Semua Bab The Vitale Bride: Bab 1 - Bab 10

The dinner table had always been my father's battlefield.Every conversation, every silence, every clink of a crystal glass — it was all calculated. Measured. My father, Richard Sinclair, did nothing without purpose. I had learned that lesson young, back when I was seven years old and watched him smile at a man across this very table, only to have that same man disappear three days later.I never asked what happened to him.Some questions, in this house, were better left unasked.Tonight felt different though. The air was thicker somehow, pressing against my skin like a warning I couldn't quite read. The candles flickered even though the windows were shut. Maria, our housekeeper of fifteen years, had served the soup without meeting my eyes. Even the house itself seemed to be holding its breath.I stabbed at my food, pretending I hadn't noticed any of it."You look tense," my father said from the head of the table, his voice smooth as polished marble."I'm fine." I kept my eyes on my p

I didn't sleep.Not properly. I drifted in and out of something thin and restless, the kind of half sleep that leaves you more exhausted than when you closed your eyes. Every time I surfaced, the truth was waiting for me, sitting heavy on my chest like something solid.Dante Vitale.Six weeks.By the time pale grey light crept through the curtains I had given up entirely. I sat up, pushed my hair back from my face, and stared at the wall of my bedroom the way I had stared at it as a child when the world felt too large and too cruel to make sense of.It still didn't make sense.I showered and dressed mechanically, pulling on dark trousers and a cream blouse, going through the motions of a normal morning because I didn't know what else to do with my hands. The face that looked back at me in the bathroom mirror was composed. Pale, but composed. Good. I needed composed. I needed every wall I had ever built standing tall and solid today.Downstairs, the house was quiet in the way it always

I wore the ring.Not because he told me to. I needed to be very clear with myself about that. I wore it because I was walking into a restaurant to meet the mother of the most dangerous man in the city and the last thing I needed was to hand either of them an easy ammunition. Appearances, his note had said. Fine. I could do appearances.I told myself that three times in the mirror before I left the house.The restaurant on Mercer Street was the kind of place that didn't have a sign outside. No menu in the window. No reservation system you could access online. The kind of establishment that existed entirely on the basis of who you knew and what your last name meant. A man in a dark suit opened the door before I reached it, which meant I had been watched from the street again, which meant I arrived already irritated.Good. Irritated was useful. Irritated kept the nerves at bay.Inside, the restaurant was all dark wood and low light and the particular hushed quality of expensive spaces th

I had faced difficult rooms before.Board meetings where men twice my age had looked at me like I was decorative. Charity galas where the knives were verbal and the smiles never reached anyone's eyes. My father's world had given me plenty of practice at walking into spaces that didn't want me there and standing in them anyway.But nothing had quite prepared me for the Vitale estate on a Friday evening.The house itself was extraordinary. Set back from the road behind iron gates and old trees, it was the kind of property that didn't announce itself — it simply existed, with the settled authority of something that had been there long enough to stop needing to prove it. Stone facade. High windows lit from within. The kind of place that had history soaked into its walls, not all of it clean.Dante's driver had collected me at seven. My father had offered to accompany me and I had declined, because walking into that house on my own was the only form of control I had left and I intended to

Two and a half weeks before the wedding someone knocked on my bedroom door at nine in the morning and told me a team had arrived downstairs. I had not been consulted about this. I stood in the hallway for a moment in my pajamas, coffee in hand, and processed that sentence with the particular patience I had been quietly developing since this entire situation began. The patience of a woman who had learned, slowly and through gritted teeth, that Dante Vitale operated with the comprehensive efficiency of someone who had spent his entire life making decisions and having them executed and had only recently begun to understand that some situations required him to ask first. Only recently. And still imperfectly. I went downstairs anyway. The sitting room had been transformed. Three people moved through it with coordinated professional energy, surrounded by fabric samples in every shade of ivory and white, thick binders filled with photographs, a rolling rack of dresses in protective