Chapter 1 The Daughter They Picked To Sacrifice

Bella's POV 

“You’re marrying Matteo Moretti,” Sofia said.

She was leaning against the doorframe with a glass of champagne in her hand, looking at the makeup woman packing her brushes away, and she said it casually.

I laughed.

I actually laughed out loud, because it was the only thing that made sense. “Very funny.”

“Do I look like I’m being funny?”

“Sofia, you just got home yesterday.”

“Two days ago.” She came in and sat on the end of the bed, arranging her skirt. “And that’s rather the point, isn’t it? I’m home. So they don’t need to send me anymore.”

I suddenly looked down at myself. The expensive red dress somebody had laid out for me an hour ago. The earrings. The shoes.

My mother had come to the storage room to find me tonight. She had held out her hand and said I have something for you, and I had looked at that hand for maybe three seconds too long, and then I had taken it.

In this house, kindness was a bill you paid later.

I just hadn’t seen the number yet.

“Send you where?” I asked.

“Oh, Bella.” She took a sip. “They owe the Morettis money. A lot of it. The kind you don’t get to pay back in installments. The Morettis want a marriage.” She said it lightly, like gossip. “Papa agreed months ago, back when he still thought his only daughter was dead and buried and he had nothing left to lose. Then I turned up.”

“The second son,” she went on. “Matteo. You know about him. Everybody knows about him.”

I did know him.

I knew the stories about Matteo Moretti the way you know stories about a house where somebody died. He couldn’t walk. Something happened to him years ago and he came back in a wheelchair, and after that he came back wrong in other ways too. 

People said he was violent. People said he couldn’t have children. People said one of his father’s men laughed at him once and was never seen again, though nobody could tell you the man’s name.

“That’s not funny,” I said again, quieter.

“No. It really isn’t.” Sofia looked at me over the rim of her glass, and for one second she wasn’t smiling at all. “I’d rather die than let them put me in a room with that man.”

Then the smile came back.

“Luckily,” she said, “they have two.”

The makeup woman clicked her case shut and left and she didn’t look at either of us on the way out.

That’s how I knew.

Not from Sofia. From a stranger who’d been in this house for one hour.

Forty minutes in that chair. A woman’s hands on my cheek, my mother behind us saying lift the eyes a little, she has good skin, use less — and I had sat there and let myself think that maybe getting Sofia back had reminded them they have two daughters. 

I know how stupid that sounds.

But you try growing up eating scraps of affection and see if you don’t get stupid when someone finally offers you a whole plate.

When the woman had finished, my mother looked at me for a long moment and said, “Good. That’s good.”

Not you look beautiful.

Just good. Like a job someone had finished on time.

They hadn’t dressed me up to bring me back into the family.

They’d dressed me up to hand me over.

And nobody was coming upstairs to ask whether I agreed.

•••••

The staircase went quiet when I came down.

Fifty people in that room, and I felt every single one of them turn. 

A woman near the piano leaned toward her husband and whispered behind her glass. Eyes moved over the dress, the jewelry, my waist, my hair.

Nobody was admiring anything.

They knew.

Every person at that party knew what I was wearing this dress for, and I had been the last one told.

My father stood by the fireplace with a drink in his hand. He looked at me once, then looked at the floor.

He didn’t look up again.

Sofia was already at the center of the room, blonde and glowing in white, my parents’ friends gathered around her in a circle. Somebody was crying. My mother had her arm around Sofia’s waist and hadn’t let go all night.

Twenty-five years ago someone took a baby out of this house.

Now she was back, and the whole house had rearranged itself around her in a single evening.

She saw me and made a small delighted sound.

“Bella!”

She crossed the room and hugged me, and the guests smiled because it looked like a beautiful thing.

Her mouth came close to my ear.

“Red really is your colour,” she whispered. “Do enjoy tonight. I don’t think the next one will be as nice.”

Then she pulled back, held my hands, and beamed at me.

“We’re going to be such good sisters,” she said, loud enough for the room.

Everyone clapped.

Twenty minutes later my father found me by the stairs.

“Come. Both of us need to talk to you.”

The study smelled like cigars and old paper. My mother closed the door behind us and stood with her back against it, which I noticed. You don’t guard a door unless you expect someone to run.

My father poured himself another drink. 

“You know about the Morettis,” he said.

“I know Sofia told me before either of you did.”

His hand stopped halfway to his mouth.

“So it’s true.”

“Bella…”

“Say it. Out loud. In your own house.” My voice came out flat and strange. “Say you’re giving me to that man.”

“Nobody says no to the Morettis.” He drank. “You don’t understand what they are.”

“Then send Sofia. She’s your daughter.”

“So are you,” my mother said from the door.

