Page 44 of Wicked Bloodlines

Maria looked at him, her gaze surprisingly steady, assessing. Despite everything, despite her youth and her ordeal, there was a flash of something fierce in her eyes. The fighter I knew she was.

“You’re Matteo.”

Matteo nodded once. “I am.”

“Are you going to marry my sister properly?” Her voice, though weak, carried a surprising conviction.

A ghost of a smile touched Matteo’s lips. He stepped further into the room, leaning against the door frame, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked at me, then back at Maria. “October thirty-first,” he said.

Maria’s face broke into a watery smile. “Good. I want a front row seat.”

I laughed, a warm, genuine sound that echoed in the quiet room. Maria giggled, a faint, fragile sound. I looked at Matteo, saw the possessive pride in his eyes, the subtle shift in his posture that told me he recognized my fragile, determined sister as one of his own now.

He watched us, laughing softly in our happy reunion, safe in his home. The last of the Marchesi line. All the blood, all the chaos, all the fear, it had bought this. This quiet moment. This new beginning. And in his eyes, I saw the truth. It was worth every single drop.

Epilogue

Sofia

The candles started at the top of the east stairs and didn’t stop, small flames in iron sconces all the way down to the great hall, and even through the closed door of the bridal suite I could smell the wax and the crushed lavender someone had scattered along the runner. Halloween evening pressed dark against the tall windows. Villa Luca had gone quiet, waiting on me.

Belle’s worked the silk-covered buttons one at a time at the back of my dress. The ivory silk fit perfectly, draping my body in luxury that didn’t belong in something so formal. The gown was actually comfortable. And, though it hugged my curves, it didn’t bind. The seamstress had added a few small purple, black, and orange flowers along the train and the hemline for a small splash of color. I braced my hands against the vanity and let her work.

“Take a breath,” Belle said, smiling at me in the dressing mirror. I did and smiled back at her.

“Thanks, Belle.” I met her gaze in the mirror with a sincere one of my own. “You’ve been so kind to me from the first day I got here. Maria is your biggest fan.”

“That’s what sisters do, Sofia. And I’m Maria’s biggest fan so she and I are even.”

From the chaise by the window, wrapped in a cream blanket up to her chin, Maria delivered her verdict without being asked. “It’s too plain in the back. You need the comb higher, or it just looks like you forgot to finish getting dressed.”

“Thank you, Maria.”

She shrugged. “I’m being helpful.” She shifted, wincing slightly as the blanket slipped from one thin shoulder, and yanked it back up herself before either of us could move to help her. Her color had come back over the last eleven days, faint pink under the hollows of her cheeks, but she was still healing. She’d refused a wheelchair for the ceremony and refused, twice, to stay upstairs and watch from a monitor like Dario’s men had suggested. “I’m sitting in the front row if I have to crawl there,” she’d told Dario. He hadn’t argued.

Belle smoothed the silk over my hips and stepped back to study the line of it in the mirror. “She’s not wrong about the back.”

“Shut up.”

We all giggled.

A knock came at the door and Belle crossed to open it. Fillipa stood in the hallway. She held the small gilded box in both hands. She didn’t say anything as she crossed the room. Her eyes went to me and then to the box and back to me, and I understood the whole conversation without a word of it being spoken. She set the box in my hands. Velvet and gilt and a scrap of silk lining held the comb with the secret blade. The piece had been cleaned, the brass polished to a warm gold, the small blade inside the spine of the comb.

The last time I’d held this box, Belle had pressed it into my palm at a dress shop with a stranger watching me from across the street. The last time I’d worn the comb, I’d pulled the blade from my hair and cut a man.

I lifted the comb free of the silk and turned to the mirror. Belle gathered my hair at one side, twisting it into the shape we’d practiced twice already this week, and I slid the comb home at the crown, letting the teeth bite into the twist until it held. The brass caught the candlelight from the hall through the open door and threw it back gold. I didn’t plan on using it as a weapon tonight, but this was the Villa Luca. One never knew when one might need a good blade.

“There,” Maria said from the chaise, quieter now. “That’s right.”

Fillipa moved to her next, tucking the blanket back over Maria’s shoulders the way she must have done a hundred times when Maria was small and feverish and frightened in a house neither of us ever felt safe in. Maria didn’t flinch away and for a moment the two of them together looked like a family. I suppose if I had anything resembling a mother it would be Fillipa. She cared for us as much as she did her own sons, and I’d always be grateful to her.

“We should go down,” Belle said gently. “Everyone’s waiting.”

Maria pushed up from the chaise on her own before anyone could offer a hand, blanket falling away to show the deep green dress underneath, and stood there a second, testing her balance, chin high. Fillipa hovered at her side but didn’t touch her. Belle opened the door onto the candlelit hall as the candle flames marching away toward the stairs, toward the sound of a string quartet tuning somewhere far below.

I asked for one more minute, and Belle nodded, pulling the door most of the way shut behind her, leaving me alone with the mirror and the candlelight bleeding in from the hall.

I looked at myself. My mother’s eyes looked back at me. I found nothing of my father except maybe the slight dimple on one cheek when I smiled. Today would be the last day I’d claim the name Marchesi. After this ceremony, I’d forever be a Luca. For me, this was the last hour that name would mean anything at all.