Accidental Mafia's Wife

Chapter Two: You Are Not Giulia

Elena's POV

Three words.

He said three words and the entire cathedral ceased to exist.

Not the candles. Not the roses. Not the hundreds of people sitting in those pews who had just watched me become property. Not Father Benedetto with his careful face and his careful hands and his carefully rehearsed words about sacred unions.

All of it — gone.

Just his breath against my ear and three words that landed in my chest like a blade finding the exact place it was looking for.

*You are not Giulia.*

I pulled back.

Slowly. Deliberately. The way you move when every instinct in your body is screaming and you refuse — absolutely refuse — to let anyone in this room see it. I put exactly enough distance between us that I could look at his face without craning my neck and I held his gaze and I did not look away.

His green eyes were already on mine when I got there.

Waiting.

Like he'd known exactly what I would do.

*Good,* something in those eyes said. *There you are.*

My heart was slamming against my ribs so hard I was certain he could hear it. My hands were still holding the bouquet — white peonies and dying roses — and I gripped the stems tighter and let the thorn press deeper into my palm and used that small, sharp pain to keep myself exactly where I needed to be.

Present.

Upright.

Unbroken.

"No," I said quietly. "I'm not."

My voice came out steady.

I have no idea how.

Something moved behind his expression — fast, barely there, gone before I could name it. His jaw tightened once. Those cold green eyes moved across my face with the same slow deliberateness as before, reading me like a document he hadn't been expecting to find interesting.

Then Nico appeared at his shoulder — materialised, almost, the way men like that seem to — and said something low into Dante's ear that I couldn't catch. Dante's gaze held mine for one more second. Two.

Then he looked away.

Just like that.

As though I was a question he'd already answered.

He turned and walked with Nico toward the side of the altar, their voices dropping below anything I could follow, and I was left standing in the middle of the cathedral in Giulia's dress with a ring on my finger that felt like a shackle and no idea what happened next.

Rosa appeared at my side.

"Come," she said. Just that. No explanation. No apology. No acknowledgment that she had just handed me to a man who ran a criminal empire and hadn't thought to mention it.

I looked at her.

At her carefully composed face and her pearl earrings and her hands folded neatly in front of her like she was at a garden party.

I had called this woman *Auntie* since I was six years old.

"Where's Giulia?" I said.

Her composure didn't c***k. Not even slightly. "This isn't the time, Elena."

"Where. Is. Giulia."

"I said this isn't—"

"And I said where is she." My voice dropped. Low and flat in a way I barely recognised. "Because that was her dress. Those were her flowers. That was her veil." I held up my left hand between us — the ring catching the candlelight, the dark stone sitting heavy on my finger. "And I'm fairly certain that was supposed to be her husband."

Rosa's eyes cut sideways. Checking who was close enough to hear.

"Lower your voice."

"Answer my question."

For a moment she just looked at me — and in that moment something flickered across her face that might, in another life, have been shame. It was there and then it was buried, packed down beneath years of practice.

"Later," she said. "We'll talk later. Right now you need to smile and—"

"I will not smile." I stepped back from her hand before it reached my arm. "Don't touch me."

I turned and walked toward the cathedral's side corridor before she could respond.

---

The corridor ran along the left flank of the nave — stone-floored, narrow, lit by wall sconces with flickering bulbs behind frosted glass that threw the kind of light that made everything look older than it was. Arched doorways lined the right side, most of them closed. Through one, partially ajar, came the sound of voices.

I should have kept walking.

I have never been good at doing what I should.

I slowed.

The voices were familiar — Carlo's low rumble, Rosa's clipped precision. I stopped just short of the doorway and pressed my back against the stone wall and listened with my whole body.

*"—should have told him beforehand."* Rosa. Sharp and tight. *"Carlo, I told you. I told you we should have been upfront with—"*

*"And have him refuse?"* Carlo's voice was harder than I'd ever heard it. Something stripped back about it. The voice he used when he forgot I was in the house. *"Dante Vincente doesn't refuse, Rosa. He retaliates. You know what he does to families who waste his time?"*

Silence.

*"Giulia couldn't do it."* His voice dropped but the corridor carried it perfectly. *"You saw her. She would have broken down at the altar, made a scene, embarrassed all of us. Elena is—"* A pause. *"Elena is stronger. She can handle it."*

*"She's going to find out we knew."*

*"She already knows."*

*"Carlo—"*

*"She's a smart girl."* And there it was — there was something in his voice that might have been fondness if it hadn't been sitting right next to the evidence of what he'd done. *"She'll understand eventually. She always does."*

I pressed my palm flat against the stone wall.

