Bounded to the Devil's Name

Chapter Eight: The Call

Matteo Bellamonte made the call from a burner phone he'd bought in cash three days earlier, sitting in his car two blocks from a boathouse he had no intention of getting any closer to tonight.

"It's done," he said, when the line picked up. "She's meeting with him alone. No security. I have photographs."

"Photographs of what," said the voice on the other end flat, unimpressed, the voice of a man who'd learned patience the hard way and spent it sparingly. Dominic Marchetti had never liked Matteo, not once in the fifteen years they'd circled each other's ambitions, but hatred made for reliable business partners more often than friendship did.

"Of the Cain don sitting on a public dock with the woman his family is about to parade around as the Bellamonte heir," Matteo said. "Alone. Unguarded. Close enough that anyone with a long lens and bad intentions could have ended this entire alliance in under four seconds."

"You didn't."

"Of course I didn't." Matteo's voice cooled. "I want him married to her, Dominic, not dead before the wedding. A dead Salvatore Cain solves nothing, his people simply install someone else, and the war you and I both want happens on someone else's timetable instead of ours. A married Salvatore Cain, tangled up in a woman he clearly can't stop looking at like she's the only light left in a very dark room, that's leverage. That's a man who's made himself weak in exactly the way his father never was."

There was a pause on the line, the sound of ice settling in a glass somewhere on Marchetti's end. "You want to use his own feelings against him."

"I want to remind everyone in this city," Matteo said, "that the Cain family bled my brother out and called it an accident, then spent twenty-three years pretending the debt was settled. It isn't settled. It won't be settled until every piece of what they took from me costs them something in return." He glanced back toward the boathouse, where two shapes still sat close together on the dock, heads bent toward each other in a way that made something old and bitter twist in his chest. "And it turns out the cheapest way to make a man bleed isn't always a knife, Dominic. Sometimes it's simply giving him something to lose, and then taking it away slowly enough that he feels every second of it."

"And the girl? What happens to her once you've made your point?"

Matteo was quiet for a moment, watching Wren's silhouette laugh softly at something Salvatore said, unaware of anything watching her from the dark beyond the dock's single flickering light.

"That depends on how useful she turns out to be," he said finally. "If she's simply Antonio's stolen daughter, returned to us by circumstance, then she's family, and family gets protected, whatever else happens around her. If she's something else , if the rumors about the Cain don's old appetites turn out to have more truth in them than anyone's dared confirm then she's something considerably more complicated, and I'll decide what she's worth once I know for certain which version of her I'm actually looking at."

"You think there's more to it."

"I think," Matteo said slowly, choosing the words the way a man chooses which stone to step on crossing a river he doesn't entirely trust, "that Salvatore Cain does not risk meeting a virtual stranger alone, without security, four days after burying his father and inheriting a war, unless something about her matters to him in a way that has nothing to do with a twenty-three-year-old contract. Men don't take risks like that for arrangements. They take them for people they're afraid of losing before they've even decided to keep."

"So find out," Marchetti said. "Whatever it is. Before the wedding, not after. If there's a weakness bigger than the one we already know about, I want it in hand before we move."

"You'll have it," Matteo said, and ended the call, and sat in the dark a while longer, watching the two shapes on the dock finally rise, finally walk in opposite directions toward two entirely different worlds, and wondered not for the first time, and not comfortably, whether the girl with his sister-in-law's exact jawline was truly the niece he'd spent two decades mourning, or something far stranger, and far more dangerous to everyone involved, than either family currently understood.

Salvatore didn't see the car until he was three blocks past it, and even then it registered only as a shape in his periphery, gone by the time he'd fully processed it , a small, cold prickle at the back of his neck that he attributed to exhaustion and the general unease of a night that had asked more honesty of him than he'd planned on giving.

He drove home replaying the boathouse instead the particular sound of Wren's laugh when it was real instead of performed for a diner customer, the way she'd leaned toward him in the dark without seeming to notice she'd done it, the terrifying, unfamiliar warmth that had settled somewhere under his ribs and refused to leave even now, alone in the car, three miles from her and still somehow feeling closer to her than he had to anyone in years.

He didn't let himself think about what Enzo would say if he knew how close Salvatore had come,twice, to telling her everything on that dock. He didn't let himself think about his father's ledger, still locked in Enzo's office, still full of names Salvatore hadn't asked to see yet. He didn't let himself think, most of all, about the particular cold clarity in Matteo Bellamonte's eyes the one time he'd crossed paths with the man years ago, at a funeral neither of them had wanted to attend, or the quiet, patient way men like that waited for exactly the right moment to collect on debts everyone else had assumed were long forgotten.

He should have let himself think about all of it. He'd understand, later, with the particular clarity that only comes after damage is already done, that this had been the night the war stopped being something coming for his family in the abstract, and became something already circling, close enough now to smell blood on the wind and that he'd spent it instead sitting on a dock, falling for the one person in the entire city he had the least right to want.