Chapter 3: Arranged Marriage  

Felix POV: 

"Hello."

"Felix." His voice was clipped, the way it always was when he wanted something and expected no argument.

 "Dinner. Tonight. Six o'clock."

"I just got—"

"Six.Don't make me ask twice."

And that was the last thing he said before the line went dead.

I stood there, phone still pressed to my ear, listening to nothing. My hand tightened around it without me telling it to, with my knuckles going pale, until I finally lowered it. I just stared at the blank screen like it owed me an explanation.

Six o'clock. And when my father said six, he meant six. Not 6:05. Not "on my way." Six, or the silence at that table would be its own kind of punishment.

I glanced at the time.

4:12pm

Barely enough time to shower off Renato's cologne and throw on something that didn't scream ‘’I just crawled out of my neighbor's bed” and made the drive.

 Forty minutes if traffic behaved. I didn't have room to be late and I definitely didn't have room to think too hard about anything that had happened in the last twelve hours.

I showered fast, scrubbed harder than necessary at marks that weren't going anywhere no matter how hard I tried, and pulled on a black button down with the collar high enough to hide most of the damage. Slacks. I grabbed my keys off the counter, phone, wallet, and stood in my own doorway for one long second, some old, tired part of me already exhausted by a conversation that hadn't even started yet.

Then I left.

The drive took forty minutes, luckily there was no traffic.

I kept the windows cracked even though the air was cool.

Every time I shifted in the seat the deep ache reminded me exactly where Renato had been. His scent clung to my skin no matter how hard I'd scrubbed in my own shower. I didn't turn the radio on. I didn't trust myself to sing along to something stupid and mean it.

The gates slowly opened, and the road curved past my mother's garden the way it always did, no matter which way I came in.

The garden had a way of doing that. Reopening things I thought I'd closed for good. Her smile. Her laugh. The way she used to kneel in the dirt with her sleeves rolled up, completely unbothered by how much money surrounded her, like none of it mattered as long as her roses were doing well.

I slowed without meaning to, the way I always did passing this stretch of road, then made myself keep driving before the ache could catch up with me.

The house rose at the end of the drive, and it was beautiful, in such a way that it will slowly hurt you. 

Old stone, old bones, the kind of architecture that had outlived three generations and would probably outlive the rest of us too. But stitched through it, unmistakably, was her hand. The high arched windows she'd fought my father over. The way the ivy was allowed to climb wild in some places and nowhere else, because she'd said a house should breathe, not just perform. Sharp modern lines cut through the old stone here and there, glass replacing what used to be brick, and even those bore her signature.

After all, she designed this house before I was even born. Poured years into it, argued for every window, every curve, every place where light was allowed to fall. My father had wanted a monument. She'd built a home instead, and somehow gotten both.

It didn't look like that anymore. Not really. But standing there, staring up at it, I could still see her in the structure of it in the parts nobody had managed to erase yet, no matter how hard they'd tried.

I didn't take the main drive. I turned instead toward the inner portico, the one reserved for direct family, the one none of the staff's cars or guests' cars were ever allowed near. 

I could already see my siblings' cars. I slowly parked my black sports car in my usual spot and sat for three full seconds with my hands on the wheel before I got out.

Three seconds to remember how to be Felix Luciano instead of whoever I'd been last night.

The front door opened before I reached it.

"Felix!"

Sofia hit me at full speed, arms locking around my neck hard enough to rock me back a step. She smelled like the same expensive perfume she'd worn since she was sixteen, something floral and a little too grown up for her, like she'd been trying on adulthood before it fit. 

"You never call. You never visit. I had to hear from Gabriel, to know that you were even in the country."

"I've been busy."

"You're always busy." She pulled back, studying my face with the particular scrutiny only a sister could get away with. "You look tired."

"Thanks."

"I mean it in a caring way."

Gabriel followed at a more restrained pace, grinning, and pulled me into a one-armed hug that still managed to be fierce, knuckles rapping once against my shoulder blade like we were still kids settling an argument with our fists instead of words. 

"You look like shit."

"Missed you too." I glanced past him, scanning the foyer. "Where's Adam?"

"Still upstairs, probably ignoring all of us." Gabriel rolled his eyes. "He'll wander down when he smells food."

"No, I'm serious, what happened to your neck—"

"Nothing." I turned my collar up without thinking, and Gabriel's grin only widened, delighted, already filing it away for later teasing. I let him have it. Better that than the truth.

