Chapter 3

“Bad choice at nineteen.” I put my phone away. “Better to fix it than spend the rest of my life looking at it.” He reached to stop me, but I stepped around him.

Upstairs, I changed into a charcoal suit and put on the metal earrings he’d once called too flashy. I wasn’t used to seeing myself like this. I liked it anyway.

Bianca leaned against the guest-wing doorway as I came back down. “Off to meet the man your mother picked?” I nodded, fastening my cuff. “You don’t have to settle for just anyone to prove a point.”

“Keep that advice. You might need it.” Downstairs, Marco set his glass down hard. I didn’t look back.

Mom had arranged lunch at an Italian restaurant. The host confirmed I was Miss Moretti and led me to a window table. The man waiting there looked up, surprise flickering in his dark eyes. He was younger than I’d expected, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, a pale knife scar along one wrist. There was no entourage hovering over his chair. I relaxed a little.

“Elena.” I sat opposite him. “My mother should’ve mentioned I’m not interested in a marriage that comes bundled with a business deal.”

He paused, then closed the file in front of him. “We can still have a decent lunch. I’m Matteo.”

He didn’t ask why I wasn’t marrying Marco or offer sympathy I hadn’t requested. When I mentioned Dad’s new warehouse operation, he wanted to know what I thought of it. I admitted I’d never sat through an actual negotiation. He turned over a menu and asked me to sketch the dock connections. When I hesitated over part of the route, he asked a question instead of finishing the answer for me. I forgot to wonder whether I was boring him. I just kept talking.

We’d been talking for almost two hours before I noticed the time. On the drive home, I kept thinking about something he’d said. [You know what your family brings to the table. Why keep asking somebody else for permission to use it?]

I found Marco in the darkened sitting room, one hand pressed to his temple. He’d suffered severe migraines since an ambush left him with a head injury. During our marriage, I’d spent whole nights beside him, keeping the lights low and the house quiet. This time, I stayed in the doorway. “The doctor’s in the east wing. Call the house line.”

He looked up with the beginning of a smirk. “There you are. I wondered how long you’d keep this up.”

I went upstairs. After a pause, I heard him call the doctor himself.

Over the following days, I studied contracts with Dad’s accountant and saw Matteo whenever I could. He worked in risk management for a family business in New York and came to Chicago regularly. On our second date, he gave me his full name: Matteo De Luca. It was a common enough surname. I didn’t connect him to the young boss who’d taken control of the New York family a few years earlier.

What mattered was that he listened. When he learned I liked driving, he made time on the weekend for a stretch of road along the lake. I started looking forward to leaving the house. Marco seemed to take my growing absence personally.

Late one evening, I came through the front door and a hotel key card landed at my feet. The sleeve carried Marco’s room number and a suggestive note. He stood in the sitting room, staring at me. “This your latest trick? Have someone leave that in my room and hope I’ll sneak out to fuck you?”

I bent to look. My signature was there, cut from a delivery receipt I’d signed the day before and pasted onto the note. I put the sleeve on a table. “Find whoever delivered it. Or find the rest of that receipt and see where my signature came from.”

Bianca slipped her arm through his. “Leave it, Marco. She hasn’t moved on yet. I don’t want to put my uncle in an awkward position when he gets back.”

Marco threw the sleeve into the fireplace. The paper curled before I could retrieve the signature. “If you insist on humiliating yourself, don’t expect any favors from me. After the wedding, stay the hell away from us.”

I watched the evidence burn and felt an unexpected rush of relief. [Thank God I haven’t married him this time.]

The wedding was set for a month later, at a private estate. I attended as family; Mom ordered my dress ahead of time. When my parents arrived that day, they found me in the entrance hall, turning my car keys over in my hand. A new leather loop hung from them, stamped with a silver M. Matteo had a matching one, stamped with an E.

He’d given it to me and asked, “Think you could save a few weekends for your boyfriend?” I’d said yes on the spot.

Mom caught me smiling. “What’s that about?”

“I’m seeing someone.”

“Who?” Her voice dropped. “The lawyer I set you up with said you never came to the restaurant.”

My fingers stopped moving. Marco happened to pass at that moment and gave a short laugh. “You don’t have to invent a boyfriend to save face.”

I ignored him and took out my phone to ask Matteo what had happened at that lunch. Before I could type, Marco cornered me in the corridor leading to the terrace. He glanced at my keys and caught the leather loop. “M? Who exactly are you dating while you’re carrying my initial around?”

I pulled them free. “Not every M in the world stands for you.”

Bianca watched us from farther down the corridor, then disappeared into the room where the wedding contract was on display. Ten minutes later, she screamed.

The Vitales’ black onyx seal, which they used to stamp marriage agreements, lay smashed beside the guest book. Someone had scrawled across the page: [Get that fake bride out of here.]

Bianca was already crying. “How could you, Elena?” She pointed to an earring beside the broken seal. “That’s yours. You said you wouldn’t let me marry him.” I touched my right earlobe. It was bare.

Marco hurried in. Bianca flung herself at him, sobbing that she would call off the wedding if that was what it took. I opened my mouth, and he backhanded me before I could speak.

My ears rang. I hit the edge of a cabinet as he loomed over me. “You sabotage our alliance in front of both families? Do you understand what you’ve done?”

I tasted blood and steadied myself against the wood. “I didn’t break it. You had no right to hit me.”

He ordered security to hold me and dropped an unsigned confession on the floor. “Get on your knees. Sign it, then apologize to Bianca.”

“No. I’m not signing a lie.”

A guard drove his leg into the backs of my knees. When I fell, my palm landed on broken onyx. Pain darkened my vision, but I shoved the paper away.

“Get your hands off me.”

Another hand reached for my shoulder.

“Get your hands off her.” Matteo came through the doorway and dropped to one knee. He caught the guard’s wrist, forced him to release me, then carefully eased open my clenched fingers. The moment I saw his face, I couldn’t hold back my tears.

Marco stared at him. “This is Vitale business. Who the hell are you?”