Married to the Mafia CEO

I like arrivals. The way people step into rooms, all lacquer and perfume, as if the world has been waiting for their entrance and the chandeliers arrange themselves to flatter every jawline. Tonight’s audience is the usual: donors with teeth bright enough to whistle, camera flashes on a schedule, and my father’s smile cut from marble but warmed where it needs to be for the cameras. I, on the other hand, am a stylistic error in a room of carefully constructed correctness. Black silk with a collar that pretends to be modest but knows better, hair twisted into the kind of mess someone calls “artful.” Mia would call it “midnight bedhead.” Chloe would call it “capitalist seduction.” I call it practical — a disguise that helps me watch without being watched. “Stella,” my father says, because Bennett Musk calls me things that are older than my years. He doesn’t use the Italian — never mind that his grandparents muttered in broken Neapolitan over coffee. He uses the English that looks good on invitation cards: darling, my star, my Nolana. On nights like this, I play their game. I smile, clink a glass, nod at the right jokes, and file away the names people think they’ve told me. Logan — my brother — is a human weather system tonight: storms of spreadsheets, thunder of phone calls, the kind of flat worry that happens in CEO families when the numbers don’t sing. He catches my eye from across the room and gives a single breathless shake of his head. Translation: there’s something, and I don’t want to say it loud. “Just keep him alive until dessert,” I mouth at him across the glitter. He mouths back what he always mouths in private: Don’t be stupid. There’s a poetry to being feckless when people expect you to be smiling. My small, private plan for the next six months — a petty, delicious plan to get under an ex-boyfriend’s skin, to prove that I can pick up a husband at will and then discard him like a party favor — sits under my ribs like a dare. Bri—Brian Robert—is a sandbox fossil of my university days. He took compliments like currency and spent none on me. He left because he was frightened by normalcy and because it made him smaller in public. He owes me a bruise of humiliation, and I intend to deliver it with the precision of a jeweler. That’s my current blank ambition: be the first of my friends to say I’m off the market. Put a ring on me, post it, and let the feed combust. “Promise me you’ll not do anything regrettable,” Mia says, appearing by my elbow like she was being taught to shadow me in etiquette school. “Regret is subjective,” I tell her. “Besides, if I’m regretting, at least I’ll have a good story.” Chloe laughs. “You and your stories. Promise you’ll take a picture with Brian if he comes. We need receipts.” I let them imagine the scene. I let my smile do all the work. Acting is the original skill in my portfolio: perform until the audience can’t tell you’re improvising. Later, when I slip away from the concentrated glare of cameras and the gracious nods of trustees, the night has a loosened edge. I smell expensive perfume and the sharpness of cut citrus. Beneath that there is the faint, almost imperceptible tang of something metallic — money, maybe, or the scent of decisions being made behind closed doors. Logan corners me near the terrace, phone frayed at the edge of his fist. “They were in the east shipping lanes,” he says without greeting. “Unregistered containers. There’s a discrepancy in a transfer.” I fold my arms and adopt my best bored face. “Unregistered containers sound like an adventure, Logie. Where’s the champagne?” “Not funny,” he says. His voice tightens. “You can’t just… play with things that could burn the family down.” I am doing actually the meanest, most irresponsible thing possible with my life. I lift one shoulder. “I won’t. I’ll look spectacular while I do nothing.” He grabs my wrist, sincere panic cracking everything polite. “You don’t understand how dangerous—” “I understand perfectly,” I say. “Danger is your job. My job is to make people look better in photos.” He lets go with a press of his lips that could almost be tenderness, had I not known him since scrubbing graffiti off our garage wall as a child. “Please, Nolana. Be careful.” And I mean it. I mean the theatrical version of care, which in this business translates to cashmere, charm, and calculated silence. We leave the gala in statements: my father with the camera lines practiced by years of public life, Logan with his jaw set for the coming storms. Mia and Chloe wrap their arms through mine and steer me toward the dark promise of a club — loud bass, blurred lights, people who think shadows are for hiding but are really for dancing. On the street the city is softer than the gallery. A taxi’s brake light paints a streak of emergency on the pavement. I consider calling Brian. I don’t. That would be obvious. Instead I enjoy the idea of him receiving a ripple in the world that says: Nolana Musk has moved her pawns. We cross the threshold to the club like trespassers in silk. The room is a warm, dangerously comfortable blur of testosterone and laughter; a vinyl-scented ocean. I let the music pull my shoulders down and my feet do the remembering of a body that knows how to party first and apologize later. I spin once, a laugh on the back of my throat. If someone is watching me — really watching, not the cursory sweep that comes with security detail — I would be annoyed. But I would also be intrigued. Tonight, I am not ready to be more than a rumor and an open glass. I am not ready to be the axis of something much larger than my small, vindictive plan. As Mia orders another round, my phone buzzes in my clutch. An unknown number. A message: Per favore, non lasciarla sola. (Please, don’t leave her alone.) I frown. I don’t know the sender, and yet the words prick. Someone’s watching the periphery — or someone is playing a game that could move my life in a direction I did not write on my list of petty plans. I pocket the phone. Tonight will be longer than I budgeted for. I don't yet know whose eyes are following me, or how dangerously precise that watching will become. But that’s later. For now, Mia tugs me onto the dance floor, and I let the music pretend to be oblivion.