Marrying the Mafia King's Enemy

The wedding dress cost more than Elena Voss's entire apartment, and she hated every thread of it. "Smile," her stepmother hissed, adjusting the veil with fingers like ice. "Or I swear I'll drag you down that aisle myself." Elena looked at herself in the gilded mirror. White silk, boned tight enough to steal her breath. Diamonds at her throat that weren't hers, borrowed the way everything in this house had always been borrowed from someone else's mercy. A stranger's face staring back, ready to be handed over like a signed check. "You sold me," Elena said quietly. "To a man I've never met." "I saved this family," Camille snapped, tugging the veil into place with more force than necessary. "Dimitri Kastellanos is paying off your father's debts in exchange for a wife. Be grateful anyone still wants you." Elena almost laughed. Three years ago she'd been a normal twenty-two-year-old with a normal life, a job she liked, friends who texted her about nothing important, before her father's gambling swallowed everything, before Camille moved in with her cold eyes and colder calculations and turned the house into a ledger of who owed whom. "Does he know," Elena asked, "that I have no say in any of this? Does he know what he's actually buying?" "He knows he's buying peace along a shipping route that's cost him a fortune to protect," Camille said. "The rest is none of his concern, and it certainly isn't yours to explain to him." Through the window, black cars lined the driveway like a funeral procession, engines idling, men in dark suits standing beside them with the particular stillness of people who carried weapons and knew how to use them. Elena supposed it was a funeral, in its way. This wedding was about to bury the girl she used to be and replace her with whatever Dimitri Kastellanos decided she'd become. She had no idea it was about to hand her over to a man who would burn the world down before he let her go. --- The chapel was full by the time Elena reached the doors, every pew packed with men who wore their suits like armor, wives and daughters glittering beside them in jewelry that probably cost more than the church itself. Elena recognized power when she smelled it, and this room reeked of it — the particular hush of people who'd learned violence could arrive at any moment, so they stayed prepared for it even during a wedding. She kept her chin up and her spine straight, refusing to let any of them see her shake, and started down the aisle toward the man waiting at the altar. He was younger than she'd braced for, broader through the shoulders than the single photograph Camille had shown her months ago, as if presenting a prize she'd already decided to claim. Dark hair, a jaw sharp enough to cut glass. As Elena drew closer, his storm-grey eyes fixed on her with an intensity that made her pulse stutter despite every instinct screaming at her not to react, and his mouth curved, slow and dangerous, like a man deciding exactly how much he intended to own. *Don't,* Elena told herself. *Don't let him see it.* She reached the altar, and up close he was worse — or better, some traitorous part of her supplied, before she smothered the thought entirely. He smelled like cedar and something colder underneath, gunmetal maybe, and the heat radiating off him made the space between them feel smaller than it should have. "Do you, Dimitri Kastellanos, take this woman—" "Stop the wedding." The voice cracked through the chapel, and half the guests reached for hidden weapons before realizing it wasn't a gunshot. Elena's stomach dropped as she recognized the man in the doorway — Thomas, her father's driver, the one loyal man left in that house, chest heaving, suit rumpled from running. "Mr. Kastellanos, you've been deceived," Thomas said. "That's not the heiress you were promised. Aldous Voss has no shares in his own company. Camille made sure of that years ago, quietly, so the real value would always stay in her own daughter's hands." Silence pressed against the room like a held breath. Elena watched Dimitri's eyes never leave her face, even as chaos rippled through the pews around them. "Is that true?" "Every word." She lifted her chin even as her heart slammed against her ribs, aware of every gun in the room, aware that a lie right now might save her and refusing, still, to tell one. "I have nothing you were promised. No shares. No inheritance. Let me go, and we can both walk away from whatever my stepmother built here." A murmur rippled through the guests, low and dangerous, men shifting in their seats like something might break loose at any second. Camille's composure cracked entirely behind her, shrill and desperate, but Elena barely registered the words — because Dimitri had gone very still, and something in his stillness terrified her more than shouting would have. "You tried to swindle the Kastellanos family," he said quietly to Camille, and two of his men moved without waiting for a second order, closing in on either side of her. Camille screamed for a lawyer, for the police, for anyone at all. Elena watched the guests who'd smiled through champagne toasts an hour earlier simply sit in silence, faces carefully blank, as her stepmother was dragged toward the doors. Then Dimitri turned back to Elena, and instead of the fury she braced for, she watched something else cross his face entirely — a slow, deliberate appraisal, the look of a man recalculating exactly how much he was willing to burn to keep something he'd just realized he wanted. "You have nothing," he said. "No shares. No name worth trading on. No family left who'll claim you." "That's right." Her voice shook despite herself. "So let me go." "No." The word landed like a hand closing around her wrist, and Elena felt her pulse spike at the certainty in it. "You just stood in front of a hundred armed men and told the truth when a lie would have saved you," Dimitri said, stepping closer, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze. "That makes you the most honest thing in this entire room. I don't let go of things that rare." "This isn't a business transaction anymore," Elena said, breathless, hating how unsteady she sounded. "You don't even know me." "I know your mother was a Marchetti." His voice dropped, low enough that only she could hear it, and Elena felt the floor drop out from beneath her. She had no idea what that name meant yet, only that it landed in his expression like a lit match near gasoline. "Which means you're not just interesting, little wife. You're the one thing my worst enemy would burn this city down to get back." He reached out and closed his hand around hers — the ring the only part of this wedding that hadn't been a lie, cold metal against her trembling fingers. "So no," he said. "You're not walking out of here. You're mine now. And I protect what's mine." "You keep saying that word like it means something good," Elena said, forcing herself to hold his gaze despite the tremor still running through her. "Where I come from, being owned has never once meant being protected." Something shifted behind his eyes, the calculation softening into something she couldn't name yet. "Then I suppose I'll have to teach you the difference," he said. "Because I don't intend to be one more person in your life who takes without giving anything back." Elena's breath caught, fear and something far more dangerous tangling together in her chest as the chapel doors slammed shut behind them, sealing her inside a marriage — and a war — she'd never agreed to, with a man whose grip on her hand felt less like a threat with every second that passed. That, more than anything else he'd said tonight, was what actually terrified her. Outside, the black cars she'd watched from her bedroom window that morning were already lined up along the curb, engines running, doors open and waiting. Dimitri didn't let go of her hand as he led her down the chapel steps, his men falling into formation around them with the kind of practiced efficiency that told Elena this wasn't the first time they'd needed to move a person quickly through a crowd of witnesses. "Where are you taking me?" Elena asked, forcing the question out steady even as her legs felt unsteady beneath her. "Somewhere safer than here," Dimitri said, guiding her into the back of the nearest car with a hand at the small of her back. "Whatever Vittorio Marchetti's men saw or heard in that chapel, they'll know within the hour that you exist. I'd rather you not be standing on a church step when that information finishes traveling." Elena's stomach tightened at the unfamiliar name, spoken like something that should already mean something to her. "Who is Vittorio Marchetti?" Dimitri slid into the seat beside her, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers as the door shut, sealing them both into the muted, leather-scented quiet of the car's interior. "Your uncle," he said. "And the reason you're about to learn considerably more about your own family in the next twenty-four hours than you've known in your entire life." The car pulled away from the curb, and Elena watched the chapel shrink in the rear window, already smaller than the version of herself she'd walked out of it as. She had come here believing she had nothing left to lose. She was only beginning to understand exactly how wrong that belief had been, and how much more dangerous her own blood might turn out to be than the stranger's hand still wrapped tightly around hers.