Bound To The Devil’s Throne

Chapter 4

The car that took them shopping was not the same as the car from last night.

Elena noticed this the way she noticed everything now — quietly, without drawing attention to the noticing. Last night’s cars had been large and dark and deliberately anonymous. This one was also large and dark but it had the additional feature of Gianna Romano in the back seat, which meant it could never truly be anonymous. Gianna occupied space the way certain pieces of music did — you were aware of it before you could explain why.

She had taken Elena to a street in Midtown that Elena had walked past many times on her way to clinical rotations and had never once considered entering. The kind of street where the shops had one or two things in the window and no prices anywhere. Elena had looked at the first dress Gianna pulled from a rack — a deep ivory silk, understated, structurally precise — and had reached automatically for the tag.

There was no tag.

“Don’t,” Gianna said, without looking up.

“I just wanted to—”

“I know what you wanted to do. Don’t.” She held the dress up against Elena with one hand under the hanger, tilting her head, assessing. “It’s the right length. Try it.”

Elena had tried it. The dress fit as though it had been waiting for her, which was either a remarkable coincidence or the result of Gianna having made a phone call before she arrived. Elena suspected the latter. In the mirror she had looked at herself for a long, strange moment — composed, clean-lined, her dark hair loose around her shoulders because the shop’s attendant had taken it down from its braid without asking and somehow this had seemed like the correct thing to do — and she had thought: this is not me. This is the signal.

She had worn it anyway. Because the signal was what was required, and she had agreed to that.

Now they were in the car heading back, the dress in a garment bag across Gianna’s lap, and Elena was looking out the window at the streets of her city passing in the gray afternoon light and thinking about Luca.

“You’re not going to ask me anything,” Gianna said. Not a question. More like a verdict.

Elena looked at her. “About what?”

“About him. About the family. About what you’ve gotten yourself into.” Gianna was looking straight ahead, one hand resting on the garment bag, perfectly composed. “Every other woman who has sat in this car, in this situation, has asked me a hundred questions by now.”

“There have been other women in this situation?”

“Not exactly this situation.” A brief pause. “But adjacent situations. Women brought into Dante’s orbit for various reasons. They always ask questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Whether he’s actually as dangerous as people say. Whether he’s ever—” Gianna’s jaw tightened slightly. “Whether he’s capable of being kind.” She turned and looked at Elena directly. “You haven’t asked any of that.”

“I’m not sure the answers would change anything,” Elena said.

Gianna studied her. “That’s either very wise or very frightening.”

“Probably both.”

Something happened in Gianna’s expression — a small, involuntary shift, the kind of recalibration that Elena was beginning to recognize as a Romano family trait. “He told me you negotiated,” Gianna said.

“I asked for reasonable things.”

“He told me you read the entire contract before you signed it.” She paused. “He seemed—” She stopped.

“What?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to identify the word since he called me this morning.” Gianna looked out the front windshield. “He seemed interested. That’s the closest I can get to it. Dante has not been interested in anything that wasn’t a threat or a strategy in quite some time.”

Elena processed this. “He called you this morning to discuss me?”

“He called me this morning to arrange your shopping trip. But yes. He mentioned you in a tone that suggested more processing than he wanted me to notice.” Gianna’s mouth curved very slightly. “He would be annoyed to know I’m telling you this.”

“Then why are you?”

Gianna turned and looked at her again, and this time the assessment in it was different. Searching rather than evaluating. “Because I want to know what you’re going to do with the information,” she said.

Elena held her gaze. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m going to file it away and keep my head down and do what I agreed to do.”

“And if it becomes more complicated than that?”

“Then I’ll deal with more complicated.”

Gianna was quiet for a moment. Then she looked away, back at the window, and something in the set of her shoulders changed — not softer, Gianna Romano was not a woman who went soft, but perhaps less braced. “We’re going to make a stop,” she said to the driver.

Elena looked at her.

“My brother said you could see your brother today,” Gianna said, with the very precise tone of someone conveying a message and not their own opinion of it. “If you wanted to.”

The ground shifted. Elena’s hands tightened in her lap before she could stop them. “He said that?”

