Ivy Amis had once declared—after having to put up with entirely too many self-congratulatory speeches from those who should have chosen respectful silence on the occasion of her mother’s funeral—that returning to her former stepfather’s ostentatious Italian castle would occur only if she first crawled the length of England on hands and knees. Over broken glass. Twice.

In fairness, that was how it felt now that she was actually doing it five years later.

Even the ancient rolling hills of Tuscany, with so many cypress trees dressed in pockets of mist in formation along the edges of old, lush vineyards, failed to mask the sensation of too many sharp edges pressing into her flesh.

Her typical reaction to anything having to do with the Tavian family.

Made worse now that she was actually back in their vicinity.

It had taken exactly one phone call to be thrown back into the worst memories of her teenage years. Umberto’s oily, patronizing voice. That knowing chuckle, as if he’d expected this call all along—which he probably had. As if all the work she’d done to turn her back on this place and these people had been nothing but an exercise in futility.

A silly girl’s attempt to escape reality.

She’d nearly told him where he could go right then. It had hurt her jaw to keep it clenched so tight.

But she told herself to shake it off and shape up, sitting there in the back seat of one of Umberto’s fleet of shiny, obnoxious Range Rovers. He had insisted that he send his plane to come pick her up. That she not lift a single finger to get herself to Tuscany—something that a person who didn’t know Umberto might consider a kindness.

Ivy, sadly, knew her former stepfather—the man who had made her lovely mother so desperately miserable—entirely too well.

There wasn’t a single thing the creepy old man did that wasn’t about control.

Especially the things he dressed up in solicitous disguises.

She looked out the window and reminded herself that she was no longer the awkward girl she’d been when she’d first been dragged here against her will, forced to leave her home behind to follow this whim of her mother’s. On the contrary. These days Ivy was what this place had made her. There was a strength in that.

Besides, she was here for a purpose.

This wasn’t her starry-eyed mother making up fairy tales in her head. This wasn’t the notably romantic screen legend Alana Amis allowing a powerful and mysterious Italian to sweep her off her feet—and then sweeping up her daughter along with her because Alana had been lovely in so many ways but had never been one for boundaries.

Ivy smiled, remembering what her mother had said on that topic. Darling, I am an actor. My life is about expanding past boundaries, not collapsing into them. Something Alana had taken seriously.

This time Ivy had decided to come here of her own volition. This time, Ivy had decided that she would play Umberto’s game and beat him.

Assuming that was possible given Umberto had been running his power plays since long before Ivy was born.

The Range Rover purred its way up the drive and then stopped at the imposing front door of the ancient castle that was habitually featured in architectural magazines. The sort of publications that liked to fawn over each and every one of Umberto’s choices and suggesting his discernment in financial matters made him keenly situated in the lexicon of style. As if a corporate titan like Umberto—who had never polluted his business bonafides with an actual day of leisure in all the time Ivy had been forced to live with him—actually sat about poring over the incidental details of the many investment properties he owned. Much less the details of this castle that had been called the quiet bedrock of the Tavian brand, because, yes, the man considered his family a marketing tool and used them that way, too.

Obviously, he had his staff hire more staff to handle all such details and yet more staff to disseminate the myth of his greatness in all things to the wider world in the form of the odd puff piece.

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The actual bedrock of the Tavian brand was Umberto’s bottomless greed.

Once the car was parked, the usual phalanx of indistinguishable staff members poured out to greet Ivy. They took the small bag she’d brought with her and ushered her inside, pretending to ask after her needs and desires when any guest to this place must know that what really mattered was the way Umberto had decreed they ought to be treated.

Ivy was slightly shocked that she wasn’t marched off to the dungeons.

She’d always been convinced that there were dungeons here somewhere. Actual cells, not simply all the mind games that were played here the way some families played a bit of cribbage of an evening.

“You may wait here,” a serene-faced woman told Ivy as she led her into a room on the ground floor of the castle, away from the far grander reception rooms and a ballroom as famous for who wasn’t invited inside as who was—Umberto did love to make a Hunger Game all his own whenever possible. The woman even bowed her head as she retreated.

None of the staff had looked familiar to Ivy, which didn’t surprise her. It wasn’t easy to have a personal relationship with an angry, despotic old man who thought he was smarter than anyone he’d ever encountered simply because he was richer. Having to work for him had to be nothing short of torturous.

