Page 170 of Valentino

"What? When?"

He doesn't answer. The street narrows, the noise of the piazza falls away behind us, and the air cools in the shadow between buildings.

The next thing I fully register, we're standing in front of a church. A small one, tucked between a shuttered farmacia and a building the color of dried apricots. The doors are open. Candlelight spills out onto the steps in a long gold tongue.

He pulls me inside.

The temperature drops ten degrees and the world goes quiet, that particular held-breath quiet that old churches have, like the building itself is listening. Incense hangs in the air, sweet and ancient. An elderly priest is doing something with candles near the altar, and Valentino walks straight up the aisle toward him—dragging me, in a sundress and sneakers, my hair doing whatever it wants—and speaks to him in low, rapid Italian.

I catch maybe four words. One of them is definitely sposare.

The priest looks at Valentino. Looks at me. Looks at Valentino again with an expression that says he has seen everything in his long life and this is at least top twenty. He asks something, and Valentino answers, and then the priest says something with a question mark hanging off the end of it, glancing past us toward the door.

"He asks if we have a witness," Valentino translates.

Chiara's hand goes up from the back pew. She's followed us in, and she's glowing, hands pressed together under her chin like she personally ordered this from the universe.

"Io," she says.

The priest nods slowly and shuffles off toward the sacristy, presumably for whatever holy paperwork this requires.

I stand there in the candlelight and my brain finally catches up with my body, which is a problem, because my body has been fully on board since the piazza and my brain has questions. Twenty minutes ago I was eating tiramisu. Now there's a crucifix the size of a surfboard looking down at me and my mascara is not waterproof and I'm about to become somebody's wife. In Rome. In a dress I picked because it was the least wrinkled thing in my suitcase.

Vittoria is going to murder me. Then she's going to cry. Then she's going to murder me again.

Valentino turns to me. The candlelight does criminal things to his face, gilding the gray at his temples, deepening the shadows under his cheekbones, and his voice drops low enough that only I can hear it.

"This is your last chance," he says.

"My last chance to what?"

"To run."

I tip my head, studying him. He's serious but underneath the gravel there's a current of something I've only seen a handful of times. He's nervous. Valentino Conti, who handed himself to Enzo Basile like a parcel, who took forty stitches without making a sound, is nervous, in a church, about me.

"And if I leave?" I ask. "Hypothetically. If I walk out those doors right now, what happens?"

He considers the question with the gravity it deserves. The watch ticks on his wrist. Somewhere behind us, Chiara is pretending very hard not to listen.

"I'll probably drag you back," he says.

The laugh that comes out of me echoes off five hundred years of stone, bright and wild and completely unsuited to the venue, and I do not care even a little.

"That's the right answer," I tell him. My eyes are streaming now, ruining my makeup, but I don't care. I take his hand, and I lace my fingers through his and squeeze.

"Okay, Conti," I say. "Let's do this."

The priest comes back through the side door with a book in his hands, and behind me Chiara is already crying, and the candles gutter in a draft from the street like the whole church just exhaled.

He hasn't let go of my wrist once. I'm starting to understand he never will.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Amanda

Istand on the porch steps of my childhood home, staring at the pristine white door with its polished brass knocker. My hand finds Valentino's automatically. A reflex I've developed over the past months. His fingers close around mine, steady and warm.

"You sure about this?" His voice carries that familiar protective edge, the one that surfaces whenever I'm about to walk into something that might hurt me.