“This morning. When he called.” Gianna did not look at her. “He had Nico arrange it. The boy is fine — he’s at school, classes ended twenty minutes ago. We can have him brought to a location.” She paused. “Dante said to tell you it was not a condition of anything. That you could simply see him if you wanted to.”

Elena was very careful about her face. “Yes,” she said. “I want to.”

They met Luca at a coffee shop in Park Slope that Elena had taken him to a dozen times — familiar ground, deliberately chosen by someone, Nico or Dante, who understood the value of familiar ground. Gianna sat at the counter with her phone and her coffee and the absolute self-sufficiency of a woman who could be alone in any room in the world, and Elena took the corner table and waited.

Luca came through the door and saw her and she watched his face do something complicated — relief and anger and love all running together in the unguarded way of seventeen-year-olds who hadn’t yet learned to compartmentalize. He crossed the room in six steps and she stood up and he hugged her in that fierce, slightly awkward way he’d had since his growth spurt at fifteen, when he’d suddenly been taller than her and hadn’t quite adjusted to it yet.

“You’re okay,” he said into her shoulder.

“I told you I was okay.”

“You also told me not to ask Papa, which means whatever it is, it’s bad enough that he can’t explain it without making it worse.”

She pulled back and looked at him. Seventeen, dark-eyed, their mother’s mouth. He was wearing his school jacket and he had her note folded in his shirt pocket — she could see the edge of it — and the sight of that did something to her chest that she breathed through very carefully.

“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll explain what I can.”

She told him the version she had decided on — not a lie, but a careful edit. She told him about the debt. She told him it had been settled through an arrangement she had agreed to. She told him she was going to be living elsewhere for a while and that he was going to be safe and that she needed him to focus on his last year of school.

Luca listened with the stillness of a person preparing to argue. When she finished, he said, “What kind of arrangement.”

“The kind I agreed to.”

“Elena.”

“Luca.”

He looked at her. She looked back. The particular battle of siblings who know each other too well to bother with pretense.

“Are you married,” he said.

She held his gaze. “By Friday.”

He sat back. He looked at the table. He pressed his mouth into a flat line that was so like their mother in a difficult moment that Elena had to look at the window.

“To who,” he said.

“Someone who can protect you. That’s the part that matters most.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only answer I have right now.” She reached across the table and put her hand over his. His was cold — he’d walked from the subway without gloves again, she noted, and she was going to have to send him money for new ones because he’d lost his last month. “I need you to trust me. Can you do that?”

A long silence. Then, very quietly: “I always trust you. It’s everyone else I don’t trust.”

“Good. Keep it that way.” She squeezed his hand. “Tell me about school.”

He talked. She listened the way she always listened to him — completely, because Luca had been one of the few things in her life that didn’t require management. He was smart and funny and he had three friends she liked and a history teacher he was genuinely passionate about and a part-time job at the hardware store on Fifth Avenue that he’d gotten himself without telling her and that she was going to pretend to be surprised about when he mentioned it.

He mentioned it. She pretended to be surprised.

He almost smiled. Almost.

Then his expression shifted. Went careful. She saw it happen — the transition from brother to witness, from present tense to something he’d been holding.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “I was going to text it but I didn’t know if—” He glanced toward the counter. Toward Gianna, who was not looking at them, who appeared entirely absorbed in her phone. He lowered his voice anyway. “I didn’t know who might be reading your messages.”

Elena went still. “Tell me.”

“About two months ago,” Luca said, keeping his voice very low. “Maybe a little more. I was coming out of school — the back entrance, the one on the side street, I use it when it’s raining because it’s closer to the subway.” He paused. “There was a man outside. Just standing there. Black car, like he was waiting. I didn’t think much about it — I’ve seen parents pick kids up that way.” He looked up at her. “But then I saw him again the next week. Different spot, same block. Same car.”

Elena’s hands were very still on the table. “What did he look like?”

“Older. Maybe forty, forty-five. Silver in his hair.” Luca thought. “Nice suit. He didn’t look like—” He searched for the word. “He didn’t look like a threat. He looked like a businessman waiting for something. But I noticed him because the second time, he looked at me.”

