Married to the Mafia King

Episode Two

Her father made a sound. It was the sound of a man trying to swallow his own panic.

"Adaeze, this is not the time to be difficult."

She did not look at him. She kept her eyes on Eze Obi because he was the one who mattered in this room. Her father had forfeited his right to matter the moment he walked into whatever card game had started all this.

Eze Obi had not moved as he was still watching her with that same flat patience. But there was something else now. It was something she could not fully name. An adjustment in his attention, like a man who had expected a window and found a door.

"Say them," he said.

"You do not touch me without my permission, I keep my job at the hospital, I am not a decoration or a prisoner, and you do not lie to me." She paused. "That is four. I said three, but the fourth one is the most important."

His head tilted, just slightly. "You can count."

"I am a trauma surgeon and I count things for a living." She folded her hands in her lap. "Do you agree or not?"

The two men near the wall had gone very still. Like men who were watching something unexpected and were not sure whether to be entertained or alarmed.

Eze Obi looked at her for a long moment. Then he sat back.

"Yes," he said.

"I need it in writing."

A pause.

"Ikenna," he said, without turning his head.

One of the men near the wall moved. He produced a leather folder from somewhere and brought it forward. Eze Obi opened it, removed a sheet, and signed it without reading what was on it. He slid it across the table toward her.

She picked it up. It was not the standard prenuptial language she had expected. It was something his lawyers had drafted specifically, outlining a twelve-month union with clearly stated terms. It was already there and he had already included most of her conditions before she had stated them.

She looked up at him.

"You expected me to have conditions," she said.

"I expected you to have spine," he said. "You confirmed it."

Her father made another sound. This one was harder to identify: relief, maybe, mixed with something that might have been shame. She would examine that and many other things later.

She signed the document.

* * *

She told Nkechi the next morning.

They were in the staff locker room at 6:40 am, and Nkechi stood with one hand on her locker door and stared at Adaeze for so long that Adaeze started to count ceiling tiles.

"Run that by me one more time," Nkechi said.

"My father owes three billion naira to Eze Obi. Eze Obi wants a wife for a business arrangement. They have agreed that I am the wife and I am getting married on Saturday."

"Saturday." Nkechi repeated it like she was testing whether the word still meant what she thought it meant. "This Saturday. As in, four days from now Saturday."

"Yes."

"To Eze Obi. The Eze Obi. The one who owns…"

"Yes. That one."

Nkechi closed her locker and carefully sat down on the bench. She opened her mouth and closed it again three times.

"Adaeze," she said finally, and her voice had dropped into something serious and careful, the voice she used when she was about to say something she needed to be sure the other person heard fully. "That man is not a normal dangerous. That man is the kind of dangerous that does not make the news because the reporters know better than to run the story."

"I know what he is."

"Do you? Because knowing something in theory and knowing it in your chest are two very different things."

Adaeze tied her hair back. She looked at herself in the mirror above the sinks. She was still herself. Nothing has changed because it was the same face and same hands. Whatever was happening, she was still herself.

"I got conditions in writing," she said.

Nkechi stared. "You got conditions in writing from a crime lord."

"He agreed to all of them."

"That makes it worse! That means he wants this enough to agree to things he has never agreed to in his life, and Adaeze, when a man like that wants something that much, you need to ask yourself why."

The question sat between them.

It was the same question Adaeze had been sitting with since she drove home at 1 am and lay in her bed staring at the ceiling. Why her specifically? Her father had said it was because she was the only remaining Okafor asset, but he had also signed papers he did not read. Her father’s understanding of the situation was not a thing she trusted.

"I will find out," Adaeze said.

Nkechi pressed her lips together. "You had better. And Adaeze." She grabbed her hand. "You call me. Every day. If you miss a day, I am calling every contact I have."

Adaeze squeezed back. "Every day," she agreed.

She went to work and did her rounds. She performed two surgeries. She was very good at her job, and she let herself be very good at it for the next ten hours because on Saturday her life was going to change in ways she could not fully see yet, and right now she needed to remember who she was before it did.

* * *

The wedding was small: a court registrar and eight witnesses, four of them Eze’s men and three she did not know. Nkechi stood on Adaeze’s side in a yellow dress and held her hand through most of it.

Eze Obi wore white.

She had not expected white. She had expected black, the way she expected everything about him to be dark and deliberate. But he wore a white kaftan with silver embroidery at the collar, and he was the kind of man who wore things like they were made for him, and when she walked in and saw him standing at the front of the small room she had to remind herself to breathe steadily.

He looked at her when she entered. His expression did not change.

But he straightened.

Just slightly and enough.

She filed that away.

The registrar read the vows and she said the words, and he said the words and when the man said you may kiss the bride, there was a three-second pause in which the whole room held its breath.

Eze Obi looked at her. She looked at him.

He reached out slowly and held her hand. He brought it to his lips and kissed her knuckles. Once and slowly.

Her skin burned where his mouth had been.

She kept her face very still.

"Mrs. Obi," he said quietly, for her ears only.

She lifted her chin. "I have kept my last name as well. The document says so."

His mouth curved. Just barely. Just for a second. Then it was gone.

But she had seen it, and that almost-smile would keep her awake for the entire drive to his compound, wondering w

hat else she had not been told about who this man really was.