Chapter 3 - The Terms She Chose
He put the call on speaker.
“Cousin.” Luca’s voice was the same as always — warm, slightly sardonic, the voice of a man who had always been welcome everywhere. “I heard about the ambush. Thank God you’re both all right.”
“Yes,” Cristian said. “Where are you?”
“Still at the estate. There’s been chaos here since the news came in. Where are you? Do you need—”
“We’re safe,” Cristian said. “Stay where you are. I’ll call you when I know more.”
He ended the call. His jaw was tight.
“If he gave them the route,” I said, “he’ll know we’re gone by now. He’ll know the safe house was used.”
“Yes.”
“Does he know this location?”
Cristian was already on the phone, speaking rapid Sicilian to someone who responded in kind. He hung up and looked at me.
“This property is registered under a name Luca doesn’t have access to. But we have maybe twelve hours before he can find it another way.”
“Then we need to move, or we need to move faster than he does.”
Cristian studied me.
“You’re very calm,” he said.
“I’m terrified. Those are different things.” I looked at his collar. “Is that your blood?”
“Graze. Enzo was worse.”
I crossed to the kitchen and found a first aid kit under the sink — it was that kind of house, I was beginning to understand, a house prepared for various contingencies. I brought it back and he watched me open it without comment.
“Sit down,” I said.
He sat. I pulled back his collar and assessed the damage — a cut along the top of the shoulder, already clotting, not serious but ugly. I worked in silence for a moment.
“What you said,” Cristian said, as I cleaned the wound. “Earlier. That what I did might be worse than a transaction.”
“It might be.”
“I know.” He didn’t flinch from the antiseptic. “I handled it badly. I wanted something and I found a way to take it and I told myself the outcome would make the method irrelevant. That if we were good together, if I could make you—” He stopped. “I thought if you had everything you needed, it would be enough.”
“You arranged the marriage. But you didn’t arrange me.” I pressed the gauze into place. “You didn’t consider that I might want to be asked. That I might have said yes.”
He turned to look at me. “Would you have?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t met you.” I secured the tape. “But I would have had the chance to decide. That’s what you took.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“What do you want from me now?” he asked. Not defensive. Genuine.
I thought about that. About what I had wanted when I was in Rome, arguing with my professor about load-bearing walls. About what I had wanted when my father had sat me down and laid out a transaction I couldn’t refuse. About what I had wanted in the corridor outside the library, pressing my back against the marble and making myself small.
“Honesty,” I said. “Complete. No managing what I’m allowed to know.”
“Done.”
“A voice in anything that affects us both. I’m not decorative and I’m not a token, and I won’t be managed like one.”
“Done.”
“And I want to work. My architecture practice. I won’t give that up.”
“I never expected you to.” Something that might have been a smile moved briefly across his face. “I arranged the marriage partly because I needed someone in the city. You could work from here more easily than from Rome.”
I looked at him. “That’s an extremely thin justification.”
“It’s a supporting justification. The primary one was that I wanted you here.”
“The primary one should have been asking me.”
“Yes.” Simple. No argument. “It should have been.”
The honesty of it was more disarming than any eloquence would have been. I had expected a man who operated in this world to defend his methods, to find ways to reframe the argument. Instead he just kept agreeing with me, which suggested he had already known and chosen to do it anyway, and was now prepared to sit with that.
Which was worse and better at the same time.
“Luca,” I said, returning to the immediate. “What are you going to do?”
“Find out what happened and why. If it’s what you think, then I handle it.”
“What does handling it mean?”
He met my eyes. “In this world, it usually means something irreversible.”
“Are you asking me to weigh in on that?”
“No.” A pause. “Unless you want to.”
May you like
“I want to know what happens. Not to approve it or refuse it. Just to know.” I looked at my hands. “I grew up in this world too, Cristian. I know what it runs on. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”
He nodded slowly.