Ivy looked around the room they’d left her in. It was one of the castle’s numerous salon-type places because, apparently, outrageously wealthy people got too easily bored with only one place to sit. She drifted farther into the room, noting in an almost clinical fashion the pedigreed art on the walls. The sort of antiques that would make a Christie’s auctioneer weep. Carefully arranged objects were stacked here and tossed there—because the suggestion that the occupants might really come and read all of these books, or might have collected these pieces on some sentimental journey instead of simply buying them because they were sought after by others, was the real truth about what was considered fashionable in houses like this.

But staring at yet another example of Umberto’s collection of things quickly lost its appeal.

She drifted over to a series of glass doors that took the place of any outside wall in this room and looked out, expecting to see more bucolic fields brimming with flowers, each competing to be brighter and more riotous than the next.

Instead, she stopped dead.

Because this particular room did not face the vineyards or the fields or the gardens, as expected. This one looked out over a half-shaded terrace that boasted a set of pools. If memory served, each one was set to a different temperature and they were all arranged so that a person could float in any one of them and look out at the landscape as if they were part of it.

Though what she was looking at right this particular moment was not a part of the landscape, for all that it was…primeval.

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A man was rising up out of the hot pool, the vapor rising up from the water’s surface with him and making it seem as if he, himself, was generating the kind of heat that steamed up a spring morning.

Ivy felt herself freeze. As if her muscles themselves betrayed her, unable to make sense of what she was seeing.

But she couldn’t look away.

He rose slowly, climbing up the ladder at the side of the pool with a kind of careless athletic grace that made her head go light. She was half convinced that she’d lapsed off into sleep on one of the self-referential settees inside, suffering from heretofore unknown effects of jet lag from a simple ninety-minute flight from London down into Italy. Because otherwise, she couldn’t account for this.

His back was toward her. And yet her mouth went dry as she found her gaze moving over the impossible, powerful shifts of lean muscle beneath golden skin as he lifted himself from the water. He moved up another step and she blinked, because she could suddenly see what had to be the most perfect, bare-naked ass not currently cast in marble and tucked away in a museum that she’d ever beheld.

Still he rose, some kind of ancient god brought to life, as if the old Roman deities had never really disappeared at all. As if he had been here all along, Neptune himself, carved from wonder and sex, water and desire.

He stood at the top of the ladder now and she watched as he speared a powerful hand into his dark hair, currently slicked to shape his skull. A normal, everyday movement that this man—if he was a man and not a figment of her imagination—made into poetry.

Ivy was still frozen solid as if her bones had locked her in place while inside, everything that could soften, melted. And ran hot. She felt as if she was boiling, as if her body couldn’t handle this, because what mortal could?

He turned and she saw the rest of him, like the slow dawning of the sun. The wide shoulders, the chest a hagiography of male musculature, more golden skin dusted with dark hair, and all of it arrowing to a narrow waist. And below, a large and heavy cock that did not appear to be reacting to what she imagined were the cooler temperatures outside that hot tub.

Or then again, more worryingly, perhaps this was his reaction. Maybe that enormous appendage was, in fact, his shrinkage.

The idea made her entire body break out into goose bumps.

Yet she kept looking. His thighs were powerful, suggesting levels of performance and dedication that she found staggering. But not as staggering as the clear evidence that he did not have a single hint of a tan line. Anywhere.

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It was as if he had been created out of Roman gold, dancing sunshine, and pure lust.

Her own breath fogged up the glass window in front of her and Ivy could move then. Suddenly. She found her hand was shaking, but she wiped the fog away.

To find him staring directly at her.

Everything in her froze again. Then seemed to blare back into light and sound and sensation with a punch that made her feel as if she had been knocked back across the room. It was a disorienting shock to realize she hadn’t moved, but the bigger shock was staring straight at her through the glass.

Ivy knew that face. She knew those dark jade eyes, lit as ever with amusement and mockery. That perfect nose of his that would not look out of place on precious old coins and that cruel mouth that was so often—like now—curled to one side. Derision a certainty.

He stared back at her and she could only imagine what she looked like from his perspective. Panting up a windowed door, clinging to the glass as if it was the only thing keeping her upright.

Oh yes, she knew that face. She knew him, for her sins.

She also knew that something terrible had happened in the years since she’d last seen him in the flesh. Because Ivy had known this man since he’d been younger, more obviously feral, all of him somehow sharper. His face had been more of a hatchet when he was twenty-two, a deadly object if wielded correctly but more a tool than any weapon.

Now, though he was no less of a blade, that face of his was honed. Not the careless sharpness of his youth, but the refinement of his years. Lethal, in other words.

