Bound to the Mafia King

The first time Dante Moretti walked into the Silver Moon Diner, the whole room went quiet. I noticed, because quiet never happened there. Not at eleven p.m. on a Tuesday, when the truckers were loud and the jukebox was louder and Manny, the fry cook, was singing off-key to a song nobody had chosen. But the bell above the door chimed, three men in black suits stepped inside, and every fork in the place stopped moving. The man in front wasn't the biggest. He was the stillest. Tall, maybe six-two, dark hair pushed back from his forehead, a thin white scar cutting through one eyebrow. Black coat, black shirt, no tie, and a watch that cost more than my tuition. His eyes moved once around the diner—slowly, like he was counting exits—and then landed on me. I was holding a pot of coffee and trying to remember if I'd paid rent. "Table for three?" I asked, because my brain had apparently decided this was a normal Tuesday. The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "We're not staying." "Then you're in the wrong place. We close in twenty minutes." "We're not here for pie, Aria Chen." My name in his mouth felt like a hand closing around my wrist. I set the coffee pot down before I dropped it. "I'm sorry—do I know you?" "No." He stepped closer. Up close he smelled like cold air and something expensive. "But I know your father. Wei Chen. He owes me two million four hundred thousand dollars." The diner tilted, just a little. Behind me, Manny had stopped singing. "My father's debts are his own," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "I'm a waitress. I don't have two million dollars. I don't have two hundred dollars." "I know." His eyes dropped to my apron, to the name tag pinned crooked above my heart, and something in his expression shifted—irritation, maybe, or interest. "That's why I'm here." "To collect from me?" "To make an offer." I laughed. It was a short, ugly sound. "Let me guess. A loan. With interest." "No." He reached into his coat and set a black card on the counter between us. It was matte, no name, just a phone number embossed in silver. "Sunday. Eight o'clock. The Vault." "The Vault is a nightclub." "It's also my office." "I'm not going to a nightclub with a stranger who claims my father owes him money." "Claims?" He tilted his head. "Aria. Your father borrowed the money to pay off another debt. And another. And another. I bought all of them. Now he's gone. That leaves you." Behind the counter, my phone buzzed. Then again. Then again. My mother's ringtone. I didn't look at it. I couldn't. If I looked at it, I would see the hospital's number, or the collection agency, or both, and I would start crying in front of a man who owned half of Chicago. "Sunday," Dante said again. "Eight o'clock. If you're late, the offer expires." "What offer?" He didn't answer. He turned and walked toward the door, and the three men fell in behind him like shadows. At the door he stopped. "One more thing." He didn't look back. "When your father calls, tell him I'm disappointed. He was supposed to keep you out of this." Then the bell chimed, and he was gone, and the diner exhaled all at once. Manny appeared beside me. "Aria. Who was that?" "I have no idea." I picked up the black card. My hands were steady. My heart was not. I got home at one in the morning to a stack of bills and a father-shaped silence. Our apartment was two rooms above a laundromat on Ash Street. The radiator knocked. The hallway light flickered. My mother's room was dark, and her oxygen machine hummed its slow, patient song. She was asleep. I stood in the doorway for a long minute, just breathing with her, the way I used to do when I was small and afraid of the dark. Then I went into the kitchen, opened the drawer where my father kept his "important papers," and found it empty. All of it. Empty. The drawer had been cleaned out—no bills, no bank statements, no passport. Only one thing was left, and it wasn't paper. It was a wedding ring. My mother's wedding ring. The one she never took off. The one she'd told me she wanted buried with her. It sat in the empty drawer like an accusation, and I understood, the way you understand a fall a second before it hits, that my father hadn't just run. He had sold it. My phone buzzed again. This time I answered. "Miss Chen?" A woman's voice, professional, tired. "This is Mercy General. Your mother's surgery is scheduled for the fourteenth. We need the deposit by Friday, or the slot gets released." "How much?" "Forty thousand." I closed my eyes. Four hundred a week at the diner. Two hundred in tips if I was lucky. Medical school, on hold. Rent, three months behind. And now a man in a black coat with a black card and my name in his mouth. "Miss Chen?" "I'll have it," I said. "Friday." I hung up before she could ask how. Then I sat down at the kitchen table, in the dark, and looked at the black card. Sunday. Eight o'clock. The Vault. I told myself I wasn't going. I told myself that for two days. And then, on Sunday night at eight o'clock, I was standing in front of the Vault trying not to shake. The club was all black glass and gold light. A woman in a silver dress looked me up and down—my cheap coat, my scuffed boots—and smiled like I was the night's entertainment. "Miss Chen." She didn't ask. "He's upstairs." The elevator opened onto a hallway that smelled like smoke and cedar. At the end, a double door. Two men stood on either side. They let me pass. Inside, the room was enormous and almost empty: a desk, a bar, a wall of black windows, and Dante Moretti, standing with his back to me, looking down at Chicago like it was a chessboard. "You came," he said, without turning around. "I need forty thousand dollars by Friday." "I know." He turned. In the low light, the scar looked like it had been carved by something careful and cruel. "Sit down, Aria." I didn't sit. "What's the offer?" Dante picked up a folder and slid it across the desk. I opened it. A legal document. And a photograph—my father, handcuffed, sitting in a back room somewhere, looking ten years older than he had a month ago. "He's alive," Dante said. "For now." My hands tightened on the folder. "Where is he?" "Somewhere the people who want him can't reach him. I've been keeping him that way. It's costing me money." "Why?" "Because he's useful." He said it without apology. "So are you." I looked up at him. "What do you want?" Dante Moretti smiled then, and the smile was worse than any threat. "My grandfather is dying," he said. "He has three weeks. His will says the family business passes to whoever proves he's built a legacy—a home, a bloodline, a wife." He paused. "I need a wife." The word sat between us. "Are you out of your mind?" I heard my own voice climb. "You want me to marry you?" "For one year. A public marriage. Then a quiet divorce, and you walk away." "And in exchange?" "Your father's debt dies. His enemies stop looking for him. Your mother gets her surgery, and the rest of it—the recovery, the specialists—I'll cover it all." He reached into his pocket, and set something on the desk between us. A ring. Old gold, a small diamond, worn smooth at the edge. "And this." I stared at it. "What is that?" "My mother's ring. It belonged to the last woman who tried to leave my family." His eyes were black and steady. "She didn't make it." I should have run. I know that now. I should have turned around, walked out of that club, and taken my chances with the loan sharks and the collection agencies and the forty thousand dollars I didn't have. Instead I said, "One year." "One year." "Separate rooms." "We'll see." "And if I say no?" Dante picked up the ring. He rolled it between his fingers, watching me the way a man watches a hand of cards he's already won. "Then I'll be sorry," he said softly, "and you'll still be here. Because you're not the kind of woman who lets her mother die for her pride. Are you, Aria Chen?" The room was very quiet. My mother's oxygen machine seemed to hum in the distance between us, far away and very close at the same time. I thought about the empty drawer. The stolen ring. My father's hands in handcuffs. I reached out and took the ring. Dante's fingers brushed mine—warm, calloused, careful for a man wrapped in rumors of blood. "Put it on," he said. "Before I change my mind." I slid the old gold over my knuckle. It fit like it had been waiting. And somewhere beneath the floor, the music of the Vault started up, low and dark, like a heartbeat under a city that had already decided my fate.