Chapter Two

For a second, I don’t understand. Then I do.

It sounds archaic. Like something out of an old history textbook. I wait for the part where he tells me I misheard him.

“You’re going to marry Luca Bellandi.”

It is like a slap I didn’t see coming.

I shoot to my feet. “Absolutely not.”

“I was not asking you, I was telling you, as a courtesy.”

“You don’t get to decide that. I’m not a toy. I’m not something you trade to?—”

“He’s already on his way. I wanted to give you a chance to process, before he arrives.”

That silences me.

My ears ring.

The Bellandi name is a legend. Whispers in marble halls. Ghost stories dressed in silk and smoke. And Luca—he’s the worst of them. The one they call the wolf. A man who took over his family at thirty and left nothing but silence in his wake.

And now I’m supposed to marry him. He’s an enigma, I have often wondered if he even exists.

My voice breaks. “You can’t be serious.”

“You’ll be safe,” my uncle insists. “That was my only condition. He gets your hand—not your loyalty. Not your obedience. He wants a wife in name only.”

As if that makes it better. So now I am a pretty ornament.

I open my mouth to argue, but footsteps echo down the hall—slow, sure, final.

Then the door opens.

And Luca Bellandi walks in. He is real. He exists.

The room seems to shrink around him. He’s taller than I expected, broad-shouldered in a tailored black suit, shirt unbuttoned at the collar like power is something casual. His hair is dark, swept back. A scar cuts clean across his jaw. And his eyes—Christ. They’re cold. Green. Unblinking. Like a forest after a storm.

He doesn’t smile.

Doesn’t speak.

Just looks at me like he already owns me.

And somehow, he does.

He takes the seat opposite mine. Our knees brush.

“You’re Emilia,” he says.

Not a question. A fact.

I nod, but my voice is gone, and I can’t make myself speak.

He looks at me like I’m something valuable he intends to keep. Something he’s already decided belongs on his shelf.

“I’ll keep you safe,” he says, voice low and rough. “You won’t be touched. You won’t be involved. I will keep my word to your father. But once you wear my ring, you’re mine.”

“I didn’t agree to any of this.”