MATED TO THE MAFIA ALPHA

Chapter 3 - The Perfect Bride

The dress fitting is supposed to be the happiest part, but it seemed like something else. I stand on a little wooden stool in the center of the sitting room while the seamstress pins ivory silk along my hips, and I try to let myself feel what I'm supposed to feel, the flutter, the disbelief, the “this is really happening” instead of the low hum of unease that's been sitting under my ribs since the porch conversation with Damian four days ago. Prepare for our wedding. Not, I'm glad it's you. Not, I can't wait. Just an instruction, delivered like an order to a subordinate. I tell myself I'm overreacting. Alphas aren't raised to be all smiley or kind. Maybe that coldness is just how Damian is steady, controlled, the way every Alpha is supposed to be. Maybe once the bond settles in properly, once we actually know each other, the warmth will come, like all these slow burn love stories, I read every time. I want so badly to believe that. "Chin up, Sarah," Regina says from the couch, not looking up from the tablet in her lap. "You're getting married into the strongest bloodline in Mooncrest. Try to look like the Luna you’re about to become." "She looks lovely," the seamstress murmurs with a mouthful of pins, and I catch my own reflection in the tall mirror, pale ivory silk, my dark hair loose around my shoulders, cheeks flushed from standing so long.

For a second I almost believe her. For a second I look like a girl whose life is about to become something worth envying. Then I catch Vanessa's reflection over my shoulder, and the moment curdles. My stepsister is curled in the armchair by the window, scrolling through her phone with the particular stillness of someone who is not actually looking at her phone at all. She's been like this all week, sharp-eyed, quiet, watching the wedding preparations unfold around her like she's cataloguing something. Twice now I've caught her staring at me with an expression I can't quite name. Not jealousy, exactly but rather something colder than that.

"You're quiet today," I say, mostly to fill the silence because we hardly talk to each other but I’m curious about her attitude towards me recently. “Just thinking." Vanessa doesn't look up. "About how strange it is for you to marry Damian." "Strange good or strange bad?" I ask curiously. She finally lifts her eyes to mine, and there's something in them, something almost like a dare. "Just strange," she says, and goes back to her phone, as if she said nothing weird to freak me out. I don't know what to do with that, so I don't do anything at all. I let the seamstress finish pinning the hem, let Regina murmur approval at the neckline, and try to push the unease back down where it belongs. It doesn't stay down for long. That evening I find Regina in the hallway outside my bedroom, straightening a framed photograph that doesn't need straightening my mother's photograph, the one Regina has never once looked directly at in the eleven years since she married my father. It was as if she was waiting for my mom to die to get married to my dad, while still claiming that Vanessa was his child, I will never forget the night my dad brought them home. She startles slightly when she sees me, then smiles, warm and wide, the kind of smile that's supposed to put a person at ease. It doesn't put me at ease. It never has. "You looked beautiful today," she says. "Truly, I think this wedding is going to be exactly what this family needs." There's a strange emphasis on “this family needs”, like the wedding is less about me and more about some equation she's solving, and before I can decide whether I'm imagining it, she reaches out and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear a gesture so uncharacteristically tender from her that I go rigid. "Get some rest, sweetheart," she says. "The big day is coming." I lie awake a long time after that, turning the whole strange week over in my head, Vanessa's watchfulness, Regina's unsettling warmth, Damian's flat unhappiness on the porch and I can't make any of it fit together into something that makes sense. I tell myself it's my imaginations. Everyone's family gets strange before a wedding. I tell myself that so many times I almost start to believe it. Two nights before the ceremony, I get up for water and find the kitchen light already on, spilling gold across the hallway floor from beneath the door. I hear voices before I reach it my father's, low, and Regina's, lower still, pitched in that particular tone people use when they don't want to be overheard. I stop with my hand an inch from the door. "……still doesn't know," Regina is saying. "And she won't, not until it's far too late for her to do anything about it." My father's voice, strained: "And if the bond……" "The bond doesn't matter." Regina's voice sharpens, impatient.

"What matters is that by the time Sarah figures out what's happening, she'll already be standing at the altar, and there won't be anything she can do to stop it." I press my hand flat against the wall to steady myself, my pulse roaring in my ears so loud I almost miss what comes next my own name, spoken low and satisfied, wrapped inside a sentence I don't understand and desperately need to. "Sarah," Regina says, "has no idea what's really waiting for her at that wedding."