Two days before my wedding to a man I've spoken to exactly twice, I'm standing in a fitting room surrounded by women who think this is cause for celebration. Romano wives in silk blouses, Greek cousins whose names I've already forgotten, a future sister-in-law who keeps touching my arm like we're friends. Champagne appears every twelve minutes. I've counted. It's the only thing keeping me sane — counting the intervals between glasses, between compliments, between the moments when someone looks at me with that particular blend of pity and fascination that sayspoor thing, she has no idea what she's walked into.
I have an idea. I've had an idea since I was sixteen and watched my father run this family from the head of our kitchen table with blood still drying on his knuckles. I know exactly what this world costs. The difference between me and these women is that I chose to walk in with my eyes open.
Or at least, that's what I keep telling myself.
"You're so lucky," one of them says — Gianna, maybe, or Valentina, one of the Romano women with perfect nails and a husband who probably hasn't touched her with tenderness in years. "Nico is... well." She fans herself. The others laugh.
"He's very private," another adds, leaning close. "Never the same woman twice. And after..." She drops her voice. "Cold as ice. Just…gone. Like it never happened."
They wait for my reaction. I give them nothing. I've been managing men's expectations since I was fifteen. Managing women's gossip is easier.
"Good thing I run warm," I say. Flat. Dry. They laugh because they don't know what else to do.
They're still talking about him — his suits, his shoulders, his reputation — and all I can think about is the way his fingers felt when he tucked my hair behind my ear yesterday. The calluses on his palm. The warmth of his skin against mine, brief and deliberate and nothing like what these women are describing. They're talking about a man they've watched from across rooms. I'm the only one in this boutique who knows what his hands feel like. The private weight of that knowledge sits in my chest like a coal, glowing quietly, and I press my champagne glass against my collarbone to cool the heat I can feel rising in my throat.
The door chimes and Elena walks in carrying champagne that probably costs more than my first car. Two bottles. She hands one to the boutique attendant without looking at her — not rude, just the casual authority of someone who's never had to think about whether her credit card will clear.
"Ladies." She smiles warm, easy, the kind of smile that reshuffles the room's hierarchy without anyone noticing. The gossipy women recede. Elena has that gravity, the quiet pull of someone who belongs to this world at a cellular level. She crosses to me and her face shifts into something softer, more private. Concerned.
"Have they been terrible?"
"Only moderately."
"Don't listen to them. Half of them married for position and the other half married for fear, and they'll spend the rest of their lives justifying it by telling you what a prize you've won." She pours me a glass — fills it higher than polite, which I appreciate more than she knows. "Nico is... complicated. But not cruel. There's a difference most of these women never learned."
"And you know the difference?"
"I grew up watching him." Something flickers in her eyes, there and gone, like a match struck in a dark room. Not long enough to read. Not short enough to miss. "He'll be good to you. I really believe that."
The words land with warmth. Real warmth, the kind that makes my throat tighten because I didn't realize how badly I needed someone in this world to say something human to me. My brothers love me, but they can't guide me through this — Cormac's been angry since the meeting, Declan won't look me in the eye, Finn keeps sending me legal documents I didn't ask for, and Ronan drew me a sketch of the Boston skyline last night and left it on my pillow without a word, which was the kindest and most useless gesture of them all.
Elena isn't family, and she isn't an obligation. She's choosing to be here. And in a room full of women who see me as Nico Konstantinos's new acquisition, she sees me as a person who might need a hand to hold.
She steers me away from the racks the Romano women have been pulling from — too flashy, too much beading, dresses designed to turn a bride into a chandelier. "You're not the crystal type," she says. "You need something that moves with you. Something that looks like it was your idea, not theirs."
She's right. I hate that everyone around Nico seems to read me better than I read myself.
In the fitting room, Elena helps me with a zipper on a cream gown that's close but not right. Her fingers are cool and efficient on my back. I look up and catch her reflection in the mirror, just for a second, unguarded, before she knows I'm watching.
Something crosses her face. Pain. Or envy. Or grief. The kind of expression that has layers, that can't be reduced to a single word because it's carrying too many at once, all of them pressed into a single unguarded second.
Then it's gone. Her smile returns. Seamless.
"You must think I'm crazy," I say. "Agreeing to this."
Elena smooths the fabric at my shoulders, meeting my eyes in the mirror. "I think you're doing what women like us have always done." Her hands still. "Surviving beautifully."
Women like us.She says it like we're the same. Maybe we are — women navigating worlds built by men, finding our power in the margins. Or maybe she's telling me something else entirely, something I won't understand until later.
"This isn't the one," she says, studying the dress. "Too stiff. You need to be able to breathe."
She's right about that too.
My phone buzzes in my bag. His number — I saved it after his text two nights ago, filed under just the letter N because giving him a full contact entry felt like conceding something I wasn't ready to name.
The dress in the back. The one they haven't shown you. Try that one.
I stare at the message. He's not here. He hasn't been here. Which means he either called ahead and arranged this, or he knows this boutique well enough to know what they keep in the back for clients who don't have to ask for it.