The Dept I Owe The Don

Chapter 1: The Price Tag

☘️ARIA☘️

I found out I belonged to someone else on a Tuesday.

Not the romantic kind of belonging. The kind that comes with a folder, a signature, and a dead man’s handwriting on the last page of a contract I never agreed to.

I’d spent that morning like every other morning that month. At my mother’s bedside in a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic and old flowers, holding her hand while a machine counted out her heartbeat in soft, patient beeps. She’d asked me, for the third time that week, if I’d eaten. I told her yes. I was lying. I’d been surviving on coffee and the kind of stubbornness that comes from watching your only parent get smaller every day and having no way to stop it.

I didn’t know yet that by the end of the afternoon, stopping it would cost me my whole life.

( Four hours later...)

“Explain it again,” I said. “Slowly. Like I’m an idiot.”

Marcus Ellery, my father’s old lawyer, wouldn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on the folder like it might bite him if he glanced up. His office was small and cramped, nothing like the man who is apparently dictating my future. I’d learn later that Marcus didn’t work for men like that by choice. Nobody did. “Your father borrowed against your name six years ago, Aria. Two million. He never paid a cent back.”

“Two million dollars?.” I punctuated every word in disbelief and when he confirmed, I looked at him then looked at the flimsy piece paper he was reading and I laughed and it came out so wrong, cracked down the middle. When my disbelief had mellowed, thats when I spoke again “I have four hundred in my checking account. I sell charcoal sketches on a folding table outside my apartment for grocery money. Where exactly do you think that sum of money’s supposed to come from?”

“The debt isn’t cash anymore.” He finally looked at me, and I understood, in the half-second before he said it, that my life had already ended and I just hadn’t been told how. “The Don has agreed to convert it. Into a personal arrangement.”

“A personal arrangement.” I said the words like they were something spoiled I’d found in the back of a fridge.

“Marriage,” Marcus said. “In name, in public. In private,,," he paused and looked her wit sorry eyes "That’s between you and him.”

I stood up so fast the chair screeched against the floor, loud enough that a woman in the waiting room outside glanced through the glass. “I’m not marrying a stranger to pay off my dead father’s debt to some ugly criminal.”

“He’s not a stranger to this city, Aria. Everyone knows the name Moretti.” Marcus’s voice dropped, careful, the way you’d talk someone down from a ledge. “And he’s not asking. He’s already decided to be generous. That’s not something men like him do twice.”

“Generous.” I wanted to laugh again, and this time it would have come out as something closer to a scream. “What happens if I say no?”

Marcus was quiet long enough that the silence answered for him. “Your mother’s care is being paid for right now by a line of credit your father opened under the Moretti name. If that stops, the hospital moves her to a public ward within the week. And the men your father actually borrowed the original two million from — before he tried to launder it through people worse than him. they don’t extend the same courtesy the Don has.”

That was the first time I understood the difference between being given a choice and being told what your choice would be.

I left his office with a business card in my coat pocket, an address written on the back in handwriting too elegant for a man I already hated, and the distinct, sinking feeling that I’d crossed some invisible line and there was no walking back over it.

I stared at the card the entire train ride home. D. Moretti. No first name printed, like the city didn’t need one to know exactly who it belonged to. I turned it over in my fingers so many times the edges went soft, and somewhere between my stop and the one before it, I stopped asking myself whether I’d go because who am I kidding.

I already knew I would.