“You’re getting married in three months, Valentina. Don’t ask me to who. You don’t have the right to ask.”
VALENTINA ROSSI
I had a plan. Three months. An acceptance letter to the University of Bologna hidden in a drawer. Twenty thousand euros saved in secret since I was nineteen.
The life I’d chosen for myself, far from this house that stopped being a home and became a fortress. I had everything planned to disappear.
Until my father walked into the music room and sold me like one more clause in a deal. I’m promised to Luca Moretti. The Don of the Naples Camorra. The most dangerous man in southern Italy.
I’ll have to live in his house. Sleep under his roof. Smile at his family’s dinners while carrying, hidden in the folds of every dress, the only thing that still belongs to me: my hatred.
He thinks I’ll be a docile wife. Trained. Useful to the pact that will end the war between our families.
He doesn’t know that I learned, in the convent, that silence is the sharpest weapon a woman can carry in a house full of armed men. And I intend to use it.
LUCA MORETTI
I know things she doesn’t. I know her father lied. I know what really happened to her brother.
And I know that the day Valentina Rossi discovers the truth, she’ll either kill her father before the wedding — and the pact dies with him — or she’ll kill me, in a bed, on some random November night.
She walked into my house carrying a hatred that doesn’t belong to me, chin high and spine straight like a dancer who’s taken hits her whole life just to keep from lowering her shoulders.
I should treat her as what she is: a piece on the board. A bomb her father armed and shipped to me as a gift. I should.
But every day she spends under my roof, it gets harder to remember why I shouldn’t want her.
“A woman who hates the wrong man, for the wrong reason, is the most dangerous woman in the world. And she doesn’t know it yet.”
