Merciless Contract: The Syndicate's Unwanted Wife novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Only One Person Knew

Gemma knows only Rosanna used that pet name, Raffaele doesn't care, sets his terms, pins her wrist to the door, and locks her out on the terrace in the cold.

"I didn't write these," Gemma said.

Raffaele put the phone back in his jacket.

"Everyone says that once the messages are on a screen."

"They came from my number, but my phone has been in my stepmother's purse for a week."

"Convenient."

"Ask her to show it to you."

"I asked her this morning," he said. "She cried and said she'd hoped it wasn't true."

Gemma stared at him.

Rosanna had cried over her this morning, too, with pins in her mouth and her hands in Gemma's hair.

"Look at the last line," she said. "Look at how it's signed."

"Your Gemmina. I read it twice."

"My mother called me that. She died when I was eight, and nobody has said it to me since."

"Then you told it to someone."

"I told it to nobody," Gemma said. "My mother's letters are in a box in the house Rosanna took from me. She's read every one of them."

Raffaele looked at her for a long moment.

She could see him turning it over and putting it away.

"Cheap," he said at last. "Blaming the woman who held your veil."

"She took my phone."

"You gave it to her."

"Because she said your men read everything!"

"They do." He shrugged his jacket off and dropped it over a chair. "That's what a phone is for."

He walked to the window and stood with his back to her.

"Fiammetta Cattaneo was promised to me for two years," he said. "She was the one thing in this deal I wanted."

"Two nights before the wedding she got sick at your engagement dinner, and then she was gone."

"Your stepmother says you poured her wine."

"Rosanna poured it. I was in the kitchen, washing the glasses."

"Of course you were."

He turned around.

"Here are the terms. Listen once, because I won't say them twice."

"You have the east wing. I don't go in it, and you don't come into mine."

"You don't touch me. I don't touch you."

"In public you're my wife. You smile, you hold my arm, and you say nothing about me that I haven't heard first."

"In three years your name comes off my life and you walk out with what you came with."

"Which is nothing," he added.

Gemma folded her arms over the bare shoulders of the wedding dress.

"I have terms too."

"You don't."

"My mother's house on Hanover Street. Rosanna put it in her own name the month after the funeral."

"I want the deed. I want my mother's portrait out of the dining room, and I want my own phone back in my hand."

Raffaele laughed once, short and unpleasant.

"You want the deed to a house in the North End."

"I want what's mine."

"You're a girl who was sold for two hundred million dollars of freight contracts. You own nothing."

"Then I'll keep your phone," Gemma said.

She lunged for it.

Her hand had barely gone inside his jacket when he caught her wrist and turned her.

The door hit her back.

His body stopped one inch from hers, and his hand held her wrist flat against the wood above her head.

He smelled of cedar and smoke.

He was breathing slower than she was.

"What did I just say," he said, low.

"You said you wouldn't touch me."

"Then why are you the one who moved?"

His eyes dropped to her mouth, and came back up too fast.

Her pulse was going hard against his thumb, and she knew he could feel it.

She told herself it was fear.

His hand opened and he stepped back.

"Deed, portrait, phone," he said. "You'll earn them. I'll decide how."

"And if I don't want to earn them from you?"

"Then you'll want nothing, for three years."

"Get out," Gemma said.

"It's my suite."

"Then I'll get out."

She snatched the veil off the floor and went for the door.

He was in front of it before she touched the handle.

"Where?"

"Anywhere that isn't where you are."

"You told a ballroom you were sold in two hours," he said, very softly. "You said it with a microphone."

"I told them the truth."

"In my city, you don't say the truth with my name on it."

He opened the door.

Two guards stood in the hall, tall men in dark coats.

"My wife needs air," Raffaele said. "She's been hot all night. Give her the terrace."

Gemma's stomach dropped.

"Raffaele."

It was the first time she had said his name.

He glanced at her, and something moved behind his face and was gone.

"Don't let her in until I say," he told the guards.

They took her by the elbows.

She was walked down a corridor and through glass doors and set on the stone terrace in her thin silk wedding dress, with the door locked behind her.

It was November in Boston.

The wind off the harbor came straight through the dress.

Gemma wrapped her arms around her ribs and turned to look back at the glass.

Raffaele stood inside with one hand in his pocket and watched her through it.

He did not look away first.

Neither did she.

Her teeth had started to chatter when she said, loud enough for him to read her lips, "You will beg me for this."

The lights in the suite went out.

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