Bounded to the Devil's Name

Chapter four: The visit

Wren had lived in apartment 3B for four years, and in all that time, no one had ever knocked on her door at nine at night wearing a suit that cost more than everything she owned combined.

"You," she said, opening the door only as far as the chain would allow. "The diner, no. The gala. The man who told me to go home."

"Salvatore Cain," he said again, as if repeating his name might make the situation feel less absurd. "I need to talk to you. It's important."

"It's nine o'clock."

"I'm aware."

"I don't know you."

"You're about to," he said, and something about the way he said it was quiet, resigned, like a man walking toward a cliff he'd already measured the fall off, made her hand hesitate on the chain instead of closing the door outright.

She let him in against every instinct that had kept her alive and unbothered in this city for four ears, and regretted it and didn't regret it in the same breath the moment he stepped past her into the small living room, filling it the way certain men fill any room they enter, whether they mean to or not.

Talk," she said, arms crossed, putting the length of the coffee table between them like it might actually stop him if this went somewhere she didn't like.

"Twenty-three years ago," Salvatore said, "your parents , the people who raised you — took you in after a fire. Do you know that?"

The question landed like a slap. "How do you know anything about a fire?"

"Because I know the family whose name was supposed to have died in it," he said. "Bellamonte. Does that mean anything to you?"

It shouldn't have. She'd never heard the name in her life, not once, not from the Callahans who raised her, not from the county records she'd pulled once out of idle curiosity and found frustratingly, suspiciously thin. And yet something in her chest tightened at the word anyway, unbidden, the way a body flinches from a sound it doesn't consciously remember but has been afraid of longer than memory reaches.

"No," she said, too fast.

"I think it does," Salvatore said, not unkindly. "I think some part of you has been carrying that name your whole life without anyone ever saying it out loud, and I think you're about to find out I'm not the first stranger who's noticed."

"You need to leave."

"There was a contract," he pushed on, quieter now, like he could feel her fear rising and hated causing it, hated it and couldn't stop. "Signed between two families twenty-three years ago. A peace agreement, sealed with a promise that the firstborn son of one family would marry the firstborn daughter of the other, once both came of age. My father's family. And the Bellamontes."

"I'm not," Wren's voice cracked, humiliatingly, in the middle of a sentence she'd meant to sound certain. "I'm not part of some mafia contract. I wait tables. I have eleven dollars in my checking account and a homeowner who won't fix my ceiling. Whatever you think this is, you have the wrong person."

"I wish I did," Salvatore said, and the honesty in it was somehow worse than if he'd lied. "The Bellamonte daughter didn't die in that fire, Wren. She was smuggled out, raised somewhere safe, given a new name so no one, not rivals, not even her, would ever know what she really was. Wren Callahan. That's the name they gave you."

The room tilted, very slightly, in a way that had nothing to do with anything physical. Wren sat down on the arm of the couch because her legs had stopped being reliable.

"You're insane," she said, without much force behind it.

"I've spent three days hoping I was," Salvatore said. "I'm not."

"Even if any of this were true," she was grasping now, and she knew it, and she hated how much of her was scrambling to find the hole in his story instead of simply refusing to believe it outright. "Why does it matter? Why does some contract from before I could talk matter to anyone now?"

"Because my father died four days ago," Salvatore said, "and the alliance that contract represents is the only thing standing between my family and a war that's going to bury a lot of people who never asked to be part of any of this. The other families are watching to see if we're weak enough to finish off. Marrying you, marrying the Bellamonte heir proves we're not."

"So you want to marry me." She said flatly, testing how ridiculous it sounded out loud, hoping the sound of it might be enough to end the entire conversation.

It wasn't.

"I don't want anything from you that you haven't chosen," Salvatore said, and something in his voice had changed steadier, but rawer underneath it, like a man choosing his words around a wound he wasn't ready to show her yet. "But I need you to understand what's coming for you whether you agree to this or not. People already know you exist. People who are far less careful than I am about what they're willing to do to a woman they consider Bellamonte property instead of a Bellamonte person. I can protect you inside this. I don't know that I can protect you outside it."

Wren stared at him for a long moment, this stranger who'd walked into her apartment and rearranged the entire architecture of who she thought she was in under ten minutes, and felt something dangerous stirring underneath the fear not attraction, not yet, or not only that, but a terrible, magnetic curiosity about a man who looked like he was drowning in a secret he hadn't told her yet, and doing it specifically to keep her safe from something worse.

"I need you to leave," she said again, softer this time, no longer a demand so much as a plea. "I need to think. Alone."

Salvatore nodded, and moved toward the door, and paused with his hand on the frame the way he had at the diner, the way he seemed to always pause right before leaving her, like some part of him was reluctant to put a door between them even temporarily.

"For what it's worth," he said, not looking back at her, "I didn't want this contract either. Not until I met you. Now I don't know what I want, except that some part of it involves not being the reason anything happens to you."

He left before she could answer, and Wren sat in her small apartment for a long time afterward, staring at the door, at the name he'd said out loud for the first time in her life, Bellamonte turning it over like a stone she'd found buried in her own backyard, wondering how long it had been there, and how she'd never once noticed the ground was hollow beneath her feet.