Chapter 2

The aisle was longer than it had any right to be and Ava counted the steps because counting was the only thing keeping her feet moving. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. The veil was thin enough to see shapes through it rows of dark suits, candlelight, a room full of people who believed they knew exactly what they were watching.

None of them were looking at her face. That was the only thing she had going for her.

Dante's hand was under hers, not gripping, just present, and somehow that was worse than if he'd held her down. Like he didn't need to. Like she was already exactly where he'd placed her and he knew it.

She kept her breathing even. In through the nose, out slow, the same rhythm she'd used when Leo had his first fever and she was alone in a studio apartment at two in the morning with no insurance and nobody to call. You don't panic. Panic is a luxury. You just keep moving.

The officiant was already at the altar. She fixed her eyes on the man's collar because it was neutral and it didn't stare back, and she needed something to focus on that wasn't the armed strangers seated behind her.

The officiant cleared his throat.

"We are gathered here today to witness the union of Dante Moretti and..." He paused, someone in the room shifted. She felt it more than heard it, a ripple of confusion quickly swallowed by discipline.

Keep going. Just keep going.

"Do you, Dante Moretti, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife? To have and to hold, in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live?"

"I do."

No pause. No breath. Like the words had been waiting and he'd simply released them.

The officiant turned to her. He held her gaze for half a second too long, a flicker of something behind his eyes that he was professional enough to bury immediately.

"And do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband? To have and to hold, in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live?"

The room pressed in around her.

Twenty minutes. Say the words. Walk out the back.

"I do."

Her voice came out steady and she had absolutely no idea how.

The officiant exhaled, barely, almost nothing. "Then by the power vested in me, I now pronounce you husband and wife."

The room exhaled with him.

Dante reached over and lifted the veil.

Three seconds. That was all it took.

Three seconds of the room seeing her face before the voice cracked the silence wide open.

"That is not my daughter."

Don Aldo Romano was already on his feet. Front row, left section, silver at the temples, the kind of face that had spent decades expecting to be obeyed. The men beside him rose without being told, a wall of dark suits moving as one.

Ava's stomach dropped.

She didn't move. Her feet had stopped taking instructions from her brain somewhere around the word daughter.

"Where is Sophia?" Don Aldo's voice was controlled but only just, the edges of it beginning to fray. "Where is my daughter?"

Dante didn't turn around immediately. He looked at Ava for exactly one second, not apologetic, not worried, just checking the way you check a structure before putting weight on it. Then he turned to face the room.

"Sophia left," he said.

The silence that followed had weight in it.

"She left." Don Aldo repeated the words slowly, testing whether they were real. "You are standing there telling me my daughter left."

"Before the ceremony. Of her own choosing." Dante's voice hadn't changed register at all, same pace, same flatness, same absolute absence of apology. "We discovered it minutes before the service began."

"And you" Don Aldo took one step forward and his men moved with him. "You replaced her. With a stranger. Under that veil. In front of my family."

"In front of both our families," Dante said. "Yes."

"Who is she?"

"My wife."

The word landed in the room like something dropped from a height.

Ava felt it move through her chest in a way she wasn't built to absorb.

"Your wife." Don Aldo's jaw tightened so hard she could see the muscle working from across the room. "You put a stranger in my daughter's place and married her in front of everyone I brought into this room and you are standing there"

"Your daughter walked out of her own wedding," Dante said. "That is a Romano problem, not a Moretti one."

"You will not stand there and "

"The alliance was contingent on a ceremony, Don Aldo." Dante took one step forward. Just one. The men behind Romano shifted and nobody drew. "The ceremony happened. The terms were met."

"The terms required Sophia "

"The terms required a wedding." He let that sit in the room for a full breath. "Find your daughter. She left this building alive, unharmed, under no threat from my family. What she chose to do and why she chose to do it that is yours to answer for, not mine."

Don Aldo's face moved through fury, then calculation, then something colder on the other side of both. He was doing the same math she had done twenty minutes ago in that hallway, looking for the exit and finding the same walls. He needed this alliance. Whatever his rage was worth tonight, it wasn't worth what losing Moretti protection would cost him.

She could see the exact moment he accepted that, and it didn't make him look any less like he wanted someone to bleed for it.

"This," Don Aldo said, his voice dropping to something quiet and very controlled, "is not finished."

"It never is," Dante said.

Don Aldo looked at her then. For the first time since the veil came up he looked at her like a person instead of a problem, and what she saw in his face was worse than the anger. It was cold, thorough assessment, the kind that took inventory and filed everything away for later.

He held it for three seconds. Then he turned, his entire delegation moving around him like water around stone, and the doors at the back of the room opened and closed and they were gone.

The room let out a breath it had been holding since the veil came up.

Ava realized she'd been gripping the bouquet so hard her fingers had gone completely numb. She loosened them one by one, concentrating on each finger separately because it gave her something small to do while the room resettled around her and she tried to remember how to stand like a person who was not currently living through the worst night of her life.

Dante turned back to her.

He looked at her hands first, then at her face.

"You didn't run," he said.

"There was nowhere to go."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth, not a smile but the idea of one, there and gone before she could be sure she'd seen it. He studied her the way he had in the hallway, like she was a variable he hadn't finished accounting for.

Then he said it, quiet enough that only she could hear it above the noise of the room moving around them again.

"You are now my wife."

She looked up at him. He was already looking back, steady and certain, the same expression from the hallway that she still didn't have a name for.

"For twenty minutes," she said. "That was the deal."

He held her gaze for a long moment and said nothing.

The way he said nothing sat in her chest like a stone she hadn't agreed to carry.