Chapter 2
PART 5: The Velvet Cage
The hotel lounge was decorated in muted shades of slate and champagne, filled with the soft clink of fine china and the distant, polite hum of classical piano music. Sunlight cut through the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting long, sharp shadows across the low table between us. Victoria sat across from me in a tailored cream suit that looked like armor. Not a single strand of her dark hair was out of place. Her diamond tennis bracelet caught the light, and on her left hand rested the platinum band Dante had slid onto her finger three years ago.
She looked at her hands for a long time before she looked at me. When her eyes finally met mine, there were no tears. There was only a profound, exhausting weariness that aged her beyond her thirty-two years.
"Since I was nineteen, Elena," Victoria said, her voice quiet, steady, and devoid of the vanity I had spent three years resenting. "I knew when our father made the agreement with Dante’s father after the shipping docks went into foreclosure. You were sixteen. You were still studying for your high school exams and dreaming about art school in Florence."
The breath left my lungs in an uneven gasp. "Dad knew?"
"Dad arranged it," Victoria corrected bitterly. "Our family owed thirty million dollars to creditors who didn't take payment plans. The Morettis absorbed our debt. In return, they wanted a wife from an old-line Chicago family with no scandals, someone willing to sit on charity boards, hostess political fundraisers, sign ironclad non-disclosure agreements, and keep their mouth shut when the family businesses were investigated by federal prosecutors. Dad offered me. I said yes because if I hadn't, the house would have been seized, the bank accounts frozen, and you would have never gone to college."
I stared at her, feeling the floor tilt beneath my feet. "And Dante?"
"Dante was twenty-one. His father gave him an ultimatum: fulfill the dynastic alliance, or be completely disinherited and cast out of every corporate holding the family owned. Dante accepted it as an abstract future obligation. He thought he had ten years before anyone would enforce it. Then, two years later, he met you at the gallery benefit. He didn't know you were my younger sister until weeks after you fell for each other."
"He never told me," I whispered, the words burning my throat. "For eight years, Victoria. Eight years of holidays, family dinners, birthdays. You sat across from us at Thanksgiving dinner and watched him hold my hand under the table!"