Page 5 of A Trap So Flawless (Titans and Tyrants #4)
Valentina
O ne week in Montréal and everything’s arranged.
Tomorrow, apparently, I will be marrying Salvatore Di Mauro.
I say apparently, because I still don’t really believe it’s going to happen.
I don’t think Darragh will let it.
Even as we gather for the rehearsal dinner and I prepare to meet Sal for the first time, I still don’t accept that this is real.
Mamma fusses with stray strands of my hair as we enter the large restaurant for the rehearsal dinner.
My hair has been trimmed and highlighted within an inch of its life, shimmering honey and gold breaking up the dark shade I’ve worn since August. New hair, new me, I guess.
Or maybe I should say old hair, old me. Since I always used to wear it lighter like this.
It was only that brief stretch of summer, from August until mid-September, that I had it back to its near-black natural colour.
They echo through my head. Words wrapped in the rough smoke of Darragh’s voice. The memory of what he said to me on that rooftop.
This hair colour suits you.
He was the only one who said it. The only one who liked it. That natural slice of myself.
Oh, Jesus. If I’m going to start whining that Darragh Gowan was the only one who saw the real me…
It’s just too pathetic to think about. Even if it might be true.
“Stop poking at her like she’s your pet poodle,” Papà grunts at Mamma. The little jabs spoken through Mamma are the closest he’s come to speaking directly to me. Mamma’s hand drops at the same moment that my teeth clamp together. Pet.
I force my jaw to unlock.
“He used to call me that, you know,” I say lightly. Breezily, even.
“What?” Papà says distractedly as he leads us towards a large table with a white tablecloth near the back of the restaurant.
“Pet. I was called that by my fiancé,” I say, flashing my teeth in a falsely sweet smile. “You know. My other fiancé. Darragh Gowan.”
I think Papà might actually burst a blood vessel in his forehead. His face and neck flush dark with rage. Mamma tenses, and he takes a step towards me, as if he’s planning on dragging me right out of the restaurant.
“Do not speak that fucking name in front of me,” Papà hisses under his breath. “And don’t even think about speaking it in front of Sal. He’s not a man to be trifled with.”
Not a man to be trifled with. Ha. Yeah, I got that impression, considering his last wife – young and healthy, by all accounts – just died recently. A tragic fall down the stairs, from what I’ve heard.
Would be even more tragic if she were pushed.
By her husband.
Who is now going to be my husband.
Apparently.
I turn from my papà’s enraged face, twisting to look back towards the door. As if Darragh might walk through it at any moment. An uninvited ghost.
An apparition.
But all I see is late-afternoon sun streaming in through the glass, illuminating bottles of wine and beautiful tiles and Curse, who stands near the door beside one of Sal’s men.
A waiter in white directs us further into the restaurant, speaking Italian in polite tones to my parents.
We resume our trek towards the large table at the back.
Only now, there are two men sitting there who weren’t there before.
Both dark-haired and dressed in suits. I know immediately that the one on the right is Salvatore Di Mauro.
Mamma has shoved his picture under my nose several times over the last week, the action usually accompanied by nervously uttered lines like, “So good-looking for his age, no?”
He is decent-looking, I won’t deny her that.
He’s got broad shoulders, a nice jaw, and the few strands of silver at his temples add an air of sophistication instead of age.
But he doesn’t have hair the colour of dried blood.
He doesn’t have the wounds I gave him inked into his skin.
He doesn’t look at me like he can’t quite tell if he wants to strangle me or fuck me.
In fact, Sal looks at me without any sort of obvious feeling at all.
There’s a bland, uncaring sort of calculation in his gaze that leaves me cold.
He’s sizing me up the way a man buying a car might.
No, not even a car. Something much less consequential.
Like he’s buying a new water filter for his fridge or a shirt he never plans to wear.
Something he doesn’t give a single fuck about.
The man beside him – who must be his consigliere – rises at our approach. Sal doesn’t.
Not at first, at least. It’s only when Papà greets him that he finally stands to shake Papà’s hand.
“You remember my wife, Carlotta,” Papà grunts, releasing Sal’s hand and gesturing towards Mamma. Mamma takes up her practised, polished mafioso-wife smile and leans in for two kisses, one on each cheek.
“And my daughter.” Papà says my name with a chilling finality. “Valentina.”
