzo said nothing, jaw locked, eyes fixed somewhere past Dante's shoulder.

"He taught me to ride a bike," Tori said quietly, arms wrapped around herself, still in her ruined wedding dress, glass crunching faintly under her bare feet every time she shifted. "He carried me on his shoulders at my mother's funeral because I was too small to see over the crowd."

Something flickered behind Enzo's eyes at that. Not quite guilty. Grief, maybe, buried under whatever loyalty had put a knife in his hand tonight.

"Enzo," she said again, softer this time, stepping past Dante before he could stop her, crouching down so she was eye level with the man who'd once taught her to whistle in the Marchetti kitchen garden. "Did my father send you?"

Enzo's throat worked. For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the distant hum of security radios outside and the wind moving through the broken balcony doors.

"No," he finally said, voice hoarse. "Your father doesn't know I'm here."

Dante's eyes sharpened. "Then who does?"

Enzo's gaze slid to Tori, and something in his expression cracked wide open, old affection warring with whatever fear had driven him through that window tonight.

"I was paid," he said. "A lot of money, Tori. More than your father's ever seen in his life. Enough to make a man forget which family he's loyal to."

"Paid by who?" Dante's voice had gone flat and dangerous.

"I don't know his name." Enzo's hands flexed uselessly against the zip ties. "Nobody who works for him knows his name. He goes by Cassius. That's the only word anyone's ever heard. He reached out three weeks before the engagement was even announced, told me there'd be a wedding, told me exactly which night to come, exactly which window would be unlocked." His eyes flicked toward the balcony. "Someone on the inside gave him the estate's security schedule. Somebody close to you, Salvatore, sold out your own wedding night."

The room went very still.

Tori watched something shift behind Dante's expression, calculation sliding into something colder, more personal. Betrayal did that to a man she was learning. Made the fury quieter and far more lethal.

"You're telling me," Dante said slowly, "that someone inside my own house is working with a man named Cassius, who arranged my marriage before either of our families ever sat down to negotiate the terms."

"I'm telling you what I know," Enzo said. "Which isn't enough to keep me alive once he finds out I failed."

"You let a stranger buy your loyalty," Tori said, voice trembling now, not with fear but with something rawer. "You could have killed him tonight, Enzo. In my room. On my wedding night."

"I wasn't there to kill him," Enzo said quietly, and for the first time, his eyes went to hers with something like desperate honesty. "Cassius's orders weren't for Salvatore, Tori. They were for you. I was supposed to get you out that window. Alive. Quiet. Before anyone in this house woke up."

The words landed like a physical blow.

Dante went very still beside her. "Say that again."

"He didn't want you dead," Enzo said, looking at Dante now, voice rough with something between shame and warning. "He wanted her. This whole marriage, the folder, the contract, all of it, it was never about a truce between your families. It was a delivery system. Somebody spent a fortune making sure Vittoria Marchetti ended up inside these walls tonight, and I think whoever he is, he was never planning on letting her stay."

Tori's knees went weak enough that she had to sit down on the edge of the ruined bed, wedding dress pooling around her like spilled milk, mind reeling through implications too large to hold at once.

He wanted her.

Not the marriage. Not the truce. Not even revenge against the Salvatores.

Her, specifically, delivered through a wedding neither she nor Dante had actually chosen, orchestrated by a man whose name was apparently unspoken even by the people he paid.

"Why," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "Why me?"

Enzo's eyes dropped, and for the first time since waking up zip-tied to a chair, he looked less like a hired weapon and more like an old man who'd made a terrible choice for reasons he didn't fully understand.

"I don't know," he admitted. "But he was specific. It had to be tonight. It had to be through this marriage. And he said—" Enzo hesitated, glancing at Dante like the next words might cost him more blood than he had left to give. "He said no one would think to look for her here. That the last place anyone would search for a missing Marchetti bride was inside a Salvatore fortress, married to the one man in the city everyone assumed wanted her dead."

Dante's expression didn't change, but something in the room's temperature seemed to drop several degrees.

"He used my name as a hiding place," Dante said quietly. Not a question.

"He used this whole wedding as a hiding place," Enzo said. "For her. From something, or someone, I don't know what. But whatever he's protecting her from, or protecting himself from by having her hidden, it's bigger than a turf war between two families that have been feuding since before either of you were born."

Tori looked up at Dante across the wreckage of their wedding night, veil discarded, glass glittering across silk sheets, an unconscious hitman's blood drying on the floorboards between them, and felt the ground shift beneath everything she thought she understood about her own life.

"You said you married me for access," she said quietly. "Access to my father, to bring him down."

"I did."

"What if that's not actually why I'm here at all?"

Dante's eyes met hers, and for the first time since the altar, she saw something in them that wasn't calculation, wasn't cruelty, wasn't even the careful control he wore like armor.

It was the same thing she felt clawing up her own throat.

Uncertainty. And beneath it, something far more dangerous: the dawning understanding that the game they thought they were playing had never actually been theirs to control.

"Then we find Cassius," Dante said, voice low, final. "Before he finds a reason to finish what he started tonight."

Behind them, Enzo shifted in his chair, and quietly, almost too quiet to catch, he said the thing that would haunt the rest of their wedding night.

"You should both know," he said, "he doesn't fail twice.”