Chapter 4

Elena POV

The dress fit like it had been made for someone braver than me. Ivory, not white… my choice, a small rebellion against the idea that this was any kind of real beginning with white ranunculus woven through my hair exactly as I'd told him, exactly as my mother used to grow them. My aunt Carmela found me in the mirror before the ceremony, dabbing at her eyes.

"You look like your mother," she said. "God rest her, she'd be so proud." Then, quieter, crossing herself: "They say his first wife died strangely."

My stomach dropped. "Strange how?"

"Just gossip, cara. Don't listen to me. Today isn't for that."

She left before I could press her, and I carried the thought with me the entire walk down the aisle, past every head turning to look at me, until only Dante's gaze mattered.

"You look," he said quietly, when I reached him, "like a woman I have no business wanting to keep."

"Careful," I whispered back. "You promised me a contract, not compliments."

"I promised you protection. I never promised silence about the truth."

When he kissed me… which was required, expected, the whole church watching, it wasn't the careful thing I'd braced for. His hand came up to my jaw, and his mouth against mine was slow and certain and far too skilled for a man who claimed he intended to keep his distance. I felt it everywhere, my hand finding the lapel of his jacket and gripping it like I needed something to hold onto.

"That," he murmured, "was not part of the contract."

"No," I agreed, breathless. "It wasn't."

We didn't speak of it through the reception, through the toasts, through Marcus Calloway's oily congratulations delivered with a smile that didn't reach his eyes but I felt Dante's hand at the small of my back all evening, warm through the ivory silk, and every time our eyes met across some conversation neither of us was fully present for, I felt the same pull from the church doorway I'd been telling myself for weeks was nothing.

It wasn't nothing. The car ride to his estate passed in charged silence, his hand resting on the seat between us, close enough to mine that I could feel its warmth without either of us closing the last few inches.

"Elena. Whatever you're afraid of asking me… ask it."

I thought of Carmela's words. "How did your wife die?"

His jaw tightened, just barely, the only sign I'd hit something real. "An aneurysm which happened suddenly. The doctors said there was nothing anyone could have done."

"Do you believe that?"

"I did, for five years." He turned to look at me fully. "Why do you ask?"

"Gossip," I said, wishing I'd never brought it up at all. "I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize for asking questions in this family, Elena. It's usually the ones who stop asking who end up dead." He took my hand, his thumb tracing slow, absent circles against my knuckles.

"You're a Moretti now. That means something different than it meant an hour ago. I'll explain all of it. Not tonight."

"What happens tonight?"

"Tonight, I show you to your room, and I say goodnight, and I go to mine, exactly as I promised your father I would." His gaze dropped to my mouth, his voice roughening.

"And then I lie awake for several hours, wanting something I have no right to want."

"Maybe," I whispered, before I could think better of it, "I didn't only marry you for protection."

The car pulled through the gates before he could answer, and Dante's hand went still around mine, searching my face like he was trying to decide whether I meant it.

He didn't come to my room that night. Two weeks passed in careful, charged silence, both of us circling something neither of us would name… until the morning the first bullet hit the car.

I didn't understand at first. Just noise, impossible noise, glass exploding inward, my driver Tomas shouting something I couldn't process, my bodyguard Marco's hand shoving my head into the footwell hard enough to bruise.

"Get down!" Marco was shouting. "Stay down, Mrs. Moretti, stay down…"

"What's happening…"

"Ambush! Tomas, go left, GO…"

Another impact, closer, the car lurching sideways. I understood, in some distant part of my mind, that we were being shot at, that this was exactly what my father had feared and exactly what Dante had promised his name would prevent.

The car spun. I felt it leave the road, felt the sickening weightless drop before it hit something hard enough to slam my skull against the door frame, white light bursting behind my eyes. Everything went slow and strange, sound coming through underwater, Marco's face above mine saying words I couldn't assemble into meaning.

I remember the gunfire continuing after we'd stopped moving. I remember Marco's body over mine, absorbing at least one shot meant for me, his weight suddenly heavier, wrong.

And then, cutting through the underwater roar of it, I remember his voice, fainter now, further away, the last thing I understood before the darkness took the rest.

"Mrs. Moretti…Elena, stay with me…"