And every time he did, something in me settled.
Beside me, Lily leaned close enough that only I could hear her. “You know,” she murmured, “you do not need a ring on your finger to be treated as his wife.”
Wife.
The word made my heart skip so abruptly I nearly resented it.
I looked down at my hands, then back up at Pietro. The old version of me, the one still measuring safety by ordinary standards, might have thought the room was warning enough. Might have mistaken ritual for prison. But the woman I had become knew better than that. She knew that what mattered was not the room, not the vows, not even the men watching. What mattered was whether I could still see myself clearly beside him.
When it was done, when the final words had been spoken and the room settled around the reality of him now being officially named sotto capo, Pietro sought me out. Not his father. Not Matteo. Not the other men waiting to greet him.
Me.
Then he crossed the room and held out his hand.
My palm was still clammy when he closed his fingers around it, but he did not so much as blink. He only brought my hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to my knuckles with such calm ownership that it felt less like display and more like instinct.
He led me toward Matteo, who watched us approach with altogether too much amusement for a man of his age and position. He said something in Italian, and because I had, against all reason and in secret, spent the last few weeks learning the things I most wanted to never be excluded from again, I understood him before Pietro answered.
“Stai garantendo per lei?” he asked Pietro.
Pietro did not hesitate.
“Con la mia vita.”
With my life.
Matteo’s gaze settled fully to me then, his mouth curving. “Well, Edwina,” he said in English, “welcome.”
I smiled before I could stop myself and leaned in just slightly. “Santa.”
That made him laugh outright, which did something strange and absurdly comforting to me. It meant, in the specific lunatic logic of this family, that he had accepted me. Or adopted me. Or filed me away under some internal category labeledentertaining.
When he spoke again, his Italian was slower, clearer, obviously meant for me.
“E tu, Emily Hart, giuri silenzio, rispetto e lealtà alla famiglia che stai scegliendo?”
And you, Emily Hart, do you swear silence, respect, and loyalty to the family you are choosing?
For one suspended moment I felt Pietro go utterly still beside me. I turned my head just enough to look at him and sawhis hand tighten around the cane, the knuckles paling, every emotion he kept under control written too openly across his face. He looked at me with awe, with fear, with too much love, as if I were giving something enormous away for him.
But I wasn’t.
I knew what this was. I had always known. The argument I had been building for three years—the one my advisor had called bold and revisionist and that I had always understood in my bones before I found the historical evidence—was about exactly this moment. About the point at which a person makes themselves so irrevocably part of a structure that naming what it is becomes something they choose rather than something they survive. The Medici had not needed to threaten. They had needed to be loved, and trusted, and genuinely necessary—and so they were. The choice to step inside something like this and say yes, with full knowledge, was not the same as being swallowed by it.
The difference was that I could see it clearly.
I wasn’t surrendering. I wasn’t disappearing into his world. I was choosing with my eyes open, choosing him, choosing the family that had made room for me without asking me to become smaller first, choosing a life that would not always be easy but would at least be honest.
So I looked back at Matteo and answered, in the same language he had offered me the choice.
“Lo giuro.”
I swear it.
The silence that followed was brief but heavy, the kind that felt like acknowledgment, and then Matteo smiled slowly.
“Benvenuta nella famiglia.”
