Married to the Mafia King

The call came at 11:47 on a Thursday night. Adaeze was still in her scrubs. She had just finished a six-hour surgery on a man who had been stabbed four times in the chest by his business partner, and she was eating cold jollof rice from a plastic container in the break room when her phone rang. She looked at the screen. It was her father. She did not pick up the first time. She picked up the second time because Chief Boniface Okafor never called twice unless something was genuinely wrong, and even then he usually called her mother first. Her mother had been dead for three years. So when he called twice, it meant he had run out of other people to call. "Adaeze." His voice was different. It was hollow like a man standing at the edge of something and trying not to look down. "Daddy. It is almost midnight." "I know. I know the time. Come home." "I just came off a six-hour shift. I have to be back here at seven." "Adaeze." A pause. "Please!" Her father had not said please to her in eleven years. Not since her mother’s funeral, when he had gripped her arm outside the church and said please do not cry in front of these people, it will embarrass the family. She had not cried. She had stood straight and shaken hands with people she had never met while her chest cracked open quietly behind her ribs. She went home. * * * The Okafor house in Lekki Phase One was a large, silent building. Her father had bought it in 2009 when the oil money was still good, and he had done nothing to maintain it since. The fountain in the front yard had stopped working in 2019. Nobody fixed it. The garden her mother had planted along the left wall was overgrown and brown at the edges now. Two cars she did not recognize were parked outside. Both were black and expensive in the way that serious people buy expensive things. It was not to show off but because everything they owned was built to last. Adaeze sat in her own car for thirty seconds and looked at those vehicles. Then she picked up her bag and went inside. Her father was in the sitting room. He was wearing his agbada but it was crumpled, like he had been sitting in it for hours. He stood when she walked in, and the expression on his face made her stop walking. She had seen that expression before. On patients’ families. Right before she told them something they would not recover from. Two men stood near the wall. They were large, still and gave nothing away. Standing between them, relaxed in a way that only people with absolute power manage to look relaxed, was a man she did not know. He was seated in her mother’s chair. The one nobody sat in. It was the very one her father had not allowed anyone to sit in since the funeral. The same one Adaeze herself had only sat in once, in the middle of the night, two weeks after they buried her mother, when she had pressed her face into the fabric and breathed in what was left. This man sat in it like it was nothing. He was looking at her. She looked back. He was maybe in his mid-thirties. Dark skin. Clean jaw. Eyes that held no warmth and no cruelty, just a flat, measuring attention that felt like being read. He wore a simple black kaftan, no jewellery except one ring on his right hand, and he did not stand when she entered the room. Nobody who had real power ever stood for you. They made you come to them. "Adaeze," her father said. His voice shook. "This is Mr. Eze Obi." She knew the name. Every doctor in Lagos who had ever treated a gunshot patient knew the name Obi. You do not need to say it loud nor twice. You treated whoever came through your door and you wrote Unidentified in the notes and you went home, and you did not think about it. "Mr. Obi," she said. Her voice came out level. She was good at level. He said nothing. Just kept watching her. Her father cleared his throat. "Sit down, Adaeze. We need to talk about something." She sat. She kept her eyes on Eze Obi because she understood instinctively that looking at her father would make her appear weak, and weakness in this room right now was not something she could afford. Her father talked for a long time. She caught the shape of it quickly. Three billion naira. A gambling debt spread across four years and fourteen different creditors, all of which Obi had quietly bought up over the past six months: the house, the cars, the accounts. All of it signed over in papers her father had not understood he was signing. Chief Boniface Okafor owned nothing. Except one thing. "He wants to marry you," her father said. He could not look at her when he said it. "It is only for one year, just for appearances. He needs a wife for a business arrangement. After one year, you will be free. He has given his word." The room was quiet. Adaeze did not speak for a long time. She turned and looked at Eze Obi, and for the first time since she had walked in, he moved. He leaned forward slightly, resting his forearms on his knees, and held her gaze with that same flat, waiting attention. "Did you choose me specifically," she said, "or was I simply what was available?" The question surprised him. She could see it in the slight shift of his jaw, the small recalibration behind his eyes. He was not used to being asked direct questions. "Both," he said. His voice was low and careful, like a man who had learned that words were tools and you did not waste tools. She nodded slowly. "I want three conditions," she said. Eze Obi looked at her like nobody had ever given him conditions in his life. In fact, nobody had.