Page 56 of Conceal

I nod as the woman returns with her arms full of whites and creams in plastic bags. My stomach sours. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this. I want to order something ugly off Amazon, or wear a gown I already own to this sham of a wedding. This is a mockery of everything I thought I wanted. Do I even want a wedding anymore? Even if I got to pick the groom?

I’m not sure I do anymore.

My eyes slide over to Roman involuntarily. His face is a mask of professional indifference, but when his dark eyes meet mine, he cracks a little. I hadn’t thought about how hard this would be for him. To watch me prepare to marry another man. I imagine the roles reversed, and I’m watching him prepare to marry another woman.

It makes me sick to my stomach to think about. And he has to watch. He doesn’t have a choice. My heart hurts for him. But I slide the numbness back in and ignore it.

The saleswoman escorts me behind a curtain. I slip out of my clothes and into exactly the type of dress I was imagining. It’s a satin dress that looks more like a slip. She uses some sort of clamps to fit it to my body, and it’s perfect. It’s nothing like the dress I want.

I walk back onto the sales floor, and the woman helps me step up onto the dais so Irina can see it from every angle in the mirror.

My mother’s silent.

But Roman clears his throat. My eyes find his again in the mirror. His Adam’s apple works up and down, and he shoves his fists into the pockets of his slacks.

He’s barely keeping it together.

“Yep. This is the one,” I say, retreating back into the dressing room. I shrug out of it before the woman can even undo the clips. I’m back in my regular clothes before she can argue.

I walk past Roman, throwing open the door to the boutique and stepping out onto the sidewalk. He follows me, but this time simply stands silently behind me as I catch my breath.

The car ride back home is silent; my mother scrolls on her phone, Ro keeps throwing me worried looks in the rearview mirror, but I just let the familiar blanket of depression slide back over me.

Chapter thirty-six

Tatiana

This can’t be happening.

This is just a stress-induced nightmare, right?

One of those ‘you accidentally went to school with no pants on’ nightmares that I’ll wake up from in a cold sweat.

Right?

Sweat drips down my spine, cooling the small of my back, and I shiver.

“Ready, dear?” my father asks, his tone dripping with a fake sweetness. He’s not asking.

It doesn’t really matter if I’m ready.

The crowd around us blurs as his grip on my arm tightens, and the wedding march begins.

Giovanni Vitale is standing at the end of the aisle, looking green and sickly and clammy. Just a month ago he was at another altar with another bride-to-be. But that wedding never took place. Nicoletta’s men and the MC club she recruited stopped it.

Surely, someone will put a stop to this wedding, right?

Arranged marriages are a tradition of the old world, right? The nobility in Russia had arranged marriages for power, but this is America, and not the nineteenth century. Surely, we’ve evolved to value women as more than just pawns.

But then, my father has never seen me as anything but an object to be pulled out of storage when I needed to be paraded around. My mother’s not even here today because Nikolai couldn’t sober her up enough to bring her out in public.

I look at my brother standing as best man to Giovanni. Surely, he’ll stop this. But when I study his face and see his clenched jaw, I know that he won’t. He can’t publicly go against our father and maintain any sort of control over anything. I’m not sure he would help if he could. He shares my father’s view on women. It makes me sick that my own brother can be so disgusting.

Behind Nikolai is another dark-haired man, a brother or cousin or something to Giovanni, I’m sure. I never looked into my arranged fiancé. Maybe I should have.

All I know is the general gossip and rumors that float around our world. His father was killed, and Giovanni had to man up and take the reins of his family branch of the Italian mafia.

He wasn’t ready. He’s known as a partier, a drunk, a drug addict, womanizer. He’s known to be a violent drunk. Definitely not someone who has earned the respect and loyalty of his men, but maybe that will change now that he’s in charge. It’s one of the reasons this wedding is happening at all. He needs the strength and stability of my family in his back pocket in case any of his rivals think of moving in and overthrowing him.