Page 43 of Fire and Silk

“I’m not doing this,” he said. “I don’t want this blood money. I’m joining the navy. I can take care of my sister without any of this.”

Chiara just stared at him. Then she nodded slowly and said, “And what if you can’t, Marco? What if one day you’re gone, and she has nothing left? You think I want this life for her? I want hersafe. You both know what’s coming for her if she inherits this on paper but has no one by her side.”

She turned to me then.

I still remember her eyes. That desperate, brittle kind of love only mothers have when they know they’re running out of time.

“With this wealth in her name,” she said softly, “Lira is like prey. I give my blessing, along with my plea. Marry my daughter. Be her official protector. Be her anchor.”

Her voice had wavered slightly at the wordprotector. It wasn’t just symbolic. The role was legal. The documents allowed for a secondary heir to be named—a guardian whose signature could override hers if ever she was incapacitated or in danger.

A failsafe.

Marco groaned. “Oh, come on, Mom.”

“She loves him,” she snapped, turning on him with a tired kind of fury. “Can’t you see? Can you not accept her?”

I hadn’t meant to look away. But I did.

Because the truth was, I did love her.

I always had.

More than even Marco knew.

And maybe that’s why I did it. I looked Chiara dead in the eyes and nodded.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

The pen trembled in her hand.

Chiara signed first, her signature small and sharp like a violin clef. Then she passed the document to me, and I felt it—how final the parchment felt beneath my fingers. She wrote my name with a fountain pen, just below Marco’s, on the line markedSecondary Protector.

That was the legal title. The language is cold and perfunctory.

But it meant everything.

It meant if Marco ever couldn’t shield her, it would fall to me.

It meant she would be mine to guard, to represent, to speak for if she ever lost her voice.

It meant we were bound—not in love, not in vows, but in protection. In blood.

I didn’t say it aloud. But some part of me whispered it in the back of my head:

If you touch her, it will be with a sword in your hand, not a kiss on your lips.

Chiara sealed the document inside a fireproof folio, then gave us access codes to a joint inheritance account—held under a pseudonym and keyed to three names:Lira Marceline Falco, Marco Falco, and Domenico Salviati.

I remember walking out of that room with the whole thing feeling… theatrical. Unreal.

Like we were playing roles in some century-old tragedy.

And yet, life didn’t crack open. It just kept moving.

Marco and I shipped out not long after.

Basic training, then the dive program. We bunked together in Darwin. Got caught in a storm on the Coral Sea. Laughed ourselves breathless after a training op gone wrong and I swallowed seawater through my mask.