Married to the Enemy's Son

Three Days

"You can't be serious."

Elena said it to her father's back, because he'd already turned and started walking toward the house, like he'd delivered the worst news of her life and considered the conversation finished. She caught his sleeve. "Papa. Look at me."

He stopped. He didn't look at her right away his eyes went past her shoulder, to where Dante Rossi still stood in the courtyard with his lieutenant, waiting with the patience of a man who'd been told exactly how this scene would go and had no intention of rushing it.

"Inside," Nico said. "Not out here."

"Why, because it's rude to argue about my own wedding in front of the groom?" She kept her voice down even as it shook. "I want to know why one week became six days between the car and the front steps."

"Because I said one week when I meant this Friday, and I didn't do the math out loud." He finally met her eyes. "It doesn't change anything. It changes nothing you needed to hear twice."

"It changes how much time I have to figure out how to survive this."

Something crossed his face not guilt, she didn't think her father did guilt, not really, not anymore but something close enough to it that she almost softened. Almost. Then he said, "You'll survive it because you're my daughter, and my daughter doesn't fall apart in a courtyard," and the almost evaporated.

She let go of his sleeve.

Inside, the house was too quiet, the kind of quiet that came after two hundred people had filled it with condolences and then left all at once. Elena walked fast, heels sharp against the marble, not toward her room but toward the east wing, toward the one place in this house that still smelled like her brother his study, untouched since the funeral home had come for him, his reading glasses still folded on the desk where he'd left them.

Vittoria was already there.

Her sister was sitting on the floor with her back against Matteo's desk, knees pulled up, still in her funeral dress, mascara tracked halfway down her face in two dry lines. She looked up when Elena came in and didn't bother wiping her face.

"I heard," Vittoria said.

"You heard what."

"Don't." Vittoria's voice cracked on the word. "Don't do the thing where you pretend I don't already know. The whole staff knows. Papa's study door doesn't lock as well as he thinks it does."

Elena sat down across from her, the two of them on the floor of their dead brother's office like they used to sit on the floor of each other's rooms as kids, trading secrets under blankets. "Then you know as much as I do."

"I know you're marrying a Rossi in less than a week." Vittoria's jaw tightened. "I know Papa's handing you over like a like a peace offering, and everyone downstairs is going to smile through the wedding photos and pretend that's not exactly what it is."

"It's not my idea, Vittoria."

"I didn't say it was your idea." Her sister's eyes were wet and furious at once. "I said you're doing it. There's a difference between something being your idea and you deciding to go along with it anyway."

"What was I supposed to do? Say no in front of him?" Elena's voice rose despite herself. "Say no to Papa, three days after we buried Matteo, and let this family go to war with the Rossis because I wanted to make a point?"

"Maybe. Maybe that's exactly what you should've done." Vittoria pushed to her feet, unsteady, angry in the specific way only a twenty-year-old who hadn't yet learned to survive her own feelings could be angry. "Matteo would've said no. Matteo would've told Papa exactly where he could put that arrangement."

"Matteo's dead." The word came out of Elena flatter and harder than she meant it to, and she watched it land on her sister like a slap. "Matteo doesn't get an opinion anymore. I do. And mine is that I'm not going to be the reason this family loses anyone else."

Vittoria's mouth opened, closed. For a second Elena thought she might actually apologize. Instead her sister said, quieter, worse: "You're not saving us. You're just choosing which version of losing you it's going to be," and walked out, leaving the study door open behind her.

Elena sat there a long moment, staring at Matteo's reading glasses.

She didn't cry. She'd promised herself in the car that she wasn't going to do that again today, and she was, if nothing else, good at keeping the promises that cost her something.

She was still sitting there when Renata found her.

"There you are." Renata came in without knocking, the way she always had, closing the door softly behind her. She'd changed out of her funeral dress into something plainer, more practical, and Elena registered distantly, the way you register small wrong things in the middle of a larger wrong thing that her godmother didn't look like a woman who'd just watched a window get shot out an hour ago. She looked like a woman handling logistics.

"Did you know?" Elena asked her. "About the marriage. Before today."

Renata didn't answer immediately, which was itself an answer. She crouched down instead, took Elena's hands the way she had when Elena was small and needed steadying. "I knew it was being discussed."

"Discussed when?"

"Elena"

"When, Renata."

"Before the funeral." Renata's grip tightened slightly. "Before Matteo was even in the ground, if you want the exact truth of it. Your father's been negotiating terms with Salvatore Rossi for longer than you know."

Elena pulled her hands free. "Terms. Like I'm a shipment."

"Like you're the only thing either family has left that both sides will agree to protect." Renata's voice stayed level, careful, the voice she used when she was managing a room. "I know how it sounds. I know how it feels. But I need you to hear the part that matters right now, because it's why I came to find you."

"What part."

"It's not Friday anymore." Renata held her eyes, unflinching, delivering it the way she delivered everything that mattered fast, so there was no time to brace. "Salvatore moved the date up. Three days, Elena. You're getting married Thursday morning."

The room tilted, very slightly, the way it had when the window shattered.

"Three days," Elena repeated, the words not quite fitting in her mouth.

"I need you to start packing tonight." Renata was already standing, already moving toward the door, already back to logistics, like grief and terror were luxuries scheduled for later. "There's a great deal to prepare and almost no time to prepare it in."

"Renata." Elena's voice stopped her at the door. "Why is he rushing this. What does Salvatore Rossi gain by making me his son's wife three days sooner instead of a week."

Renata's hand stayed on the doorframe a moment too long before she answered, and when she did, her voice had gone carefully, deliberately smooth the exact tone of a woman choosing every word before she let it out of her mouth.

"I don't know," she said.

Elena had known Renata Conti her entire life. She had never once, not one single time, seen her godmother lie badly.

Until now.