Revenge and Roses

Say It Like You Mean It

Conti Estate, Palermo — Still That Night

Elara's POV

"I want to meet him," Elara said.

"Absolutely not," Mia shot back.

"Mia—", she said.

"No, Elara, I mean it — absolutely not, that is the worst idea I have heard you say out loud in twenty-three years of knowing you, and you once tried to confront a loan shark in person because you thought his math was wrong." Mia's voice had lost all its earlier softness, gone sharp and fast with alarm. "You want to arrange a private meeting with Silas Vane. On your own. Have you thought about what that actually means?"

"I've thought about nothing else for the last hour," Elara said.

"Then think about it for one more time, because it's insane," Mia said. "He burns warehouses down with men still inside them. You want to sit across a table from him like it's a job interview?"

"I want information," Elara said. "That's different from wanting his approval."

"It's not different if he decides the meeting itself is the problem." Mia's breath came fast, worried rather than teasing now. "And even if he agreed — even if, somehow, the second most dangerous man in Sicily said yes to a private audience with a woman he hasn't married yet — your uncle would never allow it. You know that."

Elara was quiet for a moment, because she did know it, and hearing it said out loud made it heavier than it had been in her own head.

"He won't give me a choice," she said finally. "So I'll ask anyway, and when he says no, I'll know exactly where I stand with him too."

"Elara," Mia said, a warning folded into two syllables.

"I have to try, Mia. I can't just sit here and let this happen to me without at least attempting to look the man in the eye first," Elara said.

Mia exhaled, long and unhappy, the sound of someone losing an argument she still believed she was right about. "Fine. Ask him. But call me the second it goes wrong."

"It's not going to go wrong," Elara said.

"You don't know that," Mia said. "Just — call me."

"I will," Elara said.

Her uncle said no before she'd finished the sentence.

"Absolutely not," Don Enzo said, not even looking up from the papers on his desk, as though the request had cost him nothing to dismiss. "You will meet Silas Vane at your wedding, as is proper, and not one moment before."

"I have a right to know the man I'm marrying," Elara said.

"You have the right I give you." His voice was flat, final. The Don has fully surfaced now, with no trace of the uncle who had begged her to sit down two nights ago. "This is not a negotiation, Elara. I have already given you more than most men would give a niece in your position. Do not mistake my patience for weakness."

"I'm not asking for the world," Elara said. "I'm asking for one conversation."

"And I am telling you no." He set down his pen, finally, and looked at her with an expression that closed the subject more completely than any argument could have. "The matter is finished. I suggest you spend your energy preparing for the wedding instead of finding new ways to delay it."

She left the study without another word, because there was nothing left to say that he would hear, and because she had already decided, somewhere underneath the anger, that his answer would not change her mind. She will find her own way to meet Silas Vane.

She waited two days for the house to empty in her uncle's absence — a meeting in Catania, he will be gone until evening — before she let herself into his study alone.

Her hands were steady. That surprised her more than the fact of what she was doing. She moved through the room methodically, the way she moved through anything that required precision: the desk drawers first, locked but not well, a hairpin and eleven patient minutes, enough to solve that problem. Ledgers. Correspondence, mostly dull. A file on the Ferraro family she made herself set aside, unread, because she didn't have time to be distracted by a different fire tonight.

She found what she needed in the bottom drawer, beneath a stack of unopened mail — a slim leather book, contacts written in her uncle's small, precise hand, organized by first name only, as though anyone who might find it would already know exactly who each initial belonged to.

“S.V.” A phone number. Nothing else.

She stared at it longer than she needed to, feeling the full weight of what she was about to do settle into her chest — not fear exactly, something steadier than fear, the particular calm she'd only ever felt right before doing something she couldn't undo.

She photographed the page with her phone, returned the book exactly as she'd found it, and locked the drawer again before she let herself leave the room.

She sent the message that night, sitting on the edge of her bed with the lights off, because some things were easier to do in the dark.

_This is Elara Conti. I believe you already know who I am, and why I'm contacting you without my uncle's knowledge. I would like to meet you. Alone. Before either of us agrees to anything further._

She read it three times before she let herself send it, and once it was gone she sat with her phone in her lap, staring at the screen, half expecting nothing, half expecting everything.

The reply came back in under two minutes.

_Tomorrow. I will send the address once I have somewhere private arranged. Tell no one._

She read it twice, and felt something settle low in her stomach that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite triumph — only the certainty, cold and clea

r, that she had just stepped off a ledge she couldn't climb back up from.