Vows and Debts

Chapter 6:House Rules

MIA

I tried to leave the house on my second morning there, and I made it exactly to the front gate before two men I didn't recognize stepped directly into my path.

"Mrs. Sabbatini." One of them said it flatly, no welcome in it at all. "Where are you headed?"

"Out. Is that a problem?"

"It's a problem if nobody told you the rules yet."

By the time I made it back inside, furious and turned around in my own driveway, Vincent was already in the front hall, like he'd known the second I tried.

"You went around me."

"I went outside. I didn't realize that required a permission slip."

"It does now." His voice didn't rise, which somehow made it worse. "You don't leave this property without telling Renzo or me first. Not the gate, not the garden, nowhere."

"That's not a rule. Thats just me in captivity."

"Call it whatever helps you sleep at night. It doesn't change anything." He stepped closer, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to hold his stare. "You're not just my wife now. You're a name people will use against me if they get the chance. I'm not interested in finding out the hard way what that costs."

"You could have explained that instead of having your men corner me at my own gate."

"I'm explaining it now."

"After the fact. Like everything else in this house." I crossed my arms, refusing to look away first. "You people really do love explaining things once it's already too late."

Something shifted behind his eyes, brief and unreadable. "Careful."

"Or what."

He didn't answer that, and the silence stretched long enough that I wasn't sure anymore whether I'd pushed too far or whether he simply didn't have an answer ready. Renzo's voice broke it from the doorway.

"Dominic's called twice this morning."

Vincent's attention snapped away from me entirely, and something tightened in his jaw before he caught himself. "Tell him I'll call back."

"He said it's urgent."

"Everything's urgent with him." Vincent didn't move. "Tell him anyway."

Renzo left. Vincent turned back to me like the conversation we'd been having had simply paused .

"The gate. The rules. We're not finished."

"I heard you the first time."

"Then don't make me repeat it again." He walked past me toward his study, and at the door he paused, not quite looking back. "I'd rather keep you alive than keep you comfortable.If you can't handle the consequences of either choice, you should have said so before you said yes to me."

He left me standing in the hallway with that, and I hated that some small, furious part of me understood exactly what he meant, even as the rest of me wanted to throw something at his back.

VINCENT

Dominic called a third time before noon, and I let it go to voicemail again, mostly out of principle.

Renzo appeared in the doorway without knocking this time. "You can't keep avoiding him."

"I'm not avoiding him. I'm choosing the terms of the conversation."

"He's going to read it as avoidance regardless." Renzo crossed his arms. "He's already asking questions about the marriage. About whether it weakens our position with the people we actually need right now."

"Dominic's questions are never really questions. They're signs of a plan he’s keeping to hiimself."

"Then maybe it's time you found out what."

I didn't answer that right away. I was thinking about the way Mia had stood her ground at the gate, refusing to back down even when I'd given her every reason to, the same stubborn refusal to flinch I'd seen the first night she walked into my study. It should have irritated me. Instead it had done something closer to the opposite, which irritated me more than the stubbornness itself.

"Set the meeting with Dominic," I said. "End of the week."

"And Mia?"

"What about her."

"You came down on her pretty hard for someone who didn't actually break a single rule, since nobody had told her the rules existed yet."

I didn't have a clean answer for that either, which was rare enough that it bothered me more than I wanted to admit. I'd been harder on her than the morning required, and some part of me already knew it had less to do with the gate and more to do with how unsettled I'd felt watching her walk toward it without asking my permission first, the way someone else once had, a long time ago, right before she walked out of my life entirely with someone else's name attached to hers.

"She'll learn the rules," I said. "Quickly, or the hard way. Either works."

Renzo studied me a moment too long before he left, the way he only did when he suspected I was lying to both of us at once.

I sat with that suspicion long after he'd gone, because for once, I couldn't fully argue with him.