Page 179 of Arrow

37

THIRTY-SEVEN

HARLOWE

We slid into the waiting car, the leather seats cool against my bare thighs. Arrow pulled me against him, his hand resting high on my leg, thumb tracing lazy circles that sent aftershocks through my still-sensitive body. The city blurred past the windows, a kaleidoscope of neon and shadow.

“You’re quiet,” Arrow observed, his voice a rumble against my side.

I watched the cathedral recede in the side mirror, its broken dome a dark silhouette against the night sky. “Just thinking about what a terrible wife I’m going to be.”

His fingers tightened on my thigh. “You’ll be exactly the kind of wife I need.”

“Dangerous?”

“Lethal,” he corrected, pressing his lips to my temple.

The car stopped at a red light, and I caught Frank watching us in the rearview mirror, his expression unreadable. Something in his gaze made me realize just how much he’d seen in his years of service to my father. How many bodies, how many compromised brides, how many deals sealed with blood instead of signatures.

When the car started moving forward again, I leaned my head against Arrow’s shoulder, allowing myself this small moment of vulnerability. The cathedral had changed something in me—not softened, exactly, but shifted. Like tectonic plates realigning beneath the surface, the same elements arranged in a new formation.

“You know,” I murmured, watching the city lights smear across the window, “my father’s going to have to be there.”

Arrow’s body tensed slightly beneath mine. “I know.”

“He’ll bring at least thirty men.”

“Fifty,” Arrow corrected.

I laughed softly. “You’ve been counting?”

“I’ve been planning,” he replied, his fingers drawing lazy patterns on my bare thigh. “Every scenario, every possible outcome.”

“And what’s your prediction? Blood before the vows or after the cake?”

He turned to look at me, his eyes reflecting the passing streetlights. “I predict that Giovanni Virelli will watch his daughter become a Romanov, and it will be the most exquisite torture I could ever devise for him.”

The casual cruelty in his voice should have repulsed me. I felt a perverse thrill at the thought of my father witnessing my union with a Romanov. The greatest vengeance wasn’t death—it was this: making him watch as I chose Arrow.

Regardless of whether he sold me off to the Romanov family, it wasn’t because he wanted to; it was because he was a greedy bastard, incapable of feeling anything close to love for anyone if there wasn’t something to gain from it. I’d spent years hating him for letting my brother’s death mean nothing, for watching as my mother drowned, then killed herself, leaving me alone with his cruelty.

Arrow read the calculations on my face. “You’re thinking about your brother, aren’t you?”

“Luca would have hated this, hated you,” I whispered, watching the city lights blur past the window. “He would have put a bullet in your skull the moment you looked at me.”

“And I would have respected him for it,” Arrow replied, his voice unexpectedly soft.

I swallowed hard against the sudden tightness in my throat. Luca had been dead for ten years, and my father had done nothing—absolutely nothing—except arrange this marriage as if trading his daughter could somehow balance the ledger of his son’s death. That giving me to my brother’s murderers would even the score somehow.

“Do you ever think about them?” I asked. “The people your family has killed? The people you’ve killed?”

Arrow’s hand stilled on my thigh. “Every night,” he said. “They’re why I don’t sleep.”

The honesty in his voice caught me off guard. I’d expected deflection or denial, not this raw confession in the back of a car speeding through Manhattan.

“I used to dream about killing you,” I admitted, watching his reflection in the window. “Back when I thought it would change anything.”

His fingers resumed their lazy patterns on my skin. “And now?”