Andrew hung back a little, hands in his pockets, watching. His smile was the same as always, the smile he'd worn since we were children sharing a room, since he was the one person who used to know exactly what I was thinking before I said it. But his eyes stayed on my face a beat longer than necessary, something unreadable moving behind them before he smoothed it over. 

"Good to see you, Felix."

"You too."

I meant it. I always meant it with Andrew, even when something about the way he looked at me lately made the back of my neck prickle for reasons I couldn't name. I filed it away without examining it, the way I filed away most things about this house.

We stayed in the foyer longer than the staff probably liked. Gabriel ruffled my hair like we were still kids sneaking down for breakfast before Father woke. For a few minutes the house felt almost warm, almost like the version of this family that existed only in the years before everything went wrong.

"Stay after," I said to Sofia, quiet and meant only for her. "Just for a bit. I need — "

I didn't finish it. I didn't know how to finish it.

She squeezed my arm once, understanding something I hadn't managed to say. "Always."

Then the butler cleared his throat, apologetic and unmovable in the way only butlers in houses like this ever were.

"Dinner is served."

The temperature dropped the moment we stepped into the dining room. Assigned seats, the same ones we'd held since childhood, as if rearranging them might rearrange something more dangerous. White tablecloth was so starched it looked like it could cut skin. Father entered last, as always, and the conversation that had been easy in the foyer folded itself into careful, polite fragments, the weather, a merger Gabriel was overseeing, a gallery opening Sofia had attended. Nothing that mattered. Nothing that touched the surface of anything real.

I took my place and kept my eyes on the plate.

We made it through the first course.

Father set his glass down with a soft, deliberate click, the kind of sound that had silenced rooms my entire life.

"I've spoken with the Ryu family," he said, not looking up from his plate, like this was simply another line item in an agenda. "The alliance is finalized. You'll marry Hayato's chosen heir in three months."

The words landed exactly the way the phone call had  flat, final, already deciding,  as if my answer had never been a variable in the equation to begin with.

Every fork at the table went still.

I looked up. "We had an agreement."

"Circumstances change."

"You told me if I stayed out of the public eye and kept the company clean, I could live my life." My voice stayed even, but only because I was holding it there by force. "That was the deal. You wrote it. I signed it. You made me sign it."

Father's expression didn't shift. It never did. That was the worst part, he could dismantle a life across the table and his face would stay as composed as it was for a business call. "You're still my heir whether you like it or not. The family needs this. You'll do your duty."

Something cold and old opened under my ribs, a door that never fully closed no matter how many years I spent trying to seal it shut.

"No."

"Felix." Sofia's voice came from my left, soft, careful, her hand finding my forearm under the table.Just...hear him out, maybe there's—"

"Don't." I didn't look at her, even though I felt the small flinch of her pulling her hand back, even though some part of me hated putting that same flatness in my voice that Father used on all of us. I kept my eyes on him. "You don't get to break your word and call it duty. You don't get to decide the rules only apply when they're convenient for you."

"Watch your tone."

"Or what?" The words came out clipped, sharp, already finished, years of swallowed arguments finally finding a door out. "You'll cut me off? Do it. I'm done negotiating with a man who only keeps promises when they benefit him."

I stood. The chair scraped loud enough that even the silence after it felt deliberate.

Gabriel started to rise, hands raised like he could physically hold the room together. "Come on, don't do this, let's just—"

"I said don't." I looked at him just long enough to see the worry there, real and unguarded, and it almost made me sit back down.

But I did not "This isn't about you."

Andrew hadn't moved. 

I left the room before anyone else could speak. The hallway felt too long, the portraits of ancestors I'd never met watching me go the way they always did, as if even the dead had opinions about what a Luciano heir owed the family. My footsteps stayed even. Controlled. I didn't slam the front door. I didn't look back, even though some part of me wanted to see if Sofia had followed. She didn't. Or if she did, I was already too far gone to hear it.

I quickly found my way to my car. 

I sat with both hands on the wheel for a moment longer than necessary. They weren't quite steady. The anger was clean and useful, easy to hold onto, easy to justify. 

Three months. A stranger's face I hadn't even seen yet. A life already decided before I'd been asked a single real question about what I wanted from it.

I put the car in gear and drove, and didn't let myself think about how, twelve hours ago, someone had asked my name like it actually mattered, and I'd almost forgotten what that felt like.