Page 20 of Ruthless Claim

I should feel worse about it than I do.

The thing is, Valentina Santoro—Brennan, technically, as of yesterday, though I give it another hour before she finds a way to make clear she’s still thinking of herself as a Santoro—is not what I expected.

I knew the broad strokes: the Santoro daughter, the gallery work, the careful social performance, the woman who’d been raised to be exactly what a mafia family needed her to be and had made a life inside those walls anyway.

I expected someone who’d been smoothed into compliance.

Someone who’d taken the shape of the container.

She has not taken the shape of anything.

She is exactly the shape she decided to be, which is sharp and difficult and completely unwilling to make this easy, and that is⁠—

That is a problem, I think. That’s what that is. A problem I’m going to have to figure out.

I rinse my own cup and get my jacket, checking my phone one more time.

Report at noon, Connor had said, but I’m going in early, because the apartment is suddenly very small and I need to be somewhere that makes sense.

Somewhere where I know exactly what’s expected of me and I’m capable of delivering it.

I do better with clear objectives.

I let the door close quietly behind me when I leave, because continuing to piss her off would be petty and I’m not petty.

I’m practical, and practically speaking I’ve had enough of Valentina Santoro for one morning.

I make it to the elevator before I realize I’ve started thinking of her as Santoro again instead of Brennan.

She’d probably love that.

The elevator comes and I get in.

This marriage is going to be a war.

Good.

At least it won’t be boring.

3

VALENTINA

Two weeks into this marriage and I have reorganized my closet three times.

This is what I’ve been reduced to.

Valentina Santoro, who once negotiated a gallery acquisition that made three competing curators cry, who speaks four languages, and can work a room of two hundred people and make every single one of them feel like the most important person there, is now alphabetizing my shoe collection at eleven in the morning because it is the only thing in this apartment I have any control over and the alternative is going insane.

The system I’ve developed is this: I wake up before Cillian does, which means before five because the man apparently doesn’t sleep like a normal person, and I make my coffee with almond milk, and I take it to the corner of the living room that I’ve claimed with a chair and a lamp and a stack of books.

I’m gone before he materializes in the kitchen.

By nine I’m out of the apartment entirely.

Afternoons at the gallery, or at my mother’s, or with Emma, who is thirty-two weeks pregnant and mostly confined to the couch and therefore a captive audience for my venting.

I come home late enough that Cillian is usually in his study with the door closed, doing whatever he does for Connor in there.