Page 23 of Bones of Revenge and Reckoning

I sip at my martini and stare at them both as they watch me, impassive. “Okay, so you don’t want me to be an obedient little wife, but you want to whore me out? Your own daughter.”

“Matteo and Clifford are losing their grips on things.” Mamma sighs. “A strong woman could run that family in ways that suit us. Matteo will see it as a merger, but it will be a takeover.”

“Dear God.” I shake my head. “Mamma you don’t know what you are asking. I … me and him … there is history.”

My father’s face turns puce, and I wait for him to explode, but Mamma turns to him and gives him a pleading stare. “How so?” she asks.

“I thought I loved him.”

“Did you screw him?” Babbo asks crudely.

“No.”

He nods and some of the fight seems to go out of him. Patriarchal idiot. I’ve screwed men. Does he think I’m still a virgin?

Mamma is thinking. Plotting, scheming. It’s what she does best. She doesn’t have the power, Babbo does, so Mamma has to twist him around her finger to get what she wants.

“My darling,” she says to me, “if you’ve carried that heartache all these years, that’s even more reason for you to do as we ask. Infiltrate the Mancini business and make him fall in love with you. When you have him weak in the knees and falling at your feet, that’s when you strike like a cobra and bring his world down around him. It’s the perfect plan, Renata. It gives you so much power, don’t you see?”

I shake my head. Part of me is loathe to admit the temptation in her words. I could be the one to make him hurt this time. I could show him what it feels like to be betrayed. What if I can’t though? What if I fall for him all over again? Or worse, he doesn’t want me now? “He might not like me, Mamma.” My voice sounds so small. So weak. I hate myself in this moment, showing Mamma my underbelly.

“Daughter, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. You make movie stars seem ordinary. Models, drab. God didn’t make you this way for nothing. It can’t be. We made your brother marry for the family, and now we are asking you to do this. It doesn’t even have to be a marriage if you don’t want to go that far. Just an affair of the heart. Make him fall for you. Then manipulate him to our ends.”

Mother is devious. But she's also right. I’ve lived my life carrying the weight of his deception like a battle wound. My family had clipped my wings and put me in a cage, but instead of saving me, Matteo left me there to rot. I’ve lived my life in search of power and control, only obtaining it through short-lived moments of sex and seduction. If I do this, if I manipulate Matteo Mancini... Mold him to my desires, or to my family’s wishes, or even destroy him. His fate would rest in my hands.

I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a certain temptation to that. After all, he destroyed my heart once before. Ruined my damn life, that boy did.

I’m still not swayed, but then my mamma says the one thing guaranteed to challenge me. “Of course, you might not be able to pull this off. It’s a very difficult thing we are asking of you. Making a man fall in love with you is about more than pure beauty. Maybe the challenge is too much.”

She smiles at me, letting those words hang in the air.

“It wont be too much,” I say.

She grins, and Babbo smirks. They’ve just manipulated me but I can’t stand being told I’m not capable of something.

“I can do it. If I want to.”

“Good, then prove it.”

Gauntlet thrown, she kisses me on the cheek and sashays out of the room.

I wander to the window and look out. Can I make Matteo Mancini fall in love with me? I can certainly try. It might be fun.

Or it might burn the singed scars he left behind.

There’s a reason I never gave him another chance to wreck me, and if I do this, if I act on this crazy scheme suggested by my family, I risk my heart.

Matteo, though.

Unfinished business.

Revenge waiting to be executed.

I’m going to try to make my childhood sweetheart who betrayed me fall in love with me all over again.

God help me.

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