Bound by Blood

Chapter One - The Bride Doesn't Cry

The dress cost more than most people's cars, and I am going to ruin it.

Not on purpose. Not yet. But my hands are shaking as Renata pins the veil into my hair, and if I move wrong, if I so much as breathe wrong, the silk is going to tear along the seam she's been eyeing nervously for the last ten minutes.

"Stop shaking," she says. Quiet. Practiced. The voice of a woman who has done this before — stood in a room like this, in a dress like this, being pinned into a life she didn't choose.

"I'm not shaking."

"Bianca."

"I'm furious," I say. "There's a difference."

Renata meets my eyes in the mirror. She's twenty-nine to my twenty-four, five years and one marriage ahead of me on this exact road, and there's something in her face that used to be fire and is now something else. Something banked. Careful.

I used to think it was surrender.

I'm starting to understand it might be something worse — the thing that comes after you stop fighting and realize the fight didn't matter anyway.

"Fury doesn't help you in there," she says, and nods toward the door, toward the chapel, toward the four hundred armed men in expensive suits currently pretending this is a celebration. "Fury gets you noticed. And you do not want Damiano Falcone noticing you today."

"He's going to marry me in the next hour. I think noticing is somewhat unavoidable."

Her hands still in my hair.

"You know what I mean," she says.

I do. I know exactly what she means, because I spent last night reading everything our family's people could find on the man I'm about to bind myself to for the rest of my life, and none of it was the kind of thing that lets you sleep.

Damiano Falcone. Thirty-two. Took control of the Falcone family at twenty-four, the same year his father was shot in the war our two families have been fighting for a decade — the same war this wedding is supposed to end. Eight years of running that family without a single public misstep, a single visible crack, a single moment where anyone got close enough to see what was underneath the control.

They call him il freddo. The cold one.

Not because he's cruel — though he is, when cruelty is useful. Because he doesn't need to be anything else. Cold is more efficient than cruel. Cold doesn't leave witnesses who can testify to having seen you feel something.

I am marrying a man my father's people describe, without irony, as the most controlled person any of us have ever met.

I have never been controlled a day in my life.

This is going to go badly.

My father finds me twenty minutes before the ceremony, in the small anteroom where brides in this world are apparently meant to sit quietly and contemplate their good fortune. I am not sitting quietly. I am pacing a groove into an eight-thousand-dollar rug.

"Bianca." He says my name the way he's said it my whole life — indulgent, tired, a man who has never once managed to fully control his youngest daughter and has mostly given up trying.

"Don't," I say.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"You're about to tell me this is necessary. That it protects the family. That Renata did it and survived and I'll survive too." I stop pacing. Look at him. My father, sixty years old, Don of a family he built from nothing, a man I have loved my entire life with the specific fierce love you have for someone who taught you everything and still somehow didn't teach you how to say no to him. "You're going to tell me it's an honor."

He doesn't say any of it.

He crosses the room instead, and takes my hands — careful, the way he's held them since I was small enough to need holding — and looks at me with something that might actually be regret, if my father were a man who allowed himself regret.

"I'm going to tell you the truth," he says. "The war has killed forty of our men in ten years. Falcone has lost more. Neither side can win it, and neither side can afford to keep fighting it, and the only thing standing between us and another decade of funerals is this marriage." His hands tighten slightly. "I am not asking you to be happy about it. I am asking you to survive it. There's a difference, and I think you're smart enough to find it."

"And if I can't?"

"You can," he says. Certain. The certainty that has run our family for three decades. "You're the fiercest thing I've ever made, Bianca. Fiercer than your sister. Fiercer than me, on my worst days." He touches my face, briefly, gently. "Don't let him see all of it at once. But don't let him take it from you either. You hear me?"

I do hear him. I don't know yet if I believe him.

"I love you," he says. "Whatever happens today — I love you, and I did this because I didn't see another way to keep you alive."

There's a knock at the door. Time.

I let him walk me out.

The chapel is full of men who would kill each other in the street tomorrow, sitting in the same pews today, because for one afternoon, my body is the treaty holding them apart.

I walk down the aisle with my chin up and my hands steady — I've decided, somewhere in the last ten minutes, that whatever else happens today, I am not giving anyone in this room the satisfaction of watching me shake — and I make myself look at him before I have to.

Damiano Falcone is waiting at the altar, and every photograph I studied last night failed to prepare me for the actual weight of him in a room.

He's tall — taller than I expected — and built like every part of him has a purpose, nothing wasted, nothing soft. Dark hair, darker eyes, a face that would be beautiful if it weren't so entirely, deliberately empty of anything I can read. He watches me walk toward him the way you'd watch weather rolling in. Assessing. Calculating. Not one flicker of what a groom is supposed to feel watching his bride approach.

I hold his gaze the entire way down the aisle.

I will not look away first. Not today. Not ever, if I can help it.

Something shifts, very slightly, in his expression when I reach him — not warmth. Not anything close to warmth. Something more like recalculation. Like a man revising a number he'd already written down.

"Ms. Marchetti," he says, low, for my ears only, as I take my place beside him.

"Mrs. Falcone," I say. "In about ten minutes. You might want to catch up."

Something flickers behind his eyes. Not amusement, exactly. Adjacent to it. The ghost of a man who used to find things funny before he decided he couldn't afford to.

"Careful," he murmurs, so quiet only I can hear it, as the priest opens his book and the chapel falls silent around us. "Fire like that gets noticed in my house."

"Good," I say. "I was hoping it would."

The priest begins. My father, somewhere behind me, is holding his breath. Renzo Falcone — Damiano's uncle, gray-haired and watchful, three rows back on the groom's side — is smiling in a way that doesn't reach his eyes, and I file that away without knowing yet that it will matter.

Damiano Falcone takes my hand. His grip is warm and absolute, the grip of a man who has never once in his life held anything he intended to let go of.

"I do," he says, when the moment comes, in a voice that gives away nothing at all.

I say it too. My voice doesn't shake.

The bride doesn't cry.

Not today.