THE MAFIA BOSS MARRIED ME FOR REVENGE—THEN MY HIDDEN SCARS CHANGED EVERYTHING

Original opening retained as Chapter 1, followed by the continuation.

The marble bit through the soles of her shoes.

Navy Martin had chosen those shoes herself, three weeks earlier, in a salon on Madison Avenue, because the woman who fitted her had said they look like they cost nothing, and Navy had agreed with her. She had wanted shoes that cost nothing. She had wanted, on this particular Saturday, to feel the floor.

It was the eighth of November and the cathedral was cold. Two hundred people sat in the pews in good dark wool and expensive silk, and the air above them smelled of lilies and wet stone and money. Above the altar the stained glass laid a long red band of light down the aisle, and the band lay on the floor like something spilled.

At the altar, Diego Ramos was not looking at her.

He was looking at the crucifix, and he was doing it the way a man looks at a wall he intends to knock down. Thirty-two years old, black suit, no boutonnière. He had inherited the Ramos syndicate nine years earlier, in the spring of 2016, after a man in a passing car put four rounds into his uncle Emilio outside a bakery in Bensonhurst. Navy knew the date and she knew the amounts, because she had learned at eleven years old to read the ledgers in her father's study and had never once stopped.

The priest said her name.

"Do you, Navy Martin, take this man—"

She was thinking about her ribs. The dress had a bespoke corset sewn inside it, whalebone and steel, and the stays had pulled tighter with every breath since six that morning. The sleeves were long lace. The collar was Victorian and high and it pressed at the base of her throat like a thumb. The Heiress of the Martin Empire, one magazine had called the dress, and had used the word modest twice, and had printed her on page nine under a photograph of her brother falling out of a car in the Meatpacking District.

"Ms. Martin."

"Yes," Navy said. "I do."

Her voice did not shake. It had not shaken in fifteen years, in any room, in front of anyone, and she had spent a great deal of her life learning how to make it that way.

Diego turned his head. He took her left hand and turned it over, and his fingers closed on hers with a pressure that was instructive rather than tender — the way a man tests a beam.

Then he put the ring on her.

It was platinum and the stone was the size of a small coin, and as he slid it down past the knuckle he leaned in so that only she could hear.

"A brand."

She looked up. His eyes were the color of the bottom of a coffee cup, and there was nothing in them at all.

"Mine," he said.

"Yours," she agreed.

He waited for her to flinch. She watched him wait for it — a small tightening at the outer corners of his eyes, one muscle feathering above his left temple. He had been told, by her brother, by lawyers, by everyone who had ever shaken hands with a Martin, that he was receiving a princess.

He had no idea what her father had done to her before Diego Ramos ever learned her name.

The priest pronounced them. Diego lifted the veil — not gently; he flipped the antique lace back over her head as if it were a tarp — and kissed her, dry and firm and brief and entirely without weather. A flashbulb went off at the back of the nave.

"Smile, Mrs. Ramos," he said against her cheek, and his breath was warm on skin that had learned to hold still under worse. "Your brother is watching. Let him see how happy you are."

She pulled back two inches and curved her mouth into something that would read, from the third row, as joy.

"I'm ecstatic," she said.

He looked at her a beat longer than the moment required. Then he offered his arm.

Two hundred faces turned with them. Some pitied her. Most were simply relieved. Three years of war had cost this city two diners, a stretch of the Red Hook docks, and a state senator who had been photographed accepting an envelope and who was now in Otisville, where Navy had heard the food was better than at the Yale Club. The war was over. The treaty was wearing white.

Thomas Martin sat in the third row, sweating through his collar, blotting his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief. He could not look at her. He chewed his lower lip the way he had chewed it at fourteen, when he broke the windshield of Arthur Martin's Mercedes and came to her door to ask whether she would take the beating with him.

She had. He had said please.

She felt nothing looking at him. You cannot betray a person who has already budgeted for it.

At the doors the air hit like a sheet of iron. Black SUVs idled at the curb, wipers moving slowly against a fog of rain. Diego's hand came off her arm and settled at the small of her back — a possessive gesture, meant for the cameras, the flat palm of a man steering his property into a car.

He pressed directly over the worst of it.

Her teeth came together so hard her jaw ached for an hour afterward. The pain went up her spine like a wire pulled taut, and she made no sound, and she did not stumble, and she slid into the leather seat as smoothly as water going downhill.

Shoulders back. Chin up. A Martin does not slouch. A Martin does not show pain.

The door shut. The crowd cut off like a radio being unplugged.

Diego pulled a decanter from the compartment between them and poured two fingers of whiskey without looking at it, which meant he had done it many times.

"Comfortable?"

"Yes."

The lie came out level. He drank. He did not offer her any.

The reception was at the estate: black marble, gray steel, glass on all four sides, thirty-one rooms, built in 2009 by a man who had made his money in container shipping. It sat on the cliffs north of the city with its back to the Atlantic and its face to the road, and it looked, Navy thought, like a museum in a country that no longer existed.