He did absolutely nothing to cover himself, of course. Instead, all he did was stare right back at her as if she was the one parading around nude on a bright and sunny April morning in a place where there could be no possible expectation of privacy. He stared at her as if she was the foolish girl she’d been when she’d lived here, always out of her depth and incapable of understanding what was happening all around her—especially if he was involved.

He stared at her and brought back memories of her embarrassing adolescence that she’d thought long-banished to the dustbin of recollections that were no longer welcome now that she was older.

He stared and when she didn’t respond, he lifted one dark brow.

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Daring her.

Ivy couldn’t even have said what it was he was challenging her to do. Not if her life depended on it—and she was dismayed to discover it felt as if it did.

But somehow she managed to wrench herself away, turning back around and retreating from those glass doors as quickly as she could without giving him the satisfaction of seeing her run.

Once she was all the way on the other side of the room, she found that her knees were weak. She had no choice but to lower herself down onto the nearest overtly fussy chair and then had to take a deeply embarrassing inventory of all the ways she was trembling. Shaking. Goose-bumping all over. Her heart was pounding so hard it made her feel slightly sick.

And she was slick and hot between her legs, a humiliation from which she was not certain she would ever recover.

She was wrecked, in other words, and she could not understand how any of this was possible.

Because that man was no Roman god. There was nothing the slightest bit holy about him and if there had been at some point he had systematically removed it thanks to his lifelong pursuit of the deepest, darkest depths of any and every vice available.

He was Giaco Tavian. The Giaco Tavian.

Once her stepbrother. Always the bane of her existence.

But he was a whole lot more than that, sadly. It was impossible to walk past a single tabloid magazine without seeing his shockingly beautiful face. Not to mention most of that internationally renowned body of his, particularly since he did enjoy spending as much time as possible parading it about. Some years it seemed as if all the yachts in the Mediterranean would sink as one if he were not personally there to keep them afloat with his exploits.

There were a lot of words to describe a man like Giaco. Lothario. Romeo. Casanova.

The more modern and less poetic fuck boy.

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If he was a woman, they simply would have called him a whore.

From a distractingly young age, Giaco Tavian had distinguished himself by being faithless and immoral in every possible respect. His father’s only son, and therefore the heir to Umberto’s vast empire because Umberto thought his younger daughter was good only for potential gains via marriage, Giaco had used his wealth, privilege, and astonishing good looks to make himself the very embodiment of sin.

In some countries they called him the devil. But that only increased the general appetite for him.

To this day, Giaco remained possibly the most debaucherous creature who had ever swanned his way in and out of the bedrooms of Europe, which he did with such regularity that some theorized—without hyperbole—that he might possibly have actually slept with everybody. He was a scandal in a distractingly beautiful male form that she had now experienced personally.

Even though she had previously been gloriously immune.

Ivy didn’t understand how this was possible, and no matter that she could still feel her own body’s betrayal. She had always loathed Giaco. His smoldering about. His utter disregard for the feelings of absolutely everything and everyone he encountered. His obvious pleasure in making as many people around him as uncomfortable as possible. He made alley cats seem like monks. He was pathologically boneless, confronting, and deeply comfortable with the outrage that followed him around like his baying packs of adoring would-be lovers.

He was a very particular kind of fantasy made flesh, there was no denying it. Yet how he could possibly have emerged from the loins of his father, who Ivy had always thought of—without a shred of affection—as the Lizard King, she could not imagine.

It was likely a gift from his Persian mother, another renowned beauty who had been lost too soon—no doubt to the same neglect that had destroyed Ivy’s mother. Because one thing about Umberto was that he did like to collect beautiful women and then destroy them. If he had a leisure activity, it was that.

Ivy blew out a breath, happy to feel that her heart was slowing down a bit. That she was getting back to normal. She needed the reminder she wasn’t here for…whatever that was that had just happened. Giaco was nothing if not a distraction. She was fairly certain that was his entire purpose in life. But his nonsense had nothing to do with her.

She made her breath even and tried to make herself relax. She hadn’t expected to see her former stepbrother today. She certainly hadn’t expected to see so much of him. But the more she thought about it, the more she decided it was like diving straight off the high dive into deep water, and probably good for her.

It could only benefit her to remember who she was dealing with and why.

Ivy thought of her own mother then. The world-renowned Alana Amis, who had been so beautiful that men had fallen over in the street at the sight of her, yet had carried around an insecurity that far outstripped her looks or her accomplishments or the simple, joyful person she could be when no one was looking. Her lovely and wildly talented mother, who was so luminous on-screen that a single tear from her could make audiences sob for days and who, despite all her fame and her enduring legend, had wanted only the simplest of things in the end.

