PAID IN VOWS

CHAPTER SIX

The Moretti house sat at the end of a long private road lined with trees old enough to have been planted before anyone currently alive in that family was born. I had worn the dress, in the end, dark green, simple, the kind of thing I would have worn to any dinner that mattered, and I had spent longer than I wanted to admit deciding on it, telling myself the extra care was about strategy and not at all about the strange, unwanted flutter of nerves that had followed me around all day.

Dante met me at the door himself, which I had not expected. "You came," he said, which struck me as a strange thing to say to a woman he had essentially given no real choice, and stranger still for the way his eyes moved over the dress, once, briefly, with something unguarded enough that I felt it land low in my stomach.

"I said I would."

"People say a lot of things." He stepped back to let me in, close enough as I passed him that I caught the cedar again, and this time I let myself notice it fully instead of pretending I hadn't. "It's rarer than you'd think for them to mean it."

Salvatore Moretti was waiting in a formal dining room, smaller than I expected, more frightening for it, with eyes that shared their son's stillness but none of whatever warmth I had begun, cautiously, to suspect existed underneath Dante's.

"Miss Calloway." He took my hand in both of his. "You have your father's eyes."

Dinner unfolded with a formality I found almost theatrical, Salvatore asking question after question, testing for consistency, and I answered honestly, mostly because I could not immediately identify a version of dishonesty that would have served me better.

"I understand exactly what I'm agreeing to," I told him, somewhere around the second course. "I'm agreeing to marry your son to erase a debt my father created and never told me about. In public, I understand exactly what you need it to look like. In private, I'm not agreeing to pretend it's something other than what it actually is."

Salvatore was quiet for a long moment, and beside me, I felt Dante go very still, as though bracing for his father's reaction. Then, unexpectedly, Salvatore laughed, a short, dry sound.

"At least she's honest," he said, to Dante, as though I were not sitting directly beside him. "Your mother was honest too, in the beginning."

We finished the meal carefully, and Salvatore walked me to the door himself when the evening ended.

"My son does not choose easily," he said quietly, out of Dante's immediate earshot. "I find it interesting that he chose you to test that against, even under circumstances neither of you actually chose."

Dante walked me to the car himself, and instead of the usual brisk, businesslike goodnight I had been expecting, he hesitated at the open door, close enough that I had to look up at him again the way I had at the funeral, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all.

"Thank you," he said finally, "for not pretending with him tonight. I've watched a lot of people perform for my father. I didn't expect to find it this much of a relief, watching someone refuse to."

"I'm not very good at performing. Never have been."

"I'm starting to think that's exactly what makes this bearable," he said, and something in his voice had gone low enough, careful enough, that for one unsteady second I thought he might close the remaining distance between us entirely. He did not. He stepped back instead, opened the car door the rest of the way, and the moment folded itself closed as quickly as it had opened.

"Goodnight, Ivy," he said, using my first name for the first time since the funeral, and something about hearing it in his voice, quiet and deliberate, stayed with me the entire ride home, replaying itself long after the private road had given way to ordinary streets, long after I understood that whatever this marriage had started as, some dangerous, unplanned current was already running underneath it, and neither of us had done anything yet to stop it.

I thought about Salvatore's comment the whole way home, the offhand mention of Dante's mother, honest too, in the beginning, and the careful way the family had learned not to discuss her directly. I did not ask Dante about it that night. It felt like too much, too soon, on top of everything else the evening had already carried, but I filed it away the same way I filed away everything else I did not yet understand, certain it would matter eventually.

Sal dropped me at my apartment a little after eleven, and I let myself in quietly, aware of how strange it was to be returning to my own small, ordinary space after an evening spent in a house that had felt, in its scale and its silences, like something out of an entirely different century, and after a goodbye that had very nearly become something else entirely. I made tea I did not drink and sat at my kitchen table replaying the dinner, Salvatore's dry laugh, the particular way Dante had gone still beside me, and underneath all of it, the memory of his hand on the car door, the low, careful way he had said goodnight using my name for the first time.

I texted Sofia a brief summary before bed, mostly to reassure her I was still alive and unmarried to anyone against my will just yet, and she replied within minutes, a single line that I read three times before finally setting my phone down. Sounds like it went better than either of us expected. Be careful, Ivy. Not of him. Of how easy it might become to want this to be real.

I did not have an answer for that yet. I turned off the light and lay awake longer than I wanted to, turning her warning over alongside everything else the evening had given me to consider, the warmth in his voice, the restraint it had clearly cost him to step back from the car door instead of closing the last few inches between us, and somewhere in the small hours before sleep finally found me, I understood that the warning had already, quietly, arrived a little too late.

I thought, too, about the particular way Salvatore had looked at me across the table, assessing, careful, the look of a man deciding whether I was an asset or a liability to the family he had spent his whole life protecting, and about how different that look had been from the way his son had looked at me in the exact same room an hour later. There was something almost dizzying about standing at the center of two such different kinds of attention in the same evening, one weighing my usefulness, the other weighing something else entirely, something that had nothing to do with debts or collateral at all.

I got up once, near midnight, and stood at my window looking out at the quiet street, turning the whole evening over again, the compact, precise way Salvatore had assessed me, the warmth that kept breaking through Dante's composure despite his best efforts to keep it contained. I understood, standing there, that I was no longer simply negotiating a debt settlement. I was navigating an entire family, an entire history, and somewhere in the middle of it, falling for a man I had known for less than two weeks, in circumstances that should have made falling for anyone the last thing on my mind.

I went back to bed eventually, and slept better than I expected to, and woke the next morning already looking forward, in a way I had no business looking forward to anything, to whatever came next, debt and danger and all the complications still waiting somewhere ahead of us.

Elena, when I mentioned the dinner to her in passing a few days later, simply smiled and said nothing at all, which I came to understand, over the following weeks, was her particular way of confirming something she already suspected without overstepping into territory that was not yet hers to comment on directly, though the small, knowing smile she wore for the rest of that afternoon told me plainly enough that she had already drawn her own conclusions.

Sofia pressed me for details that same week, over coffee, and I found myself, for the first time, describing the evening not as a negotiation survived, but as something closer to a date I had not expected to enjoy nearly as much as I had, a distinction that did not escape either of us, and that neither of us commented on directly, though I caught her smiling into her cup more than once while I talked, pleased, I think, to watch me circle an admission she had already made for herself weeks earlier.