I could laugh. I could run. I could pull out the ring Darragh gave me – the one I’ve got in my clutch purse right now, though I still don’t quite know why I’ve brought it – and brandish it mockingly in Sal’s face.
I don’t do any of that. I smile serenely and lean forward for kisses of my own, ignoring a sudden tightness in my throat. Like an olive getting stuck.
Sal grips my elbows. The shaved line of his jaw scrapes my cheeks.
When he pulls back and lets me go, a short woman with big hair and even bigger boobs joins our group. She is Sal’s consigliere’s wife, and she begins chatting with the others, leaving Sal and me in a little bubble of quiet to the side.
“Nice place,” I say blithely. I know he owns this restaurant, though I didn’t notice what it was called.
Sal sits back down in his chair.
“ Sofia’s ?” he says.
I freeze, my cheeks twitching with the effort to keep my smile on my face. Sofia was his late wife’s name.
“It was her project,” he goes on, waving a casual hand through the air. “Rename it Valentina’s if you want.”
Well, isn’t that just fucking ghoulish. We’re sitting in the restaurant his late wife ran – a place literally named after her – while we prepare for our wedding tomorrow.
Sorry , I say silently, as if the spirit of Sofia Di Mauro can hear me.
But I sit down beside her husband anyway.
The next morning goes so smoothly that I’m becoming sickeningly aware of the fact that I may actually end up married by the end of the day.
During a quiet moment after getting my hair done and before putting on the dress, I begin to frantically consider how I might escape.
We’re getting ready in the same townhouse we’ve been staying in this entire time – one of Papà’s Montréal properties – but there’s no easy way out.
There is a window with a fire escape leading down from my large bedroom, but two of Sal’s men are stationed on the ground below.
“Come away from the window, amore ,” Mamma says, her brow furrowed with concern. Like she’s worried I’ll yank it open and jump.
I’m not suicidal. But I’d risk breaking an ankle to get the hell out of here.
“It’s time to put on the gown,” she says.
The hair stylists and makeup artists have long since departed, leaving only Mamma and me in the room.
We’re wearing matching ivory silk robes.
The dress she chose for me, altered in a flurry of activity over the last few days, lies like a white silk abomination – or accusation – on the bed.
“I’m not putting that on.”
She inhales through her nose, then pinches the bridge of it.
“Don’t do this. Not today. My head is already aching. I can’t deal with both you and your papà like this.”
“Then don’t. Just take me back to Toronto.”
She laughs, and it’s brittle.
“Then what? Wait for your papà to come drag you back?” She shakes her head, then points a dark blue fingernail at the dress. “You know if you don’t put it on your papà will come in here and hold you down and make you do it.”
It seems like a grim metaphor for the entire situation. Not just putting on the dress.
Getting married in the first place.
It’s strange how much more fight I feel like I have in me this time. I hadn’t ever planned on rejecting or trying to wiggle my way out of my marriage to Dario. So why now?
Could be the fact that my new husband may or may not have killed his first wife, and it’s a sense of self-preservation. Or…
Darragh’s face is in my head. Those strange eyes, swallowing me whole.
Is it crazy? To feel like I’m betraying him?
When he betrayed me by arranging our secret engagement in the first place?
“Valentina!” Mamma snaps, dragging me back to reality. “Please! I do not want to have to tell your papà you are not cooperating!”
I don’t want that either. Because she’s right.
Papà will hold me down and make Mamma yank the dress on, no matter how hard I kick.
I could try to ruin the dress – spill something on it, rip it – but I have a feeling Papà would drag me down the aisle in nothing but this thin, silky robe I’m wearing if the dress became an issue.
I can’t stop this. Not yet, anyway. Maybe the only one who can is…
No. Stop . I can’t keep relying on Darragh to come and save me.
After today…
He might not want to.
I have a feeling I’m not the only one who is going to – unfairly, unreasonably – think today is a betrayal to him.
The heat I experienced with Darragh, those odd moments of softness behind the swinging blade of his being… It was like a fever dream. Intensely vivid. But temporary. Dark and strange and in some ways, exquisite.
But not real.
What’s real is the dress on the bed. My papà’s anger. The man waiting for me at that church. The church near the restaurant that bears his dead wife’s name, where we will host the reception.