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To be loved. To be taken care of. To matter to someone.

Ivy would never forgive her stepfather for failing Alana on each and every point.

The door opened. Her eyes snapped open, her heart kicked at her again, and she was certain that she was about to see even more of Giaco Tavian. But instead, it was another member of the staff. He beckoned for her to follow him and then led her farther into the castle, to deliver her to what she knew was Umberto’s private office.

She walked inside and found the stepfather she had never intended to see again looking as if he was relaxing—a sure sign that this was going to be a bit of blood sport on his end. Nothing about Umberto Tavian was leisurely, and yet today he was sitting in a chair in one of the seating areas that dotted the large room with a drink in his hand and his usual heavy-lidded, contemptuous look in his eyes.

“What a marvelous surprise,” he said, speaking English as if he thought Ivy was perhaps not fluent in it. Or, more likely, as if he assumed she was simply dimwitted. See: the silly, foolish, idiotic girl he thought she was. “You were so certain that you would never return to the fold, Ivy. And yet here you are. Just as I knew you would be, one day.”

The Ivy she’d been when she’d left this place five years ago, having just buried her mother and vowing never to return, would have told him where he could shove that. With malice and pleasure.

But she’d gotten smarter, these past years. More strategic. There were things that mattered a whole lot more to her than attempting to land a blow on a man like Umberto when she knew perfectly well that he felt nothing. She supposed he was amply insulated not only by the rich food he preferred and the indulgent, debaucherous lifestyle he exulted in, but by all the money he’d extracted from every business enterprise he’d ever touched.

He called himself a financier.

But she knew that he preferred to play kingmaker. Regime toppler, if given the chance, because he liked a show. He had his thick, fleshy fingers in every possible pot and sat here in his castle like a big, round spider, casting his webs far and wide.

Young Ivy had felt smothered and claustrophobic and had dealt with that by lashing out, which had garnered her precisely nothing. But she’d learned from that.

Today she simply walked in, kept smiling at him no matter what he said or what tone he used, and took a seat in the chair opposite his.

“I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” she said, politely. She’d learned that, too. The clever art of conversation with unpleasant people. She’d spent years figuring out how to use her status as a well-known nepo baby to get done the kinds of things that needed doing, in her view. She’d spent years learning how to shine brightly for men like this, because that was the only way to get them to part with their money.

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And Ivy loved nothing more than a man who could be flattered into giving large donations to her charity. The orphans didn’t care how she got that money. They only benefited when she had it. It was her job to make sure she had as much as possible at all times.

“Yes, yes,” Umberto was saying. He swirled his drink in its tumbler. “You are here for your little fortune, I know.”

One of the interesting things about the way she’d spent the last five years of life was that Ivy knew a whole lot more people now. Many of them from entirely different walks of life than the one she’d grown up in. Her little fortune, as Umberto called it, was easily millions of pounds. Part of it was the money that her mother had inherited upon Ivy’s father’s death. He too had been an actor—but before that, he’d been born into the English aristocracy. Add to that the numerous fortunes her mother had made as a screen legend and no reasonable person would call her inheritance a little fortune.

But of course, to a man like this, it was nothing.

Ivy swallowed back her fury, the rest of the emotions this place and this awful man stirred up in her, and everything else she felt but did not wish to feel while she was subjecting herself to this game of his. Even the walls themselves were unsafe in Umberto’s private castle. No doubt plastered over a hundred times with the indifference this man had shown every person he’d ever brought here. Her mother included.

Her mother was the reason she was here. Her mother and what her help from beyond the grave could do for innumerable children in need.

“The funds my mother left me, yes,” she agreed, still with a polite smile. She had practiced and practiced, knowing that it would be difficult not to snarl at this man. It turned out it was even harder than anticipated.

Umberto nodded as if she was a small, precocious child who’d learned a big word. “I will help you with this, my dear.”

Ivy had to fight not to vomit. My dear. What a vile man he was. He knew she hated him. Got off on it, if she had to guess.

But, “Thank you,” was all she said, as if she thought he was sincere.

Because what else was there to say? Her mother had made Umberto the executor of Ivy’s inheritance. Ivy had some theories about how that had come to pass, most of them having to do with Umberto’s controlling tendencies, but that didn’t change the fact that she could not access that money without him signing off on it.