I turned and looked at her, and she had the nerve to look hurt.

“No,” I said. “I’m not. If I were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because you’d never let anyone put Sofia in a car and drive her to that house. You wouldn’t even discuss it.”

Nobody argued.

That was the loudest thing that happened in that room all night.

“I’m not doing it,” I said.

“Sit down.”

“I’m not…”

My father put a folder on the desk.

“Open it.”

I didn’t want to. But I opened it.

It was a ledger.

School fees. Uniforms. The braces I wore when I was thirteen. Doctor’s visits. A line from when I was six years old for a winter coat, one hundred and twenty dollars, dated and initialed.

Page after page after page.

My whole life, priced.

“We gave you everything,” my mother said gently, like she was comforting me. “Nobody made us take you. If you walk out of this house tonight, you walk out owing every cent of it.”

There’s a thing that happens when you find out you were never a daughter, only an investment somebody was waiting to collect on. It doesn’t feel like heartbreak.

It feels like being told a word you’ve used your whole life means something else.

I checked the date on the first page.

Nineteen years ago.

Which meant that for nineteen years — every dinner, every school skirt, every birthday — somebody in this house had been writing it down.

Just then the door opened.

Sofia leaned against the frame with her champagne, and I actually looked at her, some idiot part of me still waiting for someone in this family to say this is wrong.

She laughed.

“Oh, don’t look so tragic. It’s a wheelchair, not a coffin.”

“Then marry him.”

The room went still.

Sofia’s smile stayed exactly where it was, but something behind it slipped, and for one second she looked like a woman who’d been handed a glass of something she’d already been warned about.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You said it yourself. He’s crippled. He’s harmless. Everybody laughs at him.” I took a step towards her. “So why won’t you do it?”

“Because I don’t have to.”

“That’s not the reason.”

“Bella…”

“You’re scared of him.”

Sofia finished her champagne in one go.

“I’m being sensible,” she said, and her voice had gone thin. “There’s a difference.”

Then she recovered, the way she always recovers, and her eyes moved over me slowly.

“You have such a pretty face, Bella. You’ve always had such a pretty face. And honestly, I think you’re perfect for him. Neither of you has anywhere better to be.”

I dug my thumbnail into my palm until it hurt, because if I cried in front of her she would own that too.

“Fine,” I said.

Three faces turned towards me.

“I’ll marry him.”

Not because they’d beaten me. Because I’d finally done the math.

They were putting me in that car whether I agreed or not — the dress was already on my body, the guests were already downstairs — and the only thing I still owned was whether they got to see me beg first.

And they weren’t getting that.

I stopped in the doorway on my way out.

“Why us?” I asked. “New York is full of families. Half of them owe somebody money. Why did the Morettis ask for a Carter?”

Nobody answered.

My mother looked at my father.

And my father was gripping the edge of the desk with both hands, staring at the wall like there was something on it.

Matteo’s POV 

The reports came at eleven, the way they always did.

I let Luca talk. Forty million in exposure, a father who drinks, a mother who spends. Two daughters, one of them recently returned.

None of it interested me. My father arranged this marriage to humiliate me, a bride for the son who can’t stand at his own altar, and I agreed, because a man in a wheelchair doesn’t argue.

“The bride,” Luca said, and slid a photograph across the desk. “Isabella Carter. The adopted one.”

The moment I looked down, the world went very quiet.

Nine years ago I bled into the dirt behind a church and a girl knelt in it with me. She pressed her folded coat into the hole in my side and leaned her whole weight on it, and her hands would not stop shaking, and she talked the entire night so I wouldn’t fall asleep. Nothing important. School. A dog she wanted. Whatever came into her head.

Toward morning her voice went thin and she said, I’m going to stay, so you don’t have to be scared.

She was maybe sixteen. Six men were looking for me in those trees. She never asked my name, and she never let go, and when the sun came up she stood, and picked up her ruined coat, and walked back down the road like she’d done nothing at all.

I have looked for her since I was twenty-two.

Nine years in the wrong direction. I was looking for a girl who knew who I was.

And her family is sending her to me now, wrapped as a debt payment, because they believe she is worth nothing.

“Sir?”

My hand had gone still on the photograph.

Luca noticed. I watched him decide not to have noticed, and go back to the folder, and turn a page he’d already read.

Nine years of building a man nobody looks at twice, and a piece of paper undid it in four seconds in front of the one person I trust.

“Do you want me to cancel it, sir?”

“No.”

I set the photograph face down.

“Nobody tells her that I know her,” I said. “Not you. Not anyone. If it leaves this room, I’ll know where it came from.”

He was already at the door when I spoke again.

“Luca.”

He stopped.

“Whatever you thought you saw just now.”

“I didn’t see anything, sir.”

“Good.”