The Rossi vow

Episode 8

What He Didn't Hear

Damian

Damian noticed the moment it happened, even from across the room, even mid-sentence with a man from the Chicago Outfit's old guard who required careful handling and full attention.

Camille went still. Not the ordinary stillness of someone listening politely –a different stillness, the kind he recognized because he'd spent his whole life cultivating it himself. The stillness of someone holding something together by main force.

He excused himself as soon as he could without causing offense, which in this room, with these people, took longer than he wanted. By the time he crossed the floor, Vincent had already moved on, laughing warmly with the Marchettis near the bar, and Camille was standing alone by the terrace doors with a glass of champagne she wasn't drinking and a smile that didn't reach anywhere near her eyes.

"Everything all right?" he asked, low, just for her.

"Fine," she said. "Big day. I'm just tired."

It was the same lie she'd apparently told her sister – he'd catch that detail later, piecing together the timeline – and it landed on him wrong immediately, the way a false note lands wrong even before you can name the key it was supposed to be in. Camille didn't strike him as someone who lied well, or often. She struck him as someone who threw sarcasm at fear until the fear got the message and left. This wasn't that. This was something folded up small and held very carefully, the way you hold something that might shatter if you're not careful.

"You spoke to my uncle," he said.

Something flickered across her face – there and gone, too fast to read, exactly the kind of tell he'd spent his whole career learning to catch on other people and had apparently never once looked for on the people closest to him. "Briefly. He welcomed me to the family. Very charming."

"He is that," Damian said carefully, watching her. "What did he say?"

"Nothing important." She smiled again, brighter this time, entirely for his benefit, and he let her have it, because pushing here, now, in a room full of people who'd notice every flicker of tension between the new bride and groom, would cost them both more than the truth was worth in this moment. "I think I just need some air."

He wanted to go with her. He didn't, because Selene Marchetti had just arrived, twenty minutes late and dressed like she meant to be noticed, sweeping through the crowd with the particular confidence of a woman who had never once in her life doubted her welcome anywhere, and someone needed to manage that particular disaster before it found its way to Camille.

"You didn't invite me," Selene said, kissing the air near his cheek, her eyes cutting past him toward the terrace doors where Camille had just disappeared. "I had to hear about my own almost-fiancé's wedding from my mother, Damian. That's humiliating."

"We were never engaged, Selene."

"We were promised," she corrected, sweet as poison. "By people who mattered a great deal more than either of us. I assume that still counts for something in this family, or did your uncle not mention it when he was so enthusiastically encouraging this little arrangement?"

Damian went very still. "What do you mean, encouraging?"

Selene's smile faltered, just slightly, the first genuine expression he'd seen from her all night. "Nothing. Forget I said anything. I'm being dramatic, it's what I do at weddings that aren't mine." She recovered fast, reaching for a glass of champagne from a passing tray, already scanning the room for a more interesting conversation. "Congratulations, by the way. She's lovely. For a baker."

She drifted off before he could press her further, and Damian stood alone for a moment, turning over the word encouraging like a stone he'd found in his shoe, before he went looking for Camille.

He found her an hour later, long after the band had stopped and most of the guests had gone, sitting alone on the edge of the fountain in the estate's private garden, her borrowed dress pooled around her like something spilled, staring at nothing.

"Hey," he said, sitting beside her, careful to leave space between them. "Long day."

"Longest of my life."

He reached over, slow, giving her every chance to pull away, and covered her hand with his. It was the first time he'd touched her without an audience to perform for, without a strategy behind it, without anything at all except the simple, unfamiliar wish to make some part of this easier for her.

She flinched. Not from him, he realized after a beat –flinched from something behind her own eyes, some thought that had nothing to do with the hand on hers, and pulled her fingers back gently, wrapping her arms around herself instead.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I just need tonight. Can I just have tonight?"

"Of course." He didn't understand it. He let it go anyway, because understanding could wait and her exhaustion, real and raw in the moonlight, couldn't. "Whatever you need."

She looked at him then, really looked, something searching and sad and careful in her expression, like she was trying to decide something about him that he didn't yet know he was being tested on.

"Damian," she said quietly. "How well do you know your uncle?"

The question landed harder than she could have known, given everything he'd been turning over himself for the last week – the mistimed police report, the strange interest in a nine-year-old file, the warm hands that had comforted him at a funeral for a man Vincent might have had killed.

"Why do you ask?" he said, careful, watching her face for whatever answer she wasn't giving him yet.

She was quiet for a long moment, looking out at the dark garden, and when she finally spoke, her voice was so soft he almost missed it entirely.

"No reason," she said. "Not yet."

It wasn't an answer. It was, he understood slowly, watching her walk back toward the house alone a few minutes later, a door left deliberately, carefully open – and he sat by the fountain a long while after she'd gone, turning over Selene's slip of the tongue and Camille's unfinished question, feeling the cold certainty from the altar settle deeper into his chest, patient and permanent, waiting for the moment when the two of them would finally stop protecting each other from a truth they were both, independently, cir

cling closer to every single day