A Scandal in the Headlines(50)

Alessandro sighed, and reached over to pick up the photograph. His uncle and four cousins looked like some kind of near mirror image of his own side of the family, faces frozen into varying degrees of mutiny and forced smiles, all stiffly acquiescing to the annual charade. They were all the same, in the end. All of them locked into this family, their seedy history, this bitter, futile fight. Sometimes he found himself envious of Angelo, the only family member missing from the picture, because at least he’d been spared the worst of it.

His sister, Rosa—because he couldn’t think of her any other way, he didn’t care who her father was—smiled genuinely. Alessandro and Santo stood close together, looking as if they were biting back laughter, though Alessandro could no longer remember what about. His father glared, as haughty and arrogant as he’d been to his grave. And his mother looked as she always did: ageless and angry. Always so very, very angry.

“You should never have stayed away so long,” she’d seethed at him earlier today. “It looks like weakness. As if you’ve been off licking your wounds while your cousin has stolen your bride and made our side of the family the butt of every joke in Palermo!”

“Let him,” Alessandro had retorted.

“Surely you don’t plan to let the insult stand?” Carmela Corretti had gasped. “Our family’s honor demands—”

“Honor?” Alessandro had interrupted her icily. “Not the word I’d choose, Mother. And certainly not if I were you.”

She’d sucked in a breath, as if he’d wounded her.

But Alessandro knew the woman who’d raised him. He knew her with every hollow, bitter, blackened part of his Corretti soul. She was immune to hurt. And she always returned a slap with cannon fire.

“You’re just like your father,” she’d said viciously. And it had speared straight through him, hitting its mark. “All of that polish and pretense on the surface, and rotten to the core within. And we know where that leads, don’t we?”

He was so tired of this, he thought now. Of this feud that rolled on and on and did nothing but tear them all apart. Of the vitriol that passed for family communication, the inevitability of the next fight. Would they all end up like his father and uncle, burned on their mysterious funeral pyre, while the whole world looked on sagely and observed that they’d brought it upon themselves? Violent lives, desperate acts—it all led to a terrible end. The cycle went on and on and on.

And was Alessandro really any different? Carlo Corretti had never met a person he wouldn’t exploit for his own purposes. He’d never been honest when he could cheat, had never used persuasion when violence worked instead, and he’d never cared in the least that his hands were covered in blood.

“Right and wrong are what I say they are,” he’d told Alessandro once, after ten-year-old Alessandro had walked in on him with one of his mistresses. There hadn’t been the slightest hint of conscience in his gaze as he’d sprawled there in the bed he shared with Carmela. Right there in the family home. “Are you going to tell me any different, boy?”

Alessandro had hated him. God, how he’d hated him.

He looked up as if he could see Elena through the floors that separated them. She deserved better than this, and he knew it. She wasn’t the Battaglia girl, auctioned off by her father to the highest bidder and fully aware of what joining the Corretti family meant—even if, as it turned out, she’d preferred a different Corretti. Elena had already escaped Niccolo Falco and whatever grim fate he’d had in store for her.

If he was any kind of man, if he was truly not like his viciously conniving father, he would set her free immediately.

Instead, he’d manipulated her, and he’d done it deliberately. She didn’t have to marry him to be safe; he had teams of lawyers who could help her and her village. Who could deal with the likes of Niccolo Falco in the course of a single morning.

His mother was right. He was following in his father’s footsteps. He couldn’t pretend any differently. But in the end, even that didn’t matter. He wanted her too much, too badly, to do what he knew was right.

He would do his penance instead, as small as it was in the grand scheme of things. He would keep his hands off her until he married her. He would torture himself, and pretend that made this all right. That it made him something other than what he was: his father’s son.

Alessandro simply didn’t have it in him to let her go.


Four days later, by a special license she hadn’t asked how he’d managed to obtain, Elena married Alessandro Corretti in a small civil ceremony. It was 10:35 in the morning, in a small village outside of Palermo that Elena had never heard of before. But then, she didn’t know the name of the man who married them, either, though he had introduced himself as the local mayor. Nor did she know either of the two witnesses who stood with them, both happy to take handfuls of Alessandro’s euros for so little of their time.