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I sigh. “This is an opportunity, Chiara. Behaving like a child won’t get you anywhere.
She hesitates, and then sits down, but not where I indicated. She’s two feet out of reach. It takes all my willpower not to grab her by the hair and drag her closer, and growl in her face.You sit where I tell you, and if you disobey me one more time, I’ll make you regret it for the rest of your life.
I force my shoulders against the back of the sofa to appear relaxed, extending my arm along the seat. “You seem tense,bambina. Relax. I only want to talk to you.” I make my voice deep and affectionate. There, there, little girl. Did the bad men scare you?
“Are you a criminal?” she asks. “I know inside you said you weren’t, but I just want to understand what’s happening tonight.”
Her insolence knows no bounds. I stare at her for a full minute, watching the light reflected off the water moving over her face. “Yes. But it’s business, not pleasure. I’ll follow the law until it gets in my way.”
“How often does it get in your way?”
All the fucking time. “Now and then.”
Chiara watches me with a straight back, her eyes luminous. She has a surprising amount of poise for a seventeen-year-old girl. Like she thinks she’s going to get out of this. That she’s going to say no, she won’t marry any of us, and we and her father will leave her be.
So much confidence. So very stupid.
Adjusting the slender watch on her wrist, she says, “Thank you for your honesty.”
You trusting little fool. Did you not listen to a word Vinicius said? “Games are for children.”
“Are you all good friends?”
She’s trying to figure us out. How she might play us against each other. “We’ve known each other for a long time.”
Our lives are so closely knitted into each other’s that it would be impossible to separate them. I know each of them even better than I know myself. We have something stronger than friendship. Stronger than ambition, or blood.
Loyalty.
We learned the hard way that we’re stronger together, and we always will be. Chiara will learn in time what that means for her, to be at the behest of all of us.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-four.”
“Older than the others. I guess they’re around twenty-eight or so?”
“Give or take a year.”
Chiara draws a little closer to me. “I don’t imagine you’d want to marry me. I’m still in school. Schoolgirls must be so annoying to grown men.” She flashes me a smile and tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear.
This is an unexpected surprise. She’s trying to charm me.
“Is there any way you could speak to my father about how ridiculous this is? I feel like he might listen to another man even if he won’t listen to me. Being promised to much older strangers when I’m only seventeen…”
She gives a little shiver. Quite the actress, this one.
“You’re scared,bambina?”
She looks up at me with those big, doll-like eyes, and nods.
“Do you know what I do?” I ask her.
Chiara hesitates, seeming surprised by my change of subject. “You run nightclubs.”
“And?”
“And…strip clubs.” Even saying that makes her blush. “Why do you ask?”
