The Rossi vow

Episode7

Confession

Camille

The room was full and somehow completely empty – a scattering of men in dark suits who watched with the flat, assessing eyes of people cataloguing a business transaction rather than witnessing a wedding. Marco stood at Damian's shoulder through most of it, the only face in the room that looked at me like I was a person and not a liability.

It wasn't until the reception, three hours later, glass of champagne untouched in my hand, that Vincent Rossi finally approached me – kind eyes, warm hands, a voice like honey poured over broken glass.

"Camille," he said, taking both my hands in his like I was something precious rather than something purchased. "Welcome to the family, dear girl. I only wish your father could have been here to see it."

Something cold moved through me, sharp and sudden, at the way he said my father – soft, almost fond, like the two of them had shared something I'd never been told about.

"You knew my father?" I asked, careful to keep my voice light, remembering Damian's warning even as every instinct screamed at me to lean in and demand the truth.

Vincent's smile didn't waver, not even slightly, and that was the moment I understood –with a clarity that would keep me awake for the rest of that long, glittering, terrifying night –that whatever had truly happened to my father, the answer wasn't hiding somewhere far away in Damian's guarded silences.

It was standing three feet in front of me, holding my hands, smiling like a man who had never once in his life been caught.

"Knew him?" Vincent said softly, and something behind his warm eyes went very still. "My dear girl. I'm the reason he's gone."

He said it so gently, so pleasantly, with the band still playing behind him and Damian's back turned three feet away, that for one full second, I thought I'd misheard him entirely.

Then he smiled wider, patted my hand once, and turned to greet the next well-wisher, leaving me standing frozen in my wedding dress with my new husband's uncle's confession ringing in my ears, and no earthly idea, yet, of what I was going to do about it.

I don't remember crossing the room. I remember the champagne glass still in my hand, warm now, forgotten. I remember the string quartet shifting into something slow and sweet, entirely wrong for the moment, and the way the sound of it seemed to come from somewhere very far away, like I was underwater and the whole party was happening on the surface without me.

Bella found me by the terrace doors, her burgundy curls pinned up for the occasion, a plate of appetizers she hadn't touched balanced on one hand. "Hey – you look like you've seen a ghost. You okay?"

"I'm fine," I said, and the lie tasted like copper.

"You are so not fine. What happened?"

I opened my mouth to tell her –Bella, who had held my hand through every disaster since we were kids, who would believe me instantly and without question – and then I caught sight of Vincent across the room, laughing warmly at something one of the older men had said, utterly at ease, utterly untouchable, surrounded by exactly the kind of people who would make my sister disappear without a headline if I said the wrong thing to the wrong person tonight.

"Nothing," I said instead. "Big day. I'm just tired."

Bella didn't believe me. I could see it in the careful way she studied my face, the way she almost pushed and then, reading something in my expression, didn't. "Okay," she said slowly. "But you're telling me later. All of it."

"Later," I agreed, and meant it, and had absolutely no idea yet how to keep that promise without putting her directly in the path of whatever Vincent Rossi was capable of.

Across the ballroom, Damian was deep in conversation with a cluster of men I didn't recognize, his public face fixed firmly in place — that particular stillness that read as calm to everyone who hadn't spent the last twelve days learning to look for the places where it cracked. He glanced over once, found me by the terrace doors, and something in his expression shifted – a question, quick and quiet, are you all right – and I made myself smile back like the answer was yes.

I didn't know, yet, whether I could trust him with what Vincent had just told me. I didn't know whether the man I'd married eight hours ago was the reason my father was dead, or the person most likely to help me prove who really was. I didn't know if telling him would put me in more danger, or finally get me out of it.

All I knew, standing in a borrowed dress in a room full of men who smiled like knives, was that somewhere underneath the flowers and the champagne and the vows I'd meant more of than I wanted to admit, a silver-haired man had just told me, gently, cheerfully, like it was the easiest thing in the world to say – that he'd killed my father, and that I was the only person in this entire building who knew it.

The band kept playing. Somewhere behind me, Vincent Rossi laughed again, warm and easy, and I stood very still and smiled at my new husband from across the room, and understood that the real marriage –the dangerous one, the one that actually mattered – had just begun.

Later, alone in the unfamiliar dark of a bedroom that wasn't mine yet, I turned Vincent's words over and over until they lost all shape, until I couldn't tell anymore whether I'd heard him correctly or whether shock had simply rewritten the memory into something worse than what he'd actually said. But some part of me, the same part that had spent three years refusing to believe a car accident was just a car accident, already knew I hadn't

misheard a single word.