Chapter 2

His disgust hit me like a fist under the ribs. I had to draw one slow breath through the haze of Turkish tobacco and old money that hung over the private room, had to press my thumb hard against the base of my ring finger and hold myself steady before I trusted my voice. "It didn't need your blessing," I said. "I'm not marrying you, Salvatore."

The room broke apart into laughter. Salvatore's crew, the young made men and the hangers-on who trailed the Falcone heir like smoke behind a cigarette, doubled over at the polished table. Crystal trembled. They laughed the way boys laugh when they have never once been told no, and of course they couldn't resist sinking their teeth into it.

"Salvatore," one of them called out, wine slopping over the rim of his glass, "better keep your soldiers close! Your girl's about to pull another stunt just to feel your eyes on her!"

Salvatore only shook his head, and I watched the irritation curdle across his handsome face. His hand drifted up to tug at his collar, that soft rich-boy tic he'd never trained out of, the one that surfaced whenever a room slipped a fraction beyond his grip. "Clara," he said, "now you're going to make me chase you? Playing hard to get in front of the whole Family?"

I couldn't stop the smirk that pulled at my mouth. "With a Falcone? If I won't have you, who's left in this city stupid enough to?"

He leaned in close, near enough that I caught the expensive rot of his cologne, his voice dripping with a sarcasm honed since we were children. "Let's not rewrite history, tesoro. You've been telling every capo's daughter from the Marina to the bay that you'd be mine since we were kids. This whole territory already thinks you belong to me."

Then he dropped his voice lower still, meant only for me, a whisper laid down like a knife on velvet. "I'll let the engagement stand. I can give you a wedding grand enough to make the saints weep, a feast the whole Family will kneel at. But the marriage license, the name signed into the book, that's for the one I actually mean to marry."

I froze. The clink of ice in someone's glass sounded impossibly loud, a small cold chime in a room that had turned to leather and shadow around me. Because in the life before this one, at this precise hour, in this precise room, Salvatore had bowed his head to his Family's arrangement and we had signed the papers. He had gone through with it. The union had been sealed in ink and blood, and it had ruined me.

Could it be that he'd been reborn too?

The thought had barely surfaced when my cousin arrived. Adriana slipped through the doorway with the timing of something rehearsed, and the moment her eyes found me standing at Salvatore's side, her face crumpled on cue. Tears welled and spilled, catching the low light like something staged for an audience that was, in fact, watching every move.

"Clara. Salvatore." Her voice broke on each word, deliberate as dropped pearls. "I heard the two of you are to be married soon. I didn't bring a gift. Forgive me. I only wish you both every happiness under heaven." Her hand fluttered to her dress and smoothed a crease that wasn't there, that half-second of composure cracking beneath the surface of the performance.

Before she could finish the line, she turned and fled, sobbing, the sound trailing behind her out of the room and down the corridor toward the estate's dark stairwell.

"Look what you've done," Salvatore muttered at me, low and vicious, his glare cutting across the space between us like a straight razor. Then he was gone after her without another word, chair scraping marble, leaving me standing alone in the center of all those watching eyes.

When the two of them returned, their fingers were laced together, knotted tight and shameless. Adriana's lips were swollen and flushed dark, and there, plain on the pale skin of Salvatore's throat, sat the fresh red bruise of a mouth.

The whole room was watching. Made men and their wives, the elders in the shadows, all of them waiting, holding their breath to see what the Ricci daughter would do with an insult laid this bare on neutral ground.

In the life I'd already burned through once, if I'd caught another woman pressing this close to Salvatore, I would have made a scene loud enough to shake the chandeliers, clawing and screaming so every soul present would remember that he was mine.