The Devil's Contract Bride

This dress cost more than what most people made in a year. I know this because my father said so. Several times. Like the number was supposed to make me feel something other than the specific kind of nausea that comes from being dressed up for your own auction. "You look beautiful, Isabella." he said, I knew better than to think it was a compliment, it was more like he was appraising livestock. "I know," I said. He didn't like that, and I could see it in the way his jaw tightened slightly. The car smelled like leather and his cologne. Old money and older sins. Outside the window, the city blurred past in amber streetlight, and I thought about how many times I had sat in this exact seat, been driven to exactly this kind of meeting, been told exactly what was expected of me. "The Morettis are expecting civility," my father said without looking at me. His eyes stayed on his phone. "Not theatrics." "When have I ever been theatrical?" He looked up then. Something moved across his face, was it surprise? Guilt? Hard to tell with Giovanni De Luca. He'd spent forty years training his expressions the way other men trained dogs. "Never," he admitted. "That's why I chose you." Chose me. Like I was a chess piece he'd been saving. Which, to be fair, I was. I turned back to the window. The thing about being the daughter of a mafia boss is that nobody ever explains the rules to you, you’re just expected to absorb them through proximity and consequence, the way you learn not to touch a hot stove. You learn early that your value is conditional. That love in this world comes attached to expectations. That the word family can mean both the people you'd die for and the people who'd sell you if the price was right. Tonight, apparently, the price was peace. The Moretti estate sat behind iron gates that looked like they'd been designed by someone who wanted you to know, before you even stepped inside, that this was a place where the rules were different. I counted four guards at the entrance. Two more at the top of the steps. The kind of guards who stood so still they looked like they were a part of the architecture. My father straightened his tie. A nervous habit he'd deny under oath. "Remember what we discussed," he said. "Be charming. Be compliant. Don't give him a reason to change his mind." "And don't—" "Give anything away." I opened the car door myself. "I know, Papa." The air outside was cool. Dry. There was no drama up above tonight, nothing but flat and clear skies, the way nights feel before something irrevocable happens. I smoothed the front of the dress and walked toward the steps. The inside of the house was exactly what I'd expected and nothing like it at the same time. I'd expected opulence, and I saw opulence, marble floors and high ceilings and the kind of art that didn't come with price tags because the price tags would be obscene. But it was quiet. That was the part I hadn't prepared for. No music, no crowd noise, no performative excess. Just space, and light, and the low murmur of men in suits speaking in clusters near the far end of a room that could have comfortably held up to a hundred people. It currently held maybe twenty. A man broke from one of the clusters and came toward us. Tall. Late thirties. Dark hair. He had the kind of build that suggested he had had a job doing something physical for a long time and had no intention of stopping, and was wearing a suit that fit the way suits only fit when someone's had them made specifically for their body. He wasn't looking at my father. He was looking at me. There was something different about the way he was looking at me. Unlike all the men I had encountered before today, he wasn't assessing or cataloguing me like I was a piece of meat. This look was direct and slow. "De Luca." He extended a hand to my father. "Thank you for coming." "Moretti." My father shook it. The handshake of two men pretending like they wouldn’t cheerfully kill each other under different circumstances. "This is my daughter, Isabella." The man — Alessandro Moretti, the youngest don in the family's history, the man I had been researching on for four months, the man I had six different plans to destroy — turned to me. "Isabella." It wasn't a greeting exactly. More like confirmation. "Mr. Moretti," I said. "Sandro." "I'm sorry?" One corner of his mouth moved with what can only be described as the suggestion of a smile, offered and immediately taken back. "My name is Alessandro. But if you are going to marry me, you would have to call me Sandro."