She was a prop for three hours and forty minutes.

Diego walked her from table to table with the same hand on the same vertebrae and introduced her to men with broken noses and good tailors, to a state assemblyman who did not blink once while shaking her hand, to a police commissioner who looked at her chin and nowhere else. Each time he said the same words — my wife, Navy — and each time the pressure of his palm went down a fraction of a millimeter, and each time she drank.

Four glasses of champagne. She counted them, because counting was what she did instead of feeling.

"Sheltered," Diego said to a man named Bruno who had kissed her hand and looked at her collar with open disappointment. "Protected. Her father kept her in a very gilded cage."

Navy took a slow sip and let the bubbles burn the back of her throat.

If you only knew.

Across the room, Thomas was drunk. He had draped himself against the bar and was laughing too loudly at something one of Diego's soldiers had said, fifteen decibels too loudly, and she watched him with the flat attention of a woman reading a meter.

Diego leaned down. His mouth came within an inch of her ear.

"He's pathetic. Your father built an empire and your brother traded it for a bottle of scotch and a few more years of breathing."

"Thomas is not my father."

"No. But he loves you. You were the golden girl — the untouched Martin princess. He cried when he signed the contract. Put his head down on the table and cried." A pause. "It killed him to give you to me."

"Then he's a very good actor," Navy said, "because Thomas would sell his own soul if it kept his hands clean."

The band started something slow and mournful. Diego's hand closed around her wrist.

"Dance with me."

It was not a request.

He pulled her to the center of the floor and put his arm around her waist too tightly, and his thumb moved once across the back of her hand.

"You're stiff."

"I don't like dancing."

"I think you don't like me."

"I think we both know my preferences aren't relevant." She met his eyes squarely. "You wanted a hostage. You have one. Stop pretending this is a romance."

Something crossed his face — quick, real, gone.

"I'm going to break your father's legacy. You are the prettiest piece of it. Perfection. Status. Wealth. I'm going to strip all of it away, in front of everybody, and there is not one thing you can do about it."

Perfection. She almost laughed; she felt it come up into her throat and swallowed it back where it belonged.

My father valued perfection. That's why he made sure nobody ever saw what happened when perfection wasn't met.

"Good luck," she said.

The song ended. Diego stepped back, and his eyes were dark and full of a promise he had not yet decided how to keep.

"Go upstairs. Master suite, end of the hall. Wait for me."

"Are we done parading?"

"We're done with the public part of the evening." His gaze moved down her throat to the row of small pearl buttons running from her collar to her waist. "Now comes the private part."

She walked out of the ballroom with her spine perfectly straight and the silk rubbing the ruined skin of her back with every step.

The suite was freezing.

The air conditioning ran at full and cooled a room designed in grayscale: charcoal walls, a bed the size of a small country, slate-gray sheets, floor-to-ceiling glass looking onto black water. Beautiful. Completely empty of life.

Navy stood in the middle of the rug and let her shoulders drop for the first time in seventeen hours.

The pain came up immediately, sharp and hot. She hissed through her teeth and pressed her palm against the worst of it, careful not to snag the lace. The adrenaline that had carried her through the cathedral and the receiving line and three hours and forty minutes of being introduced was draining out of her the way water drains out of a tub, and what was left underneath was bone-deep and old.

She walked to the window.

Violence, she thought. Assault. Or cold indifference.

Indifference would be easiest. If he hit her, it would not be anything she had not survived before, and she had a map of everything she had survived, and it was written on her body in a hand she could still read.

Behind her, the heavy oak door clicked open.

She did not turn around. She listened to him cross the hardwood — seven, eight — and then go quiet on the rug.

"You didn't run," Diego said.

"To where?"

She watched his reflection come up in the glass: jacket off, tie loosened, collar open. He looked tired. The predatory edge was still there, but it had settled, the way a current settles when the tide turns.

"Most girls in your position would be crying in the bathroom or plotting an exit."

"I'm not most girls."

"No." He came closer. He did not touch her. She could feel the heat of him anyway. "You're a Martin."

"Arrogant to the end."

She turned.

He was holding a glass of amber liquid, and he took a sip, and he looked at her dress the way a man looks at an invoice he believes he has overpaid.

"Take it off," he said.

The words sat in the air between them, and Navy understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, exactly what they were for. This was the moment he had been carrying in his pocket all day. The conquering king. The spoils.

She looked at him for a long moment.

"Are you sure?"

His jaw tightened. "Do not test my patience tonight. I am not a kind man. You are my wife. You are in my bedroom. Take the dress off."

She didn't argue. There had never been a point in arguing with men like this, and she had stopped trying when she was fifteen.

Her fingers went to the collar at her throat.

One.

He was expecting porcelain. He was expecting the smooth, unmarked, buffed-and-manicured skin of a woman who had spent twenty-six years being handled by expensive professionals and never once by anything with an edge on it.

Two.

He was expecting to ruin something untouched, and to do it in the name of a man who had killed his uncle.

Three.