Revenge and Roses

Via Alloro

Via Alloro

Elara's POV

Via Alloro, Palermo — The Following Afternoon

"You're early," Angelo says, walking in.

Elara turned toward the voice and found a compact, precise man standing in the doorway of the private room. He inclined his head, courteous, the practiced warmth of someone used to greeting people on another man's behalf. "Miss Conti. A pleasure. I'm Angelo — Mr. Vane's associate. He'll join you shortly." He gestured toward the table. "Please, sit. Would you like something brought in while you wait? Water, coffee?"

"I'm fine, thank you," Elara replied.

"As you like," Angelo said. He offered a brief, professional smile and withdrew, closing the door behind him with the same unhurried courtesy he'd used to open it.

The door opened without a knock.

He was younger than the file in her head had prepared her for, and moved with an economy that suggested nothing about him was wasted, least of all attention. His eyes found her and stayed there, and she understood, within the first two seconds, that she was being read the same way she'd spent the last three days reading everyone else — for weaknesses, for leverage, for the shape of what she actually wanted.

"Miss Conti," Silas says.

"Mr. Vane." She kept her spine straight, her hands loosely clasped instead of curled into fists, though it cost her to manage the difference. "Thank you for agreeing to this."

"I didn't agree out of courtesy." He crossed to the table and pulled out the chair across from her, not at its head. "You went around your uncle to reach me. That told me something worth ten minutes of my time. Don't mistake it for anything warmer."

"I wasn't going to." Elara responds.

"Good," He sat. "Then we understand each other already, which will save us both time."

She sat across from him, close enough now to see the exact grey of his eyes, flat and unreadable, nothing in them that resembled curiosity or welcome. Good, she thought. She hadn't come here for either.

"Why did you agree to marry a woman you've never met?" she asked. No preamble. She'd decided in the car that preamble would only give him more time to build a version of himself for her benefit.

"Your uncle's network has assets I require. Routes. Contacts along the southern coast." He said it like a man reciting figures from a ledger. "The marriage secures those assets in a way a handshake wouldn't."

"That's what my uncle told me too. Word for word, almost." She held his gaze. "Which means either you rehearsed the same answer with him, or neither of you is telling me the truth."

"What would you prefer I say instead?" His face gave nothing away — no offense taken, no admission made. It was, she thought, the most controlled reaction she had ever watched a person produce on demand.

"I'd prefer you not to insult me with an answer you already know I won't believe.", she says.

"Careful," he said, and his voice didn't warm at all when he said it. "You're assuming I care whether you believe me."

"I'm assuming you're smart enough to know that a wife who doesn't believe you is a liability, not an asset. Which one you get out of this depends on how honest you're willing to be with me now, before either of us is stuck with the result." Elara retorts.

He studied her for a long moment, and she made herself hold still under it, refusing to be the one who filled the silence first.

"The routes are real," he said finally. "They're not the whole of it. The rest isn't something I'm prepared to discuss with a stranger, regardless of how directly she asks."

"Then we're not strangers for much longer. That should motivate you to speed up the timeline." Elara says.

"Or it should motivate me to keep the rest of it to myself for as long as I can manage it." His tone stayed even, nothing in it to read one way or the other. "You're not what your uncle described."

"My uncle describes me the way it's convenient for him to describe me. I wouldn't take anything he's told you at face value either." Elara explains.

"I don't." He said it flatly, no explanation offered, and she filed the omission away with everything else she couldn't yet account for.

"I have conditions," she said. "Before I agree to anything."

"Name them," he says.

"I will not be surveilled. If you have a concern about me, you bring it to me directly, not through staff, not through him." She held up a second finger. "I keep my own accounts, separate from the household. And I am not lied to. I can survive almost anything except discovering later that I was managed into believing something false."

He didn't answer immediately, and the pause stretched long enough that she wondered if she'd overreached.

"Agreed," he said. "All three. Though I'll tell you now — the third condition is the one you should worry about breaking yourself, not me."

"Meaning?" she asked

"Meaning most people who ask not to be lied to, discover eventually, that the truth was worse than whatever comfortable version they'd have preferred instead. I don't offer that as a threat. I offer it because you asked for honesty, and that's the most honest thing I have to give you today," he answers.

His face told her nothing further. It hadn't told her anything at all, she realized — not once, through the entire meeting, not even now. That was, in its own way, the most useful piece of information he'd given her.

"I'll consider your terms," she said.

"That's all I asked for," Silas says.

He extended his hand. She took it. His grip was steady, unhurried, nothing performed in it — and it was only after she'd let go, already turning toward the door, that she understood what had been sitting wrong in the room the entire meeting.

He had answered every question about the routes, the assets, the arrangement, instantly, without a beat of hesitation. It was only the question about honesty itself that had cost him a pause before he spoke — and when he had spoken, he hadn't answered as a man protecting a business arrangement. He'd answered like a man who had learned, somewhere, exactly what an unwanted truth could do to a person, and had never quite finished paying fo

r that lesson.

Whatever Silas Vane was protecting, it wasn't the marriage.