Fury shot through me and I had a fucking hard time controlling it. I unfastened Anna’s arms and put her down. “Thanks,” she said with a huge grin before she started running toward Aria, unaware of the tension in the room. Valentina gripped Dante’s arm and tugged until he finally sank back down on his chair. Anna jumped onto Aria, who hugged the girl to her chest and kissed her cheek. Aria looked fucking ecstatic with the kid in her arm.
I approached the table slowly, still wary of Dante, and his eyes told me that he shared the sentiment. Aria gave me a meaningful look.
“Dante, perhaps now would be a good time to talk in private,” I said in a civil tone.
Dante gave a sharp nod and stood.
Val touched his forearm briefly, and I caught the warning in her gaze. Aria, too, was pleading me with her eyes to keep it together.
Dante and I walked out of the room and he led me out into the garden. The cold helped to clear my mind. “I am well aware that you don’t like me around your wife and child,” I said. “And I don’t like you around Aria either.”
Dante inclined his head. “We are at peace, but in the past that hasn’t always prevented accidents.”
He was probably referring to the truce between the Famiglia, the Camorra and the Outfit that had been broken by the Camorra by murdering the wife of the Boss of the Outfit. That had happened sixty years ago, but some things were remembered.
“We are both men of honor, Dante. You don’t like me and I don’t like you, but I can assure you that your wife and children are safe from me. I don’t prey on the weak.”
Dante gave me a closed-lipped smile. “Will that still be the case if truce was ever broken between us?”
“I could ask you the same—would Aria be safe if there was war between us?”
Dante didn’t say anything because we both knew that war was an unpredictable beast. “She’d be safe from certain things in my territory even in times of war. No woman, enemy or not, will ever have to fear rape in my territory.”
“That’s something I can guarantee as well.”
Neither of us said any more because there really wasn’t anything else to say. I knew that the voices in the Outfit that wanted to cancel the truce had grown louder, as they had in the Famiglia. It was old hatred that had only been buried, but not forgotten.I’d attended countless weddings from a young age. They had all been tense to some degree, as was to be expected with arranged marriages, but Scuderi’s wedding to the Brasci girl topped it all. The girl was younger than Aria, and Aria’s father was over fifty. That was sick even by our standards. But that on its own wouldn’t have made me tense. No, that was all thanks to Romero and Lily. They had both been gone after the ceremony. It didn’t take a genius to guess what they were doing. To hell with them. She was supposed to marry Brasci tomorrow!
“I don’t get it. She’s younger than two of his daughters,” I said with a nod toward Scuderi and his too young wife. He was grinning all over his face. No wonder. He’d get to pop a girl’s cherry thirty years his junior.
“Some traditions are harder to change than others,” Dante said, but I caught the hint of disapproval for his Consigliere’s choice. We’d returned to being civil, at least in front of our gathered men. It wouldn’t do to send them the wrong message. Brasci and Scuderi had made the arrangement and as I knew very well, the influence of a Capo regarding family matters was very limited.
“I’m glad that Valentina is close to my age. It makes it easier to find topics to discuss,” Dante said.
I nodded. He had married a woman who had been married before. That had broken with tradition, but it was his choice. He couldn’t force the same choice on others. If it were my choice alone, I’d have stopped the tradition of bloody sheets long ago, but I had a family I needed to appease. Capo or not, I needed their support. Ruling over the East Coast wasn’t a one-man show.
His attention shifted past me toward a young girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen, with the same blonde hair as Dante. I’d often wondered why the Outfit had so many blondes. Perhaps it was because many of the families were originally from Genoa and Bologna in the north of Italy. The girl approached us. She held herself with surprising pride for someone that young, but she didn’t meet my gaze, only curtsied briefly before she turned to Dante.
“Mom told me to find you for a dance,” she said in a lilting voice. Her eyes darted up to me, cheeks flushing. This must have been one of her first social events. It was obvious that she was unaccustomed to males that didn’t belong to her family. And I knew why she had been sent over, Dante’s sister had probably picked up on the underlying tension between her brother and me.