Page 6 of The Lies We Tell

She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from snorting in disagreement. He definitely wouldn’t like that. But it was a joke to think he’d ever arranged a single marriage that did anything but benefit him and him alone.

Dante Gallo was the first man her father selected under the age of forty. And he’d had a target on his back.

“Somehow, you managed to run them all into the ground. Even the ones that didn’t care about appearances.”

He raked her with a look from head to toe, and she fought every instinct she had to shield herself from his disapproving gaze. She’d long since stopped caring what he thought about her body or her weight or the shape of her face or the many other things he delighted in criticizing. But that didn’t mean she enjoyed being appraised like a piece of meat.

Her father had been trying to get rid of her since she was sixteen, making matches with whoever would agree to take her off his hands in exchange for more money or more power or whatever deals he made in his office.

Sometimes she ruined them on purpose—who the fuck wanted to be married to a seventy-year-old man?—and sometimes all she had to do was step into the room.

“And now here we are. Another one ruined.”

“You say that like I’m the one who killed him,” she mumbled, unable to help herself.

Stumbling back when her father advanced, she tripped over the edge of the carpet and rammed her elbow against the wall. The blinding pain distracted her long enough for her father to get his hand around her throat and shove her against the cool surface.

“I am tired of dealing with you, Tessa. I am just as eager for you to become someone else’s problem as I am to get what I need to take down that Bianchi bastard. Which is why you will do what I ask and be the definition of perfect at this party I now have to salvage. And you will do it without complaint. Do you understand me?”

She met his gaze head-on, refusing to cower or bow and scrape. Her stubborn streak really was going to be her undoing. He mistook her silence for agreement, releasing her and taking a step away.

But she was tired. Tired of being seen as a pawn to arrange in whatever way would offer him the most benefit. Tired of being treated as worthless simply because she hadn’t been born with a dick swinging between her legs. Tired of being shoved aside for the boy whose mother was just a nameless slut her father had been fucking while her mother miscarried three sons.

“And if I don’t?”

He froze in the middle of her bedroom, and her gaze dropped to his side, where she watched his large hand curl into a fist. “Excuse me?”

His voice was low, deadly. A warning if she’d ever heard one. And still, she couldn’t bring herself to back down. What he was asking of her was a death sentence as surely as if he threw her out the window at her back and onto the stone patio below.

“What if I refuse to do as you say, to follow your orders?”

“I wasn’t aware I gave you a choice, Tessa.”

“I’m not interested in playing your games anymore, Father. Find another chess piece to move.”

He spun, his hand connecting with her cheek before she could anticipate the blow. It snapped her head back so violently she crashed into the wall and sagged against it. Something warm and wet trickled down her face, and she swiped at it with her fingertips.

Blood. She stared at it, numb. Still better than broken ribs.

“Watch how you speak to me, you little bitch,” her father snarled. “You have been a burden since you drew your first breath, and if you aren’t careful, if you continue to disappoint me, I will do what I should have done years ago. Rid myself of you. Permanently.”

Tessa laughed then. She couldn’t help it. After everything she’d been through in the last eight years, hell, in all twenty-one of them, he thought threatening her with death would motivate her? She was already dead. A shell of a person in a body with a beating heart.

“Kill me then. What’s the difference? Now or later. I’m dead either way.”

He took a step toward her, pausing when she didn’t even flinch and cocking his head to study her. She met his steely stare with her own. If he was going to kill her, she wouldn’t make it easy for him. Not that she imagined her father had any qualms about murdering people. Least of all the daughter he’d never wanted.

Swallowing when he reached up to wrap his fingers around her throat, she dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of emotion. Detached, cold, unfeeling. That’s all he would get from her.

His fingers tightened, squeezing until her throat constricted and it became harder and harder to pull in enough air. He watched her with a curious intensity, like he was studying her death, committing it to memory so he could relive it later. The sick fuck.

When her vision dimmed at the edges and her fingers began tingling before going numb one by one, she had to fight against her body’s basic survival instinct. He’d enjoy it too much if she fought back. If she was going to die today, she’d do it with some fucking dignity.

“You are committed, aren’t you?” her father said, his voice muffled under the sound of the blood rushing through her ears. “I guess you need better motivation.”

His grip loosened enough for the feeling to rush back to her hands, the sensation like needles pricking her skin from the inside out. Her throat burned, and the extra oxygen made her sway on her feet.

“If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for your mother.”

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