Sold To The Devil's Son

Chapter 1

Alessandra

She'd woken up at five that morning without an alarm, Lay there in the dark for a long time looking at the ceiling of a bedroom that had been hers since she was nine years old.

By six-thirty there were people in her room who weren't supposed to be there yet.

Carla arrived first; the stylist, trailing two assistants and a garment bag long enough to hold a body. Alessandra sat at her vanity and watched them unzip it in the mirror.

"Oh," said one of the assistants,. "It's beautiful."

Carla shot her a look. The girl went quiet and didn't say anything else the rest of the morning.

Alessandra understood, distantly, that there was an entire language being spoken around her that she wasn't included in. She'd noticed it start three days ago, the day her father called her into his study and told her, in the same voice he used to discuss shipping delays, that she was getting married on Saturday. Since then she'd become something people managed. Not talked to. Managed.

"Arms up," Carla said.

Alessandra put her arms up.

The dress went over her head, the assistants catching the fabric before it could snag on anything, smoothing it down over her hips. It was heavier than it looked. Ivory silk, structured through the bodice, a skirt that pooled out behind her like something out of a painting. Some old master's idea of what a bride should look like, timeless and blank-faced and entirely decorative.

Nobody had asked her opinion on the color. Nobody had asked her opinion on anything.

"Sit," Carla said, gesturing at the vanity stool, and Alessandra sat, and the next forty minutes disappeared into the mechanical business of hair.

That was when the door opened and Francesca came in.

Her mother didn't knock. She never had, not in this house. Francesca came in already dressed for the day in pale blue, her own hair and makeup done. She stood in the doorway for a second just watching the assistants work before she said anything at all.

"Leave us," she told them. "Ten minutes."

Carla and the two assistants filed out without argument. The door clicked shut. And then it was just Alessandra in the mirror, and her mother behind her, and the particular silence that had lived between them for as long as Alessandra could remember.

Francesca crossed the room and opened the small velvet box that had been sitting on the vanity since that morning. Inside, on a bed of dark fabric, sat a necklace; gold, delicate, a single sapphire drop that caught the light when Francesca lifted it out.

"This was your grandmother's," Francesca said.

"I know."

"She wore it on her wedding day."

"I know that too, Mamma. You've told me."

Francesca's stepped behind Alessandra, close enough that Alessandra could smell her perfume

The clasp was small and fiddly. Francesca's fingers worked it with total steadiness, no hesitation at all, and that was the part Alessandra couldn't get past, watching her mother's hands in the mirror. How steady they were. Fastening the same necklace her own mother had probably fastened on her, once, in a room like this one, in front of some other mirror, for a man she hadn't chosen either.

The clasp caught. The necklace settled cold against her collarbone.

For a moment neither of them moved. Alessandra watched her mother's face in the mirror over her own shoulder, Francesca had started to say something and thought better of it a half-second before it reached her mouth. Her eyes went soft and urgent at once.

"Mamma," Alessandra said. "What is it?"

Francesca's throat moved. Her hand stayed resting on Alessandra's shoulder.

"Nothing," she said. "You look lovely."

And that was all. The moment closed over like water.

Alessandra had spent her whole life learning to read the things her mother didn't say, it was a survival skill in this house. She knew, watching her mother's face smooth back over into its practiced calm, that whatever had almost gotten out just then was something Francesca had decided, a long time ago, could never be spoken.

Whatever it was, Francesca swallowed it, and smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle from Alessandra's sleeve instead, and said, "Your father wants you downstairs in twenty minutes. The cars are early."

"Early."

"They called ahead."

Alessandra almost laughed; a short, ugly, humorless sound that never made it past her throat. Early. As if this were an appointment. As if there existed a version of today where the difference between twenty minutes and forty minutes was a difference that belonged to her.

"Do you remember your wedding day?" Alessandra asked.

Francesca's hand went still on the fabric.

"Of course I do."

"Was it like this?"

A long pause. Long enough that Alessandra watched it stretch out in the mirror, watched her mother's face hold very carefully still.

"Every wedding is its own thing, cara," Francesca said finally. "You'll see. It'll be... it'll be its own thing."

Which wasn't an answer.

She let it go. There wasn't a version of the truth today that either of them could afford to say out loud, and pushing at it now, twenty minutes before the cars pulled up the drive, wouldn't change anything except make the next twenty minutes harder to get through.

The door opened again. Carla, back with the assistants, a look on her face like she'd been listening from the hallway and thought better of interrupting sooner. "We still need the veil and the shoes, signora."

"Go ahead," Francesca said, stepping back. "We're nearly done."

The shoes went on first; ivory silk to match the dress, low heels, then the veil; long, longer than she'd expected, cascading down past her shoulders in a soft column that one of the assistants arranged, tucking pins in along the crown of her head to keep it anchored.

"Beautiful," Carla said, stepping back to survey the finished result. "Truly."

Nobody asked Alessandra if she agreed. Nobody had asked her anything, really, in three days.

"Alessandra."

Her mother's voice, again, pulling her back down out of the soft place behind her own eyes. Francesca was watching her in the mirror.

"You're not listening."

"I'm listening."

"I need you present today. Do you understand me? However you get through it, however you need to get through it, I need you present enough to walk down there on your own two feet and not give any of them a reason to --" Francesca stopped herself. Started again. "Just be present enough to get through it. That's all I'm asking."

'However you need to get through it.' Alessandra turned that phrase over twice, and understood that her mother knew exactly what this morning had been doing inside her.

"Okay," Alessandra said. "I'll be present."

It was the first outright lie she'd told her mother in longer than she could remember.

Francesca held her gaze in the mirror a moment longer. Then, apparently satisfied, or at least willing to accept the lie as sufficient for the next twenty minutes, she nodded once and turned toward the door.

"The cars," she said again, already walking. "Twenty minutes. Less, now."

Alessandra sat alone at the vanity after her mother left, Carla and the assistants having slipped out ahead of her, the room gone quiet. She looked at herself in the mirror. Ivory silk. Sapphire drop at her throat, warm now from her own skin. Veil pinned into hair that had been made to look harder and older than her own face usually did.

She did not recognize the woman looking back at her.

She stood. Smoothed her hands once down the front of the dress, then she went to the window, because she needed somewhere else to put her eyes before she had to go downstairs and be a role instead of a person.

The grounds spread out below her, green and manicured all the way to the front gate, gardeners already out trimming hedges that didn't look like they needed trimming, the whole property arranged.

She watched the gate for a long moment before anything came through it.

Then it did.

Four cars, moving up the long gravel drive in a tight line; black, low to the ground, and even from this distance, this high up, she could tell they were heavy. The particular low, dense weight of a car that had been built to stop bullets instead of just carry passengers. She'd seen cars like that before, a handful of times, parked outside her father's study during meetings.

Four of those cars. For one man. Coming to collect one girl in a dress somebody else had chosen for her.

Alessandra pressed two fingers to the sapphire at her throat and stood very still at the window while the convoy rolled to a stop on the gravel below, doors opening in sequence, men in dark suits fanning out around the cars before anyone important had even stepped out.

Nobody, she understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful after three days of refusing to feel anything at all, Nobody drove four armored cars to a wedding.

They drove them to a handoff.