The dress weighed more than the truth anyone had told her in the last six months.
Vittoria Marchetti stood in front of the mirror, watching a stranger get laced into ivory silk by hands that weren't gentle, just efficient. Her mother's old maid, Rosa, pulled the corset strings with the same grip she used when Tori was twelve and needed to be squeezed into obedience for church.
"Breathe out," Rosa muttered.
"I have been breathing out for a decade," Tori said. "Nothing changes."
Rosa didn't laugh. Nobody laughed anymore in the Marchetti house, not since her father had signed away her name on a piece of paper thinner than the excuse he gave her.
A truce. A gesture of peace. A chance for our family to survive.
What he meant was: a body to hand over so the wolves stop circling the rest of us.
Through the window, Tori could see the cathedral steps already crowded with black cars, black suits, black umbrellas held over women who wore more jewelry than warmth. The Salvatore family didn't do anything subtle. They did spectacle, because spectacle was a threat wrapped in silk, and everyone in this city knew how to read it.
She was marrying into the family that had spent ten years bleeding hers dry.
"You look beautiful," Rosa said, because it was the only thing left to say.
"I look like a flag someone's about to plant on a grave," Tori said, and turned from the mirror before she had to watch her own face agree.
Dante Salvatore did not believe in nerves. Nerves were for men who hadn't already decided how a room would end before they walked into it. He stood at the altar with his hands folded, jaw set, and let the cathedral's gold light fall over him like it belonged to him, because in this city, most things eventually did.
His cousin Marco leaned close. "You could still walk."
"I could," Dante agreed. "I won't."
"She's Marchetti blood. You really think a marriage certificate is going to stop her father from putting a knife in your back the second this truce stops being convenient?"
Dante's eyes didn't move from the cathedral doors. "I don't need the marriage to stop him. I need it to buy six months. After that, it won't matter what the paper says."
Marco fell quiet, the way men did when they remembered exactly which family they'd married into.
Because Dante Salvatore hadn't agreed to this wedding for peace.
He'd agreed to it because a wife inside Marchetti's own bloodline gave him something better than any spy, any informant, any bought judge on the payroll.
It gave him access.
And access was the only currency that mattered when you were quietly building the case that would bury her father alive.
The organ began. The doors opened.
He almost felt something, watching her walk down the aisle in white, veil trembling with each step like she was fighting her own body not to run.
Almost.
Tori kept her eyes forward because if she looked at the crowd, she would see her father's face, and if she saw her father's face, she might finally understand what it looked like to sell your own daughter and still sleep that night.
She reached the altar. The man waiting there was taller than she remembered from the one dinner their families had forced them through, broader, colder, watching her the way men watched things they already owned.
"You look like you're walking to your execution," Dante said quietly, only for her.
"Aren't I?" she said back, just as quiet.
Something flickered behind his eyes. Not softness. Calculation.
"Depends," he said, "on how well you learn to survive in my house."
The priest began. Tori barely heard the words. She was too busy memorizing the exits, an old habit her mother had taught her before she died, back when survival still meant something simpler than marriage vows.
I do, she said, when it was time, and the words tasted like a door closing behind her.
I do, he said, and his voice didn't shake at all.
The reception was worse. Champagne and violin music dressed up a room full of people who would gladly watch either family bleed out if it meant a better seat at the next table. Tori danced when she was told to dance, smiled when the cameras came close, let Dante's hand rest at the small of her back like a leash disguised as affection.
"You're good at this," he murmured against her ear, spinning her slowly across the floor.
"I've had practice pretending," she said. "You should know. Your family's the reason I learned."
His hand tightened, just slightly, at her waist. "Careful, Mrs. Salvatore."
"Don't call me that."
"It's your name now."
"It's a name I didn't choose."
"Neither did I," he said, and for one unguarded second, something almost human passed over his face. "We're both wearing chains tonight, Vittoria. Yours just come with better jewelry."
She almost believed there was a man underneath the ice. Almost.
Then she saw it. A folder, half hidden beneath a stack of gift boxes on the table nearest the exit, corner peeking out just enough to catch her eye. Marchetti family crest stamped in the corner. Her father's handwriting is visible on the edge of a page.
Her stomach dropped.
That folder had no business being here. Not at a wedding. Not in Salvatore's hands.
She pulled back from Dante's arms mid-song, ignoring the way eyes turned toward them.
"I need air," she said.
"Tori—"
But she was already moving through the crowd, heart hammering, weaving toward that table like the answer to every question she'd been too afraid to ask for the last six months was sitting three feet away, waiting for her to finally open her eyes.
She reached the folder. Flipped it open with trembling hands.
And found her father's signature, dated four months before the engagement was ever announced, on a contract that had nothing to do with peace.
It was a sale.
Her father hadn't been forced into this marriage to save his family.
He'd been paid.
Behind her, a voice she hadn't heard approach went low and dangerous in her ear.
"That," Dante said, closing his hand around her wrist, "was not supposed to be found tonight."
