Chapter 2

Elena POV

I didn't cry at my father's funeral because I'd already done my crying, three weeks earlier, at his bedside, when he told me who he'd chosen to keep me safe. I knew something like that was coming and when the words were finally out, bare for me to see, I took it in good faith because really, there was nothing else for me to do than to accept this as my new reality.

"Dante Moretti," I said, in the flat voice I used when I needed my father to know I thought he'd lost his mind. "You're giving me to Dante Moretti."

"I'm not giving you anywhere. I'm asking him to protect you."

"By marrying me."

"There's no one else I trust with this, Elena. No one else has the power to make it stick."

I'd wanted to argue. I'd wanted to tell him I could protect myself, that I didn't need a legend twice my age standing between me and the world like some black-suited wall but my father was dying, and there is a particular cruelty in arguing with a dying man about the terms of his last wish, so instead I held his hand and said nothing, and let the decision get made without me.

Now I stood at the front of a church full of people who called themselves family and meant something closer to the audience, and I watched Dante Moretti stand at the back like he was casing the exits instead of mourning a friend.

He probably was, I'd met him twice before this. Once as a child at my mother's funeral, when he'd been a shadow near my father's shoulder that I was too young to understand the weight of. Once at a wedding three years ago, when I'd caught him watching me across a room and felt something low in my stomach I'd dismissed, at the time, as too much champagne.

It hadn't been the champagne. I understood that now, feeling that same pull even through the grief.

He came to me after, when the crowd had thinned to the people with nowhere better to be.

"Miss Ricci." His voice was low, meant for me alone. Up close he was worse…taller than I remembered, a scar through one eyebrow I didn't remember either, thin and pale, somehow making the rest of his face more dangerous instead of less.

"I'm sorry for your loss."

"Are you?" I hadn't meant to say it like that, sharp, but grief had burned off my patience for polite lies. "You're here to collect on a promise, Mr. Moretti. Let's not pretend it's condolences.”

Something moved behind his eyes… not anger but something closer to respect like everything that had happened to me, leading up to this very moment was something he thought I would never be able to go through no matter how much you thought about it.

"Both things can be true," he said. "I am sorry. Your father was the closest thing to a brother I had and yes, I made him a promise, and I intend to keep it."

"By marrying me."

"By marrying you." He said it like it was simply a fact of the world now, weather already arrived. "I understand if you have questions."

"I have several." I stepped closer, close enough to see the dark, unsettled brown of his eyes, close enough to catch some scent on him… cedar, and beneath it something warmer, skin, that I had absolutely no business noticing at my father's funeral.

"Starting with why you think I need a husband instead of a bodyguard."

"Because a bodyguard can be paid off, threatened, or killed. A husband from a family like mine cannot be undone by anyone with sense." His gaze didn't waver. "No one touches what's mine, Miss Ricci…not without answering to me first."

Mine. The word landed somewhere it had no right to, low and warm, and I hated how much I felt it.

"I'm not a possession," I said. "Whatever paperwork we sign, you don't get to call me yours."

"No," he agreed, something almost like amusement at the corner of his mouth, gone as fast as it came. "I don't imagine I will, for a long while yet."

"There won't be a while, Mr. Moretti. This is protection. A contract. My father's dying wish, not a… "I stopped myself before the word marriage could mean more than paper. "Not a courtship."

"Agreed. Separate rooms with separate lives, as much as your safety allows. I have no interest in pretending at something neither of us wants."

I wondered, looking at the careful distance in every line of his body even as he stood close enough that I could feel the heat of him, whether that was entirely true. I wondered if he wondered the same about me.

"Fine," I said. "When?"

"Two weeks. There are families already circling, Miss Ricci. I'd rather not give them the time to circle closer."

"Two weeks to marry a man I've spoken to twice in my life."

"Three times," Dante said quietly. "You're forgetting your mother's funeral."

"I was twelve."

"I remember anyway."

I turned before he could see whatever was happening on my face. I made it almost to the doors before his voice reached me one last time, low enough that only I could hear it.

"Elena." My name in his mouth landed somewhere it had no business landing, and I stopped walking before I decided to.

"When I marry you, I intend to keep every promise I make. Including the ones you haven't asked for yet."

I walked out into the daylight alone, and told myself the unsteadiness in my legs was grief.

It wasn't grief, not entirely and some small, furious part of me already knew that two weeks from now, standing in front of a priest with Dante Moretti's ring on my hand, I was going to have to f

ind a much better lie than that one.