The Rival Heiress

Chapter 3 — The Dinner

The last time Elena Marchetti had spoken to Damian Rossi, she was fourteen years old and he was calling her family murderers across a country club parking lot, loud enough that both their fathers had to physically separate them before it turned into something neither family could walk back.

Ten years later, he stood up when she walked into the private room at Altomare like he'd been raised properly, which she supposed he had been, and said, "Elena," in a voice with absolutely nothing in it.

"Damian." She matched his tone exactly.

Their fathers flanked them at the long table like referees who already knew the fight wasn't over, just paused for the cameras. Vincent Rossi smiled the practiced smile of a man closing a deal. Salvatore didn't smile at all — just watched his daughter with the careful attention of someone bracing for impact.

Elena sat. Damian sat. For the first ninety seconds, nobody said anything real.

"You've grown up," Damian said finally, which might have been a compliment from anyone else.

"So have you." She let her eyes move over him once, deliberate, unimpressed. "Still throwing accusations at country clubs, or did you retire that hobby along with the rest of your personality?"

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile. "I stand by everything I said that day."

"Convenient. Considering none of it was true."

"Wasn't it?"

The table went quiet in the specific way that meant everyone was pretending not to listen. Salvatore's jaw tightened. Vincent cleared his throat and reached for the wine like it might save the evening single-handedly.

"Careful," Elena said, low enough that it was just for him. "You're about to marry into a family of murderers. Might want to watch your tone with the one you're actually marrying."

"I intend to." Damian's eyes stayed on hers, steady, unreadable. "Watch closely, I mean. Every part of you."

She almost asked what that meant. Almost. Something about the way he said it — not flirtation, something colder — made her decide she'd rather not know yet.

The appetizers came and went in a fog of small talk performed for the benefit of two dozen soldiers standing along the walls, half of them wearing Rossi black, half wearing Marchetti gray, none of them touching their drinks. Elena had grown up around rooms like this. She knew how to read the temperature of armed men pretending to be furniture. Tonight it was high. Too high for a dinner that was supposed to be good news.

"You're tense," she said to Damian, quiet, under the noise of Vincent telling some story about a fishing trip that nobody at the table cared about. "More than a man is supposed to be at his own engagement dinner."

"I could say the same about you."

"I asked first."

He studied her for a second longer than was comfortable. "Three of my men didn't come home this morning. Nobody's claimed it. Not your family. Not mine. Somebody wanted my father angry enough to start a war before dinner, and it almost worked."

Elena's stomach dropped, though she kept her face perfectly still — a skill her father had drilled into her since before she could tie her own shoes. "Nobody told me that."

"Would you have believed me if I had?"

"No," she admitted. "But I'd have believed it now, watching your face while you say it."

Something passed between them then — not warmth, nothing close to it, but the first flicker of two people realizing they might actually be looking at the same problem from opposite sides of a table neither of them chose to sit at.

"There's something else," Damian said, and his voice changed, dropped into something more deliberate. "I did some reading, before tonight. On you."

"I'd expect nothing less from a man who accuses first and thinks later."

"Two nights ago. A restaurant on Rush Street. You, and a man who wasn't your brother." He said it evenly, watching her reaction with the particular focus of someone who'd rehearsed the moment. "Should I be concerned my future wife has secrets before the wedding even happens, or is that just how the Marchettis do business?"

Elena's blood went cold, then hot, in quick succession. She thought of Marco — of the conversation on Rush Street that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with a job neither of them could discuss at a table full of soldiers from both families. She thought about how easily this could be twisted, how fast a rumor like that could travel through two houses that already hated each other.

"That," she said carefully, "is none of your business."

"It is now." His voice stayed level, but something underneath it had sharpened. "In six weeks, everything about you is going to be my business, Elena. I'd start getting used to that before the vows, not after."

Before she could answer, the sommelier arrived to refill glasses no one had touched, and the moment folded itself back into performance — Vincent laughing too loud at his own fishing story, Salvatore signaling for the next course, twenty-four armed men along the walls pretending this was any other dinner in any other restaurant on any other night.

Elena smiled the smile she'd learned from her father and lifted her glass when Vincent proposed a toast to "new beginnings" — and beneath the table, out of sight of both fathers, her hand closed around the edge of her chair hard enough that her knuckles went white.

Because Damian Rossi wasn't wrong to be watching her that closely.

She just needed him to never find out exactly why.

The toast was still hanging in the air, glasses halfway to twenty-four mouths, when the front window of the restaurant exploded inward.