The Rival Heiress

Chapter 2 — Three Bodies

Damian Rossi was still in his gym clothes when his father's head of security pulled him out of a sparring match and told him to get to the study. Now.

He didn't ask why. Vincent Rossi didn't send for him mid-workout unless something had already gone wrong.

He found his father standing at the window with his back to the door, which was its own kind of warning. Vincent liked to watch people's faces when he talked to them. He said you could read a man's whole life in the half-second before he answered a question. Tonight he was looking at the driveway instead, at nothing, and that told Damian more than anything his father was about to say.

"Sit down," Vincent said, without turning around.

"I'll stand."

"Sit down, Damian."

He sat. He hated that he sat.

Vincent finally turned. He looked older than he had that morning — Damian would swear to it later, that his father had aged five years between breakfast and dinner — and he set a single sheet of paper on the desk between them, face down, like he was deciding whether Damian had earned the right to see it yet.

"Three of our men were found this morning behind the Cicero lot," Vincent said. "Marchetti didn't do it."

Damian's jaw tightened. "How do you know that."

"Because I know how Salvatore Marchetti kills people, and this isn't it. No message. No warning. No reason given. Just three good men, gone, and nobody claiming it." Vincent finally turned the paper over. A photograph. Damian didn't need to look closely to know what kind. He'd seen enough of them in his life to recognize the particular stillness of it from across the desk. "Whoever did this wanted us to think it was the Marchettis. They almost got what they wanted. I had Aldo halfway to declaring war on the phone before I stopped him."

"Maybe it was them," Damian said, but even as he said it, something in his chest didn't believe it. Thirty years of hating that name, and some traitorous, exhausted part of him had stopped being sure a long time ago exactly what he was hating it for.

"It wasn't." Vincent said it like a closed door. "And that's exactly why I've spent the last six hours on the phone with Salvatore Marchetti instead of loading trucks."

Damian felt it coming before his father said it. He'd learned to read his father's pauses the same way Vincent claimed to read faces — and this one had the shape of something Damian was not going to like.

"You're marrying his daughter."

The room went very quiet.

"No," Damian said.

"In six weeks."

"No." He was on his feet before he'd decided to stand. "I don't care what happened behind the Cicero lot. I don't care who's playing games with both families. You are not selling me off to end a war I didn't start with people who—" He stopped himself. Barely. His mother's face flashed behind his eyes, the way it always did when this particular rage got loose, and he shoved it back down where it lived most of the time. "With people who've cost this family everything."

"Sit down."

"I said no—"

"Three men," Vincent said, louder now, the first real crack Damian had heard in his father's voice in years, "found behind a warehouse this morning, and I don't know who did it, and neither does Salvatore Marchetti, and for thirty years that has never once been true at the same time for both of us. Somebody wants us at each other's throats, Damian, and I am telling you, as your father, that if we give them that war, we will not have a family left to hand you when it's over."

Damian said nothing. His hands, at his sides, were shaking in a way he hoped his father couldn't see.

"You think I want this," Vincent said, quieter now. "You think I want to give you to that family, after what they've cost us. I buried men because of that name. I nearly buried your mother's memory under thirty years of blaming the wrong people for something I still don't fully understand." He came around the desk, closer than he usually stood, close enough that Damian could see he meant every word. "But I would rather hand you a wife you hate than a coffin, and right now those are the only two things on the table."

"There has to be another way."

"Find it," Vincent said. "You have until Thursday. That's when you meet her, whether you've found one or not, because Salvatore Marchetti has already told the girl, and I am not going to be the Rossi who backed out of ending a thirty-year war because his son couldn't stomach a wedding."

Damian didn't answer. There was nothing to say that wouldn't come out as either a lie or a threat.

He walked out of the study, down the hall, past the gym where he'd been sparring twenty minutes earlier in a life that had felt simple then, and didn't stop until he reached his own room and shut the door hard enough that the frame rattled.

Elena Marchetti. He didn't even have a face to put to the hatred yet — just a name that had been synonymous with everything wrong in his life since he was seventeen years old and watching his mother's casket lowered into ground the Marchettis were blamed for putting her in.

He pulled out his phone and did the only thing that felt like control in a night that had taken every other version of it away from him.

He searched her name.

The first photo that loaded stopped him cold — not because of who she was, but because of the date stamped in the corner. Taken two nights ago. Elena Marchetti, standing outside a restaurant he recognized, deep in conversation with a man who was very clearly not family, and very clearly not a stranger either.

Whoever she was, she already had a secret.

And in four days, Damian was going to have to sit across a dinner table from her and pretend he hadn't just found it.