My brothers had been completely against it. They had sat me down in the study of the Valducci Fortress, the room where all the most important decisions of the Dynasty were made, and they had told me the truth as they saw it. I was the only daughter of the most powerful Family in the underworld. I had never known hardship. I had never tasted cruelty from the people who were supposed to love me. And marrying a cold, ambitious man like Xavier Salvatore, a man who saw alliances before he saw people, would not fare well for me.
How foolish I had been. How impossibly, devastatingly foolish to believe that pure love could surpass all status, all rank, all the brutal arithmetic of power. Because today, my husband was the very person who had told me I was useless. That I was nothing. An illiterate orphan with no name.