Married to the Enemy's Son

The first shot shattered the window behind the flower arrangements, and Elena was on the floor before she understood why. Glass rained onto the white roses meant for her brother's memory table. Somewhere to her left, a woman screamed. Elena's hands found the leg of the nearest chair and she pulled herself under it, heart slamming against her ribs, the black fabric of her dress catching on the metal frame. "Stay down." Her father's voice, low, close. Nico Marchetti's hand closed around her wrist and yanked her further under the table, his body between her and the broken window. "Was that" Her voice came out wrong, thin. "A warning." He said it like he'd expected it. Like this was routine. "Nobody's dead. Nobody's aiming to kill today." "Today." She repeated the word back to him, and it tasted like something rotten. Around them, the reception hall that had held two hundred mourners an hour ago was a stampede of black suits and heels, security shouting into radios, someone knocking over the easel with Matteo's photograph on it. Elena watched it fall face-down onto the marble and didn't move to pick it up. She couldn't stop staring at the spiderweb crack spreading across the window glass, the exact shape of it, like it mattered. "Get her to the car," Nico said to someone. Hands under her arms, lifting her up too fast. She yanked free. "I'm not leaving. This is Matteo's Her voice cracked on her brother's name and she hated herself for it, hated that after everything, after three days of not crying in front of anyone, it was a bullet through a window that finally did it. "This is exactly why you're leaving." Nico's jaw was tight, a muscle jumping under the skin. He looked older than he had a week ago. Older than he had any right to look, still upright, still giving orders like a man in control of something. "Renata. With me." Renata Conti appeared at Elena's elbow like she'd been standing three feet away the whole time, unbothered, smoothing the front of her dress as if a bullet hadn't just come through a window at her godson's funeral. "The car's ready." "I want to know who did this." Elena planted her feet. Around her the room was thinning out, security herding the last of the guests toward the exits, men in dark suits fanning out along the perimeter with their jackets pushed back just enough to show what was underneath. "Papa. Who did this?" Nico didn't answer. That was the answer. "It's the Rossis," she said, and watched something flicker behind her father's eyes before he shut it down. "It has to be. Everyone in that room was already saying it before the first course was even served. That Matteo's dead because he crossed them. That whoever did it was probably standing at the back of his own funeral." "You don't know that." "Then tell me who does." Nico looked at her for a long moment, and in that look was something she didn't have a word for yet not grief, not fear, something adjacent to both, something that made the back of her neck go cold. "We'll talk at home." "We'll talk now." "Elena." Renata's hand landed on her shoulder, gentle, the way it had been gentle since Elena was seven years old and skinning her knee in the courtyard. "Not here." She let herself be moved. That was the mistake, she would think later letting herself be moved, the way she'd let herself be moved through the last three days, through the church, through the burial, through every hand on her elbow steering her toward the next necessary thing. She got into the car. She watched the reception hall shrink in the rear window, security still combing the parking lot, a man in a gray coat crouched by the flower beds studying something on the ground that might have been a shell casing. "Papa." She said it to the back of his head, since he wouldn't look at her. "What did you mean, we'll talk at home." He was quiet until the car turned onto the main road. Then: "There's something I need you to do. For the family." "Something." "A marriage." The word landed strange, out of place, like he'd spoken a foreign language and she was still translating. "A marriage," she repeated. "Whose." "Yours." She almost laughed. Would have, if his face weren't doing the thing it was doing flat, careful, a man reading from a script he hated. "Papa, my brother is barely in the ground" "I know what day it is." Sharp enough that she stopped. "I know exactly what day it is." "Then explain to me how this is the conversation we're having." "Because it ends this." He turned in his seat to face her, and for the first time since the funeral began, he looked at her the way he used to when she was a child and he needed her to actually listen instead of just hear him. "It ends the war before it starts. You marry into that family, and there's no more reason for anyone to put a bullet through a window. No more reason for anyone to put a bullet through you." The car went quiet enough that she could hear her own pulse. "Which family," she said, though she already knew, though some part of her had known since the window shattered. "The Rossis." She stared at him. Somewhere behind her ribs something was climbing, fast, ugly. "You want me to marry into the family that killed Matteo." "I want you alive." His voice didn't rise, which was worse than if it had. "I want this family alive. There is exactly one way I know how to guarantee both of those things, and it is sitting across from you in this car." "You don't even know for certain it was them" "It doesn't matter who fired the gun." He said it like a man who'd already made peace with a decision she hadn't agreed to yet. "It matters that it stops. One week. That's the timeline they gave me." "One week." The words came out of her like something breaking. "You're telling me I bury my brother and marry his killer's son in the same month." Nico didn't answer that. He looked out the window instead, at the city sliding past, and Elena understood that the conversation, as far as he was concerned, was already over that this had been decided somewhere she hadn't been in the room for, signed and settled before anyone had thought to tell her it concerned her at all. The car pulled through the Marchetti gates. Security opened the door before it had fully stopped, and Elena stepped out into the wind off the water, still in her funeral dress, still hearing the window break every time she blinked. She didn't see the second car until it was already parked. Black, unmarked, the kind that didn't need markings to tell you who it belonged to. A man got out first broad-shouldered, mid-thirties, a face she recognized as one of the Rossi lieutenants from the news clippings her father kept locked in his study. He held the rear door open. The man who stepped out of it was younger than she expected. Dark suit, no tie, the kind of stillness that read less like calm and more like something being carefully contained. He didn't look at Nico. He looked straight at Elena, across the courtyard, across the wreckage of the last three days, and something in his expression wasn't triumph and wasn't apology it was almost, unbearably, recognition, like he already knew exactly what this cost her and had decided to walk toward her anyway. "Elena." Nico's voice, low, at her shoulder. "This is Dante Rossi." She didn't move. She didn't trust herself to. "Your husband," her father said, "in six days."