Page 35 of The Boss
He pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth. “Possible because of your blood.”
“Yes.”
“Say your name,” he said. “The one you left behind.”
Another of those silences that told him she was standing at a line. Then: “Leticia Dante.” She breathed out. “I haven’t spoken it aloud in a very long time.”
Heat climbed his spine that had nothing to do with the Brand. “You were thrown out.”
“I was cast out,” she said, and there was old pain under the calm tone. “I broke the family’s law. Imarried without a Brand. Ichose a man I believed I could love enough to live with the lack.”
“Bjorn.”
“Yes.”
“And later?”
“I divorced him when it became clear that the lack was a wound we couldn’t heal.” She hesitated. “And because he couldn’t forgive it either.”
Leif stared at his reflection in the glass. It looked like a stranger would look. “Do you have a Brand now?”
“Yes.” Simple. Unapologetic. “I remarried. We didn’t go looking for it. It came. That’s the way of it.”
His hand tightened around the phone. “You didn’t think to tell me?”
“What would’ve it changed for you then? Nothing except to make you look at your own skin and wonder why it was empty. Irefused to add that kind of hunger to your life before it was time.”
He almost asked what sort of man had put his mark on her. He let it go. Sons could be foolish around their mothers and the men who touched them. He wasn’t in the mood for that kind of foolishness.
“So you’re a Dante by blood,” he said. “And you were cast out. Yet you still carry the thing they prize most.”
“I carry the truth of it,” she said. “The Brand isn’t the crest on a door. It isn’t a vote at a table. It is a vow. Ibroke a different vow once. Iwon’t betray this one.”
He took that in, filed it. “There’s more.”
“There is.”
“Say it.”
“I have a brother,” she said. “You know his name as a story the Dantes tell their children when they want to warn them about pride and power. Marco.” A pause. “They call him Marcello in some of those stories. They say Marco died, Iguess because they needed him to be dead.”
The city tilted under Leif’s feet as if a floor had shifted in the building. He stood still until the sensation passed. “And yet.”
“And yet Marcello lived,” she said. “For a time. There are things I don’t know. There are things I know and can’t say without putting you on a path I would rather you not walk.”
“You married a man who built paths like that and made others walk them.” His voice stayed quiet. “You divorced him. You don’t owe him protection now.”
“I owe my son a chance to survive what he’s walking into,” she said, and for the first time the steel inside her showed. “Listen to me. Marco was thrown out before I was. Not for lack of a Brand. For betrayal. The story says he passed secrets. The truth is always more complicated than the story. He fled. He survived because a Severin patriarch saw value in him and because I begged for his life.”
Leif’s jaw set. “Bjorn.”
“Yes.”
“Why did Bjorn save him?”
“Because Marco knew the Dante maps. Because he knew where the currents ran under the ground. Because a man like Bjorn always keeps a key to the door he might need to open later.” A beat. “And because I asked.”
“So you chose the Severins and lost your name. Then you asked the Severins to save the brother the Dantes wanted dead.”He let the shape of it sit between them. “And you thought I would never need to know this.”