She had decided years ago that she would rather turn her back on her inheritance than subject herself to the kind of performative obeisance with too many strings to count that she knew Umberto would demand.

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But times had changed. More importantly, her needs had changed. If this had been just about her, she never would have come back here. She would rather prostitute herself on the streets of London than demean herself for this man’s amusement. It had been clear from the moment he’d accepted her call that Umberto would make her jump through hoops once she’d come crawling back and that she would hate every moment of it.

Lucky, then, that this wasn’t about how she felt.

“I’m an old man,” Umberto told her, with a smug look on his face, because men like him didn’t really believe they were old. Not the way other men were old. Men like Umberto didn’t believe that being old made them weak the way it did others. They were so sure their wealth and consequence made them better. “My only joys in this life come from my business dealings and I have on the table a particularly exciting deal. I won’t bore you with the details. Pretty girls have much better things to think about, I’m sure.”

Ivy gritted her teeth, kept her smile on her face, and wondered—not for the first time—what it was like to be poor Leontina, Umberto’s usually wholly ignored daughter. She remembered her former stepsister as little more than a shadow in the corner, which had always struck her as odd when the two of them weren’t far apart in age. But then, she supposed that was an answer in and of itself.

“But in order for this deal to go through, I’m afraid there is a challenge that I must overcome,” Umberto continued. “There’s a moral stipulation, you understand.”

Ivy did not understand. She also didn’t care. So she nodded, trying to look as if she was actively listening to this.

Umberto smiled. Always chilling. “As you are no doubt aware, moral is not a word that has ever been applied to my son.”

That got her attention. Or rather, the sight of Giaco rising from the steaming water came back to her like a punch to the gut. She coughed into her fist, cleared her throat, and nodded. “I can’t say I’ve kept up with him in all these years,” she lied.

Well. It wasn’t really a lie, was it? She hadn’t kept up with him in the sense that she hadn’t privately considered him at all. But he was inescapable. The legend of Giaco Tavian was an international preoccupation. His collections of lovers. Their breathless tales of his prowess. The not-so-subtle hints of his sexual deviance, his penchant for bedroom games, his wholly indiscriminate selection processes, and the high-octane, jet-setting, partying lifestyle that went along with all of that.

Umberto didn’t seem to care if she was prepared to admit the omnipresence of his son’s sins or not. “When you called I realized that there was a simple, elegant solution. I’ve watched what you’ve done with yourself over the years, Ivy. It’s hard to imagine that such a spoiled, petulant girl could turn into the toast of London, but you’ve managed it.”

The Lizard King never blinked when he was busy handing out insults, and this was no exception. He watched her, clearly expecting her to react to his characterization of her adolescent behavior while trapped in his clutches.

Instead, she smiled and said, “I’ve been lucky enough to make great friends in London. I suppose we all have the places where we truly shine, don’t we?”

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Umberto made a scoffing noise. “I don’t know about shining,” he said. “But most people in your situation, considered celebrities thanks to having been adjacent to the fame of others, follow a different trajectory. Yet you, by all accounts, are a living saint. Lady Bountiful herself, friend to orphan children, bestowing her kindness as best she can. Truly, a heartwarming tale to inspire the most cynical heart.”

He neither looked nor sounded the slightest bit inspired.

“I found myself orphaned five years ago, when I was twenty, and it was shockingly disorienting,” Ivy began calmly, as this was a story she had told many times before. “It made me wonder how much worse it must be for those who do not have my advantages, or my—”

“I’ve heard these little speeches,” Umberto interrupted her, sounding bored. “It’s why I brought you here. No one is more astonished than me, given the path I expected you would take when you left here, but you have made yourself a reputation for moral fortitude. And as it happens, I need it.”

For a moment, the way he looked at her, Ivy had a creeping, horrifying notion take her over. Umberto was forever marrying trophies. Surely he didn’t think her moral fortitude, whatever the hell that was, qualified? She would climb to the top of his castle and fling herself off it first.

Instead, Umberto reached over and rang the bell beside him, then nodded when one of his servants opened the door. “Bring him in,” he said, a crisp order.

And moments later, Giaco himself ambled in. He was not dressed. He had covered himself with a silk robe, but that was his only nod to civility.

Ivy could not bear to look at him any more than she already had today, especially not when his gaze found hers as he entered and lit up at once with that unholy amusement of his. Instead, she watched Umberto and found herself nothing short of delighted to see that Giaco got to him, too. The old man was fairly bristling.

