“I still can’t believe you didn’t give me a heads-up,” I murmur to Grey, wearing a sundress and a floppy hat that I hate. I don’t feel like myself, more like a piece of clay that Giulia’s been sculpting with her long witch-like fingers. She controls everything that I do, drags me around like a pet. She even keeps a diamond encrusted leash that she attaches to my wrist when she takes me around the compound.
It’s humiliating.
“I didn’t have many good options, Gidge,” Grey tells me, sipping an iced coffee, his new wristwatch gleaming in the sunlight. He looks every bit the mafia brat now. Looking at him the way he is, it’s hard for me to imagine that I actually felt sorry for him once upon a time. He fits in here in a way that’s disturbing. His gray eyes glance my way, and he smiles. It comes across as genuine. And his behavior and personality in private haven’t changed, even if his looks and public persona have. He sets the coffee down and turns to look at me, waving his hand to dismiss the guards waiting at the edges of the veranda.
They disappear inside the stone walls of the church, but they don’t go far. It’s a pretense, their pretending to listen to Grey. It’s all bullshit.
“This doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” he tells me, and I cock a brow. “What? It doesn’t.” His smile gets a little bigger and he reaches out to take my hand. I let him, because we are playing a chess game after all. We can’t very well be engaged and not show any sort of affection toward one another. “This is a chance to start over.”
I stare at him.
“Start over?” I query, lifting a brow and withdrawing my hand from his, like we’re having a lover’s quarrel or something. I down my mimosa and pour myself another before one of the servants runs up and starts doing it for me. I hate that. It just isn’t in my blood. I can take care of myself. “Explain, please.”
Grey has a habit of stating something like it’s fact, and then getting tangled up in whimsy. He stares up at the clouds a lot, lost in thought. Sometimes, when the light hits him just right, and I glance his way, I can see an internal struggle playing about on his features, like he’s at war inside his own brain, his own heart.
I snatch a macaron and stick it in my mouth whole, even as Grey cringes slightly. He’s urbane and polished, and I’m craggy and wild. We’re basically exact opposites in our mannerisms. On the inside, we’re the same person, just two birds trapped in a cage. I take another cookie and lean back in my seat. During that first dinner, I sampled everything carefully, prepared for poison. But then it occurred to me that the mafia could just put a goddamn bullet in my brain at any moment, so why bother?
Then again, they do enjoy a good performance.
“We’ll get married,” Grey says, like it’s a fact. Because, in spite of my own feelings, I know that it is. There is no getting out of this. If I don’t marry Grey, I’m signing my own death warrant. “And eventually, they’ll learn to trust us. Eventually, Gidge, this can all be ours.” He gestures with a hand in the direction of the rolling hills and the pine trees that trail down toward the ocean.
He doesn’t just mean this church-house-whatever-it-is, or the land surrounding it, or even the jewelry and the money and the clothes and the servants. He means the Grey Wolfe Mafia empire. Their crime rings, their drug and human trafficking, their weapons smuggling, their political machinations.
“Your family ordered my pregnant sister killed—even when they knew she was carrying their own flesh and blood.” I just stare at Grey because I can’t quite believe what I’m hearing. “They raped my sister Posey and left her for dead beside our swimming pool.”
Grey cringes and sits back, ruffling up his perfect, burnished-gold hair.
“We could change things,” he says, looking at me with a sort of silent pleading in his gaze. If I fuck up, he’s done for. We’re both done for. His survival hinges on me and my behavior just as much as mine does on his. “Once my father hands over the reins, it’s our horse to run.” I just keep staring at him. “Goddamn it, Gidget.” He curses in Italian then French then something that sounds Eastern European. Grey scoots his chair toward me and takes my hands in his. “Please. What else do you plan on doing? Waiting for them to trust us enough to escape? And then what? We’ll be on the run from both of our families. As of right now, we’re only trying to escape the claws of one.”
He stands up suddenly, knocking his chair over in his haste, and storms off.
I watch him go, my hands squeezed so tightly around the ends of the chair arms that my fingertips are going numb. He keeps saying ‘us’ and ‘we’, like I’m an equal partner in all of this. It’s something I’ve always wanted. So why can’t I just give in and try to enjoy it?
What the actual fuck is wrong with me?
Handsome, kind partner. Equal marriage. Ready-made empire.
As if summoned by her son’s anger, Giulia reappears, gliding out onto the veranda in another of her silken designer gowns. This one is loose and flowy, as if a three-thousand-dollar dress is just a pair of lounge pants. She waves her hand, and a servant rushes forward to right the chair for her.
I frown.
“Young couples are so passionate,” she tells me, crossing her legs at the knee and resting her hands atop them. She stares at me from her son’s eyes, that same soft heather gray with thick, dark lashes. “I don’t see much of that in the bedroom however.”
“It’s creepy as fuck that you watch to see if your son and his fiancée are doing it,” I retort back, but Giulia just smiles at me. “Did it ever occur to you that we aren’t doing it because you’re watching?”
This time, she laughs, and the sound cuts straight through me like a knife. Goose bumps rise on my arms, and I rub at them with my hands, hating my body for betraying me like that. She doesn’t deserve to know how she makes my skin crawl, how much I despise her, how much I’d like to reach out and wrap my hands around her skinny neck …
“Grey is my son, but he’s weak. He’d do whatever his bitchy biker bride requested.” She keeps her legs crossed, tapping those long nails of hers against her silk-covered knee. “And you? You’re a barbarian. Your people rut like monkeys, regardless of who’s watching. Don’t tell me you actually care about privacy or modesty.” Giulia leans forward, getting in my face in a way that triggers every instinct I have to fight back. But I don’t. Because I’m learning that I don’t have to display every emotion I feel, every time I feel it. “I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t tell my husband about your lack of intimacy. It’s concerning to me, Gidget.”
“It’s concerning to me that you’d kill your own grandchild,” I retort back, and for once, I get a reaction out of this bitch. Just … not the one that I was expecting.
She has the audacity to smile at me.
“How many bastards do you think my son left behind in his wake?” she asks me, cocking her head slightly to one side. “A dozen? More. Do you think I’d ever accept the offspring of some dirty whore as my grandchild, as the heir to my husband’s throne? Do you think I’ll ever accept you?” The look she flashes me then is crafted of calculated menace and pure, unadulterated hatred. “You will never walk outside these walls without a leash. You’re a useful political tool, that’s all you’ve ever been.”