Chapter 3 My Brother's Secret

I slapped him before I had decided to. The crack of it rang through the bedroom, and Dante let his head turn with the blow and slowly brought it back, as though he had expected nothing less.

"Take it back," I whispered.

"I cannot take back what I believe to be true."

"My father was not a murderer."

"You married into this family knowing what people said about us. Do not pretend he was incapable of violence simply because you loved him."

I hated him for saying it, and I hated him more because some small, treacherous corner of me wondered if he was right. My father had been a powerful man. People lowered their voices when they spoke his name. But the same hands had lifted me onto his shoulders when I was small, taught me to read, bought me my first piano, and promised that no one would ever hurt me while he lived. Then one rainy morning he had driven away and never come home. They found his car beside a river, and his body two days later. The police called it an accident. Adrian called it murder, and I had believed my brother.

"You're lying," I said.

"I have no reason to lie about a dead man."

"You have every reason! This marriage ended a feud that threatened your empire. If you convince me my father killed yours, you can hold me with guilt for the rest of my life."

Something flickered over his face. "Is that what you think this marriage is?"

"I don't know what it is anymore!" I turned toward the window so he wouldn't see my eyes fill. For a year I had trained myself to be Dante Moretti's wife. I had memorised the names of his associates, learned which subjects to avoid at dinner, and smiled through gatherings where strangers studied me like a prize he had purchased. I had done everything that was expected, and now I was being told the foundation under it all was a lie.

"Isabella," he said behind me. "Wanting something to be true does not make it true."

I rounded on him. "And being a mafia king does not make you an expert in morality."

"No," he said. "It makes me an expert in what people will do to survive."

Before I could find an answer, his phone rang. He took the call without taking his eyes off me. "What?" A pause. "When?" His face darkened by degrees. "Keep him there. Do not let him leave."

"What happened?"

"Nothing you need to worry about."

My laugh had no humour in it. "Naturally. My life is made entirely of things I'm not supposed to know."

He ignored that. "I have to leave for a few minutes. Do not open this door for anyone but Marco or me."

"I am your wife, not your prisoner."

"Tonight the distinction does not matter."

He reached the door, and I heard myself say his name. I hated the question already forming in my mouth, and asked it anyway. "Did you ever love me?"

His shoulders went rigid. The silence stretched until I could hear the clock somewhere down the hall. When he finally looked back, his face was carefully empty. "I married you because I believed it was necessary."

"That is not what I asked."

"It is the only answer I can give you tonight."

The door shut behind him, and I stood in the middle of the room feeling like the most foolish woman alive. I had fallen in love with a man who could not even tell me whether his feelings were real.

I called Adrian twenty minutes later. He answered on the second ring, and the sound of his voice nearly undid me. "Isabella? What's wrong?"

"Someone tried to kill me."

There was a pause, and when he spoke again his voice had hardened. "Where is Dante?"

"Somewhere in the house."

"Listen to me. Do not trust him."

"Adrian, he says Father was involved in the murder of his father."

Silence again, and this one went on far too long. "Your husband will say anything to make you doubt yourself."

"That isn't an answer. Did you meet Dante's father before Father died?"

What came back down the line was a different kind of quiet, heavier and more careful. "Who told you that?"

"That isn't an answer either."

"I have to go."

"Adrian, wait!" The line went dead. My brother had always been protective, sometimes unreasonably so, but in twenty-six years he had never once hung up on me.

I stood at the window and watched armed men crossing the courtyard, their weapons printed against their jackets like shadows. I could not leave the house. But I might be able to leave the lie. If Dante truly had been investigating my father, the evidence would be somewhere in his study, and I waited until the corridor went quiet before I slipped out. The guard who had stood at my door was gone, and that should have stopped me. It didn't. The study door was unlocked, the room still smelling of leather and whiskey and faintly, awfully, of blood. I found only contracts and ledgers in the desk until I tried the bottom drawer, where a black folder lay waiting with my name written across it.

Inside were photographs of me. I was leaving a restaurant, standing at my father's grave, outside the house I grew up in. Someone had been watching me for months. Behind them lay a copy of our marriage certificate, and across the corner, in Dante's handwriting, one sentence: SHE MUST NEVER DISCOVER WHAT HER FATHER HID.

"Looking for something, wife?"

He stood in the doorway, and his eyes went to the folder and then to me, and for the first time I saw real anger there. "Put it down, Isabella."

I should have obeyed. Instead I turned over the last page in the folder, and the room tilted. It was a photograph of my father standing beside Dante's father, both men alive, both men smiling. Between them, in a white dress, with a silver bracelet at her wrist, stood a little girl.

Me.