She had always enjoyed how easily riled he was. This man who fancied himself the king above all kings could not tolerate the faintest poke in his direction, and Ivy dearly wished that she was in a place where she could deliver a few such pokes.

It was almost better, however, that it was Giaco. Since his existence, for all intents and purposes, was the greatest and most effective poke at Umberto possible.

“Is there some reason you are not dressed?” Umberto growled at his son and heir.

“I prefer not to dress at all,” Giaco replied, in that lazy drawl of his. No matter what language he was speaking, he always sounded as if vocabulary itself made him sleepy. As if he needed to taste every word as it came out of his mouth, and that required all his energy. “I’m happy to remove this robe, father. Would you like that?”

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Umberto made a growling sound. If Ivy didn’t dislike Giaco so much herself, she might have applauded.

Then it was impossible not to watch as Giaco took his time sauntering over to the couch that stretched between her chair and Umberto’s and flung himself down upon it. With no particular attention paid to whether or not his robe would cover him.

That it did was a miracle.

But even as Ivy thought that, she found him watching her, the dark jade of gaze mocking. Because he knew—somehow he knew—that she was thinking of exactly what he had beneath the fabric of his robe. He probably knew that she had committed it all to memory, damn him.

She felt herself heat and hated him. Hard. Then tried to focus on his loathsome father instead.

Umberto threw back the remains of his drink. “In order to close this deal, and I am determined to close it, I am afraid that the tawdry legend of Giaco Tavian, heralded cocksman, must come to an ignominious end.”

“Must it?” Giaco asked, sounding bored. “But I am so popular and beloved as is. Ask anyone.”

“This is what will happen,” Umberto said curtly. “The two of you will engage upon a relationship. It will be widely photographed. A worldwide love affair, focusing on Ivy’s rather impressive virtue and not the fact that she was once a stepsister. Finally, they all will declare, a woman who tames the savage beast—and whatever other maudlin story the papers choose to tell. You will see to it.”

Ivy could not comprehend anything the demented old man was saying. She could not make any of those words make sense, much less together.

Giaco sighed, sounding even more bored and now amused besides. “And why would I do that?”

“Because if you do not, I will cut you off entirely,” Umberto told him. “And I doubt very much that you have any skills outside your preferred bedsport, Giaco. Given that you have never exhibited the slightest inclination toward anything else.”

Giaco shrugged, lying there on his back on the sofa as if about to drop off into a nap at any moment. “Fair point.”

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“There will be an engagement. The world will go wild. It will seem inevitable—fated, even—that the only woman capable of civilizing such a beast is the one who grew up in this house and thus learned the secrets of Giaco’s benighted soul, whatever they might be. Again, the press will be encouraged to pursue the virtue. The romance. There will be no scandal. There will be no dark intimations about what you got up to with her when she was an adolescent.”

“Father,” Giaco said then, in mock astonishment. “I had no idea that you cared what anyone got up to, as an adolescent or otherwise. Or that such a romantic has lurked within you all this time.”

Ivy found this significantly less amusing than Giaco seemed to. Yet she still couldn’t bring herself to speak.

“And then, the coup de grâce,” Umberto said, with deep satisfaction and what looked a lot like actual malice, to Ivy’s eye. “You will marry. It goes without saying that during the period of this whirlwind romance and into your marriage, which will last for at least three years, there will be absolutely nothing but squeaky-clean behavior. More virtue. So much virtue that canonization will seem inevitable. Your transformation, Giaco, will be a thing of epic beauty or you will pay for it. Meanwhile, my deal will go through and it will survive its probationary period. Then I will wash my hands of the both of you and happily pay to never think of either one of you again.”

Ivy couldn’t breathe. She didn’t know where to look. It was bad enough that she’d seen all of Giaco today. Now she was supposed to… Date him? Pretend to fall in love with him? She was not an actress. She was only related to a late, legendary one and had not inherited the faintest shred of Alana’s talent. How would any of this work?

She found herself drawn to look at him again, telling herself it was the horror of this that was making her seek him out for some kind of confirmation that he was hearing the same things she was.

But all she saw was that too-dark jade, so mocking, and currently filled with what looked like some kind of glee.

“For you, Father, anything—if it affects my bank accounts. I’m sure that sweet, virtuous, stepsister Ivy and I can work it out,” Giaco said, though that gaze of his was fastened to Ivy, and there was nothing about it that suggested he saw her as sweet or virtuous in any way. “As long as you’re aware, my soon-to-be beloved and bride, that I require a not inconsiderable amount of fucking. Daily. Can you handle that?”

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