Chapter 3

Salvatore stepped forward, angling Adriana behind him the way a man puts a table between himself and a gun, his face arranged into that peculiar, expectant expression. He was waiting for me to shatter. The whole room, thick with the scent of cigar smoke and spilled Barolo, seemed to lean in with him, the low murmur of the feast dropping half a register while the made men pretended not to watch the boss's boy work his cruelty. But I didn't give him the reaction he was so plainly starving for.

Minutes crawled past, each one measured out by the soft clink of ice in someone's glass across the room. His smug little face began to falter. The certainty leaked out of him by degrees, and to cover it he sneered, "Well, look at that. At least you've grown up a little. No screaming, no throwing a fit like you used to."

I didn't even dignify his jab with a response. In another life those words would have gutted me. Now they landed on nothing, like knuckles against stone.

As the celebration under the saints wound down and the guests began drifting toward the doors, past the soldiers standing silent along the walls, Salvatore stopped me in my tracks with a hand that didn't quite dare to touch.

"It's late, and the streets aren't safe. Not for a Ricci walking alone." He let the family name hang there, a reminder of whose protection I supposedly lived under. "I'll give you a ride."

The ride was free and I had no intention of walking through territory that belonged to men who owed my father nothing, so I didn't argue. I moved toward the car and reached for the front, but Salvatore was faster. He slid between me and the passenger door, blocking it with his body.

"You're sitting in the back," he said.

Then, with a tenderness that was meant for me to see, he helped Adriana into the front seat, easing her down like she was something precious and breakable, something worth guarding. Adriana turned her head, and her smile arrived a half-second too fast.

"I'm so sorry, Clara," she said, her concern polished to a false shine. "Salvatore's just being protective. He worries I'll get car sick if I ride in the back."

I said nothing. I simply slid into the backseat, exactly where I'd meant to sit from the first. Under the folds of my dress my thumb found the base of my ring finger and pressed there, steadying myself against a marriage that had already ruined me once. Let them have their little performance. I had watched this whole play before, from a worse seat, for ten wasted years.

The entire drive was Salvatore and Adriana talking and laughing as though the car held no one else, as though the world had been emptied of every soul but them. The engine hummed beneath us. At a red light, the city's dirty gold spilling across the windshield, Adriana leaned toward him and teased him into helping her with her lip balm, tilting her chin up, making a small, deliberate ceremony of it.

They exchanged a look. I swear the air in that car went thick, the way it does in a room right before someone reaches inside his jacket.

Then, all at once, Salvatore's head snapped toward the rearview mirror, as if he had only just remembered I was breathing behind him. His eyes found mine in the glass. I let them, then turned pointedly to the window, to the passing storefronts and the wet black street, and I gave him nothing at all. His expression faltered. Whatever hunger he'd carried into that mirror met only my profile and my indifference, and it curdled.

For one raw instant I saw the anger break across his face, that old boyish fury he'd never learned to bury. His fingers went to his collar and tugged, and his shoulders rolled once beneath his jacket, the tic of a man who has just felt a room slip out of his grip. Then, before I could even finish the thought, he slammed his foot down on the gas, and the car lunged forward into the dark.

When we pulled up to my father's house, the wrought-iron gate and the shape of a soldier waiting in the shadow of the portico, Salvatore did something I truly hadn't expected. He caught my arm again, harder this time, before I could reach the door.

"Alright. Enough with the act," he said, and the dismissiveness in his voice was meant to cut. "Don't pretend like you don't care. It's beneath you." With that he pressed something cold into my palm, forcing my fingers around it. A bracelet, the metal expensive and heavy and utterly without meaning. "This is your engagement gift from me," he added, each word dripping condescension, sure of every inch of the ground he thought he owned. "As long as you stay in line, I'll give you a wedding. At least on paper, everyone in the Family will think you're my wife."

I looked up and let my eyes lock onto his, unhurried, and the last of the fear left my hands so that my thumb finally lifted from my ring finger.

"And who exactly," I said, "are you planning to marry? Adriana?"