Page 35 of Empire
“Then Lucia marries Giacomo Moretti.”
The room drops out from under me. I don’t think my face changes—years of training saved me that much—but inside, something in me splinters.
Not Lucia… Not Giacomo. Anything but that!
She’s only thirteen with paint on her fingers and books under her pillow. She still has sunlight in her hair and hope in her eyes, and thinks I can bring her small pieces of my world when I travel. She still asks for sweets with her chin lifted and believes there’s a version of her future where she belongs to herself.
Giacomo Moretti has three dead wives and a penchant for crushing flowers before they bloom. Giacomo smiles well, sends flowers to funerals, kisses hands, and makes deals my father always approves of.
Giacomo also leaves bruises where dresses cover them, and likes his women frightened enough to confuse obedience with affection.
My father knows all of that. He knows because he allows men like Giacomo near our table precisely because their kind of evil is useful.
“She’s a child,” I say, though my voice sounds distant even to me.“Not to him, Father—”
“No?” he tilts his head. “Then to whom would you prefer she be given?”
The question is a trap, and we both know it. There is no one I would prefer because preference has never been the point. Women in our world are transferred, not chosen. Even Lucia—my bright, impossible Lucia—is only exempt now because she’s useful later.
“Not him,” I repeat.
My father lets the silence answer for him at first, then he sighs. “Bring me what I want, and you won’t have to watch it happen.”
That is the ultimatum. Just a father offering his only son a choice between betraying the man he loves and sacrificing the only innocent thing left in his life.
My stomach turns so violently that I have to lock my knees to keep still.
He picks up a photograph of Ruslan pinning me against a terrace wall.“You see the problem,” he says.
I look at him then, and think, ‘No, father, I see you. I see that you know exactly where to put the blade and still act as though the wound happened naturally.’
“You’d sell your only daughter to a butcher to test your son?”
His mouth flattens. “I’d secure my legacy by whatever means the moment demands.”
I hate him more than anything then. Not the boyish, temporary way children hate hard fathers when they’re denied something. I mean pure hatred. I hate him with the clarity of a grown man seeing the architecture of another man’s soul and understanding exactly how little tenderness was ever meant to survive there.
So I nod.
That was three days ago.
Now, Ruslan sleeps with all the softness on his face that the world doesn’t get to see. While I lie here with my father’s ultimatum wrapped around my throat so tightly, I can hardly draw a full breath without feeling it cut.
I should wake him—that thought comes and goes. Wake him up and throw the truth between us while it’s still hot enough to deserve honesty.
Maybe he’ll tell me he understands, because if he has been spying on me, I know it must be because his father gave him that command. Maybe he’ll tell me to be selfish and take Lucia and run. Maybe he’ll pull me into his arms and tell me we’ll find another way. Maybe he’ll do something dangerous and offerhimself up in some half-sacrificial gesture that would only make things worse.
I don’t wake him. If I wake him, I have to hear his voice as I tell him the shape of the thing I may become. And some selfish, cowardly part of me wants one more hour where I can look at him like this.
Mine, in no legal sense, but every secret one. My man, my heart, my love.
My downfall.
“Cuore mio,” I whisper.
Ruslan stirs but doesn’t wake. I reach out before I can stop myself, and move the hair off of his forehead. He still doesn’t wake; if anything, he leans subtly into the touch, still deep under.
I shift onto my back and stare up at the ceiling for a while, images of Lucia flash in my mind. Lucia, laughing when I tell her she sounds exactly like me. Lucia, who still thinks I can fix things because I’m her brother.