“At you specifically.”

“He looked at me like he recognized me.” Luca met her eyes. “Like he was checking something off a list.”

Elena breathed. “Did you tell Papa?”

“I told Papa.” A brief, familiar frustration crossed his face. “Papa said I was imagining things.”

She looked at her hands on the table. Two months ago. The timeline of her father’s debt, the part she’d been tracing in her head since last night — the part that didn’t add up. Marco’s debt had reached crisis point in the past six weeks, according to what the contract had implied. But someone had been watching Luca two months ago.

Someone had been watching her family before the debt reached the point of no return.

Someone who already knew what they were going to do with that information.

“Can you describe the car?” she said.

Luca gave her the make, the color, a partial plate — he had her memory, the precise kind that catalogued things automatically and retrieved them clearly. She stored every detail.

“Don’t tell anyone else about this,” she said. “Not Papa. Not your friends. No one.”

“Elena—”

“Luca.” She kept her voice quiet and her face calm. “I need you to trust me.”

He looked at her for a long time. He was seventeen and he was not stupid and he was afraid in the way that people who love someone more than they love themselves are afraid — not for himself. For her.

“The person you’re marrying,” he said. “Is he—” He stopped. Started again. “Will he keep you safe?”

Elena thought about a grey-eyed man at a window, looking out at the city with the expression of someone carrying something very heavy for a very long time. She thought about an amendment drafted at three in the morning by a lawyer who didn’t sleep. She thought about a coffee shop in Park Slope, chosen because it was familiar.

“I think so,” she said. And then, because it was Luca and she owed him more than managed truth: “I don’t know yet. But I think so.”

He nodded. Small, unhappy, accepting. He reached into his bag and produced something — slid it across the table to her.

It was the photograph she’d left on her nightstand in her haste, the one of their mother. She’d missed it in her packing. Luca had found it and brought it without knowing she needed it, the way he’d always done things for her without knowing she needed them.

“You forgot it,” he said.

She picked it up. Her mother laughing at something outside the frame, hair loose, eyes the same brown as Elena’s. I know, she thought. I know I always forget to take care of myself.

“Thank you,” she said.

When they left the coffee shop, Gianna walked beside Elena to the car and did not say anything for half a block. Then, without looking at her: “He’s a good kid.”

“Yes,” Elena said.

“He looked at me like he was memorizing my face.”

“He was,” Elena said. “He does that.”

Another half block. Then: “He’ll be looked after. Whatever else happens—” Gianna stopped walking. She turned and looked at Elena with an expression that was entirely unguarded for the first time since they’d met, and what was in it was complicated and old and had clearly cost her something to bring to the surface. “Whatever else this is — your brother will be fine. I need you to believe that.”

Elena looked at her. “Why?”

Gianna held her gaze. “Because someone should have said it to me when I needed to hear it,” she said. “And no one did.”

She turned and kept walking. Elena stood on the sidewalk for a moment in the grey afternoon, the photograph of her mother in her bag and her brother’s words moving through her head — the second time, he looked at me like he was checking something off a list — and she felt the shape of something she couldn’t fully see yet. Something that had been constructed carefully, over time, by someone who knew exactly what they were building.

She had agreed to this marriage because she had no choice.

But what if the removal of choice had also been constructed?

What if someone had engineered the whole thing — not just the debt reaching crisis, not just the marriage as a solution, but her specifically, Elena Moretti, being the one who walked into Dante Romano’s penthouse?

Why me, she had thought last night.

Standing on a Park Slope sidewalk in October, she thought it again. And this time the question had weight to it. Not the panicked weight of a woman in crisis, but the precise weight of a woman who was beginning to understand that she was standing in the middle of something much larger than a debt settlement.

She got in the car.

Gianna was looking at her phone. The driver was looking at the road. The city moved past the windows in the blue-gray light of late afternoon.

Elena put her hand in her pocket and felt the photograph there, her mother’s face, and thought very carefully about a man with silver in his hair and a black car parked outside her brother’s school two months before a debt became a death sentence.

Someone had planned this.

She did not yet know why. But she was going to find out.

She was very certain of that.