BOUND BY BLOOD

CHAPTER TWO: SOMETHING TO REMEMBER ME BY

She didn't sleep.

Not because she was afraid — Aria Romano had trained herself out of fear the same way she'd trained herself to shoot, to negotiate, to walk into hostile rooms with her chin level and her pulse steady. Fear was a luxury. Fear was something you indulged in when you had time to fall apart, and she had never been given that time.

She didn't sleep because she was thinking.

Nikolai Volkov had her phone number. He'd called within minutes of a private family dinner whose contents he should not have known yet. He'd used her first name — not Miss Romano, not the formal distance that protocol demanded between strangers entering a political arrangement — her name. Like he'd been thinking about her. Like he already knew her.

I've been waiting, Aria.

She'd hung up. She wasn't proud of it — it wasn't strategic, it wasn't composed, it was the reaction of a woman whose carefully built equilibrium had just been shaken — but she'd pressed the red button before he could say anything else, because she'd needed to breathe and she couldn't do that with his voice in her ear.

He hadn't called back.

That, somehow, was worse.

She lay on top of her covers and stared at the ceiling until four in the morning, mapping it out. Nikolai Volkov was twenty-eight years old. He had run the Bratva's eastern operations since he was twenty-three, when his father had handed him the territory as a test and he had tripled its revenue in eighteen months. Every intelligence briefing she'd ever overheard described him the same way: methodical, precise, and utterly without sentiment.

A man like that did not make careless phone calls.

Every word had been deliberate. The number. The timing. The name. He had wanted her to know, before she ever set foot in his house, that he already had information she hadn't given him. That he was several moves ahead. That whatever this arrangement was, he was not walking into it blind.

Fine, she thought.

Neither was she.

---

By seven the next morning she had a plan. By nine she had executed the first part of it.

The silver Mercedes appeared outside the Romano estate gates just after ten — Volkov plates, Volkov driver, parked without permission directly in front of the main entrance like a territorial flag planted in foreign soil. It was a message. Petty, deliberate, designed to let her family know that the Volkovs already considered this their territory.

Aria looked at it from the upstairs window for thirty seconds.

Then she called Gio.

Gio was twenty years old, loyal as a hound, and had once removed a car engine in eleven minutes on a bet. He also owed her three favors from the incident with the city councillor she would never speak of again.

"I need you to do something creative," she told him. "And I need it done before noon."

By two in the afternoon, the silver Mercedes was sitting on four flat tires.

By four, the word VOLKOV had been painted on the hood in neat red letters — precise, almost elegant — with a line underneath it that read: NOT YET.

She didn't sign it. She didn't need to.

---

Her father's voice, when he called her into his office, was the particular quiet that she associated with him being genuinely angry rather than performatively so.

"What," he said, "did you do."

"I sent a message." She sat down across from his desk without being invited. "Their men parked on our property without permission. That's a provocation. I responded to it. That's protocol."

"Viktor Volkov called me."

"What did he say?"

Marco looked at her steadily. "He laughed."

She blinked.

"He said—" her father paused, like he still couldn't quite believe it "—that his son had been right about you."

The words moved through her strangely. She filed them away, added them to the pile of things she was already building about Nikolai Volkov, this man she'd never met who apparently already had opinions about her.

"The wedding is in three weeks," her father said. "I need you to understand what that means. Not just for us — for every family who lost someone in this war. The Moretti brothers. The Genovese cousins. The men we buried last spring." His voice, for just a moment, dropped its armor. "This ends it, Aria. All of it."

She looked at her father for a long moment.

She understood. She hated that she understood. She had sat with the widows, attended the funerals, held Enzo's wife while she shook with grief that had no bottom. The war had taken things from all of them that couldn't be returned, and if this marriage — her marriage, her freedom, the life she'd quietly been building in her head — genuinely ended the killing, then she understood the math.

It didn't mean she had to be quiet about it.

"I'll do it," she said. "I'll stand next to him and say whatever needs to be said in front of whoever needs to see it. I'll honor the agreement." She met her father's eyes. "But he needs to know what he's getting before he gets it. The car was a courtesy."

She left before he could argue.

---

She was in her room packing — three weeks wasn't long, she'd been ruthlessly selective, only what mattered — when the phone rang again.

Same number. Russian prefix.

This time she answered on the first ring.

"You hung up on me," he said. Still that same controlled quiet. Not angry. Amused, almost, in the way of someone who found unexpected things interesting rather than irritating.

"I did," she agreed.

"Do you plan to make a habit of that?"

"Depends on whether you keep saying things designed to unsettle me."

A pause. "I wasn't trying to unsettle you."

"Then what were you trying to do?"

"Introduce myself." Another pause, shorter. "I thought the alternative — waiting until you arrived and meeting as strangers — would be worse. For both of us."

She sat down on the edge of the bed and thought about that. It was, annoyingly, a reasonable thing to say.

"You had my phone number," she said. "Before the announcement."

"Yes."

"How long."

"A while."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed, "it isn't."

She gritted her teeth. "The car—"

"Was an excellent message." His voice shifted — barely, but she caught it. "I want you to know that I didn't authorize it. My father's men have territorial habits that I intend to address."

She hadn't expected that either. An acknowledgment that his side had been provocative. No defense, no bluster, no you should have let it go.

"You're not what I expected," she said, before she could stop herself.

"No." A beat. "You're not what I expected either."

"What did you expect?"

He was quiet for a moment. Long enough that she thought he might not answer. Then: "Someone who would make this easier on herself by pretending it was something it isn't." Another pause. "You're not doing that."

"I don't pretend."

"I know." And something in those two words made her think he genuinely did. "I'll see you in three weeks."

He hung up before she could respond.

She sat with the phone in her hand and replayed the conversation in her head, looking for the angle the way she always did — the manipulation, the play, the thing he was actually trying to accomplish beneath the surface of what he'd said.

She found something she hadn't expected.

She thought he might have been telling the truth.

That scared her more than the lies would have.

She was still sitting there, unsettled and angry about being unsettled, when Cesca knocked and came in with a bottle of wine and took one look at Aria's face and said, "Okay. Start from the beginning."

Aria opened her mouth to do exactly that.

Her phone buzzed.

A text from the unknown number. No words. Just a photograph — taken tonight, through her bedroom window from somewhere outside, the light catching her face as she'd sat on the bed talking to him.

He had been right outside.

He had been watching her this whole time.