Cold. Rough. Real.

*She can handle it.*

She can handle it.

Twenty-two years. Twenty-two years of eating their food and wearing their charity and telling myself they loved me even if they had a strange way of showing it. Twenty-two years of being the grateful one, the quiet one, the one who didn't ask too many questions because asking questions made Rosa's mouth go tight and Carlo's eyes go somewhere else.

Twenty-two years and it turned out they had always known exactly what I was to them.

A contingency plan.

A spare.

Something to use when the thing they actually valued needed protecting.

The bouquet was still in my hands. I didn't remember holding it this whole time but there it were — white peonies browning at the edges already, red roses starting to curl. The black ribbon Rosa had tied around the stems.

I set it down against the wall.

Carefully. Quietly.

I didn't want to be holding it anymore.

I didn't want to be wearing this dress anymore. Or this veil. Or this ring — I looked at it again, sitting on my finger like it had always been there, like it belonged, like I had chosen it.

I hadn't chosen anything.

Not one thing in this entire day had been my choice.

My eyes burned.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed through my nose and absolutely refused. Not here. Not in this corridor. Not where any one of the hundreds of people in that cathedral might walk past and see Elena Moretti — Elena Vincente, a voice in my head corrected viciously — fall apart in a side hallway because she finally understood what she was worth to the people who raised her.

Nothing.

She was worth nothing.

She was worth less than Giulia's comfort.

Less than Carlo's fear.

Less than a deal that needed closing.

My phone.

I still had my phone — in the small clutch Rosa had given me, which I was still somehow carrying. I pulled it out with shaking hands and opened Jabari's messages.

The last thing I'd sent him.

*I'm fine. I'll call you after.*

My throat tightened so fast it hurt.

I typed with fingers that wouldn't cooperate properly.

*I need you.*

Three dots appeared immediately.

Then: *Location. Now.*

I sent it.

I leaned back against the cold stone wall of St. Michael's Cathedral in a dress that wasn't mine and a ring I hadn't chosen and I stared at the vaulted ceiling above me — stone ribs and white roses and dark ivy and candle smoke curling upward into the dark — and I breathed.

In.

Out.

*You are not going to fall apart.*

*You are going to figure this out.*

*You have always figured it out.*

The corridor was quiet except for the distant murmur of the cathedral filling again — guests moving, voices rising, the particular sounds of a reception beginning to organise itself. Somewhere out there Dante Vincente was being congratulated. Somewhere out there Carlo was exhaling for the second time today, relieved, unburdened. Somewhere out there Giulia — wherever Giulia was — was safe.

Because I was here instead.

Because I was always the one they could afford to spend.

My phone buzzed.

Jabari: *I'm outside. Side entrance. ELENA I am outside right now come out.*

I stared at the message.

Then I pushed off the wall.

Fixed my spine.

Lifted my chin.

And walked toward the side entrance of St. Michael's Cathedral with the ring of Dante Vincente cold on my finger and absolutely no idea what I was walking into — only that Jabari was on the other side of that door, and Jabari was the only real thing I had left.

I pushed the door open.

The morning air hit me first — cool, sharp, carrying the smell of rain that hadn't fallen yet. Then the light. Then—

"Elena."

He was already moving when I saw him — crossing the narrow side street at a pace that was almost running, tall and broad-shouldered in a dark jacket, his face tight with something that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite fear but lived in the space between them. Jabari. My Jabari, who had replied in seconds because he always replied in seconds, who had asked *do I need to come* because he always knew before I did.

He reached me and stopped.

Looked at the dress. The veil. The ring.

His jaw went rigid.

"Elena." His voice was very controlled. Very quiet. "What did they do?"

And that — those four words, in that voice, with that look on his face — was the thing that finally cracked it.

Not the altar. Not Dante's green eyes. Not Rosa's *don't embarrass us* or Carlo's *she can handle it* or three words breathed against my ear like a verdict.

This.

Jabari's face.

Because he was looking at me the way people look at you when they actually see you — not what you're worth, not what you can handle, not what you can be used for. Just *you.* Just Elena.

I pressed my lips together hard.

"They sold me," I said.

The words hung in the cool morning air between us.

Jabari went very still.

And behind his eyes something shifted — something quiet and absolute, the way a decision looks when it's already been made and what you're seeing is just the moment the person accepts it.

"Okay," he said softly.

Just that.

*Okay.*

Like it was a promise.