Reborn to Marry the Rival Mafia Boss

Carlo took the service road past the closed warehouses without warning. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror. His phone had rung twice in the space of a minute, and each time he had silenced it without answering. We were supposed to be on our way home from the Bellandi offices. "Turn around," I told him, reaching for my own phone. "Mr. Rinaldi said to use this route." Carlo kept both hands tight on the wheel. "There's been trouble near the bridge." Marco had never bothered to tell me when he would be late for dinner. He wouldn't have called our driver to spare me twenty minutes in traffic. I pressed Marco's name on my screen. The call went straight to voicemail. Ahead of us, a dark vehicle pulled out across the narrow road. Carlo braked hard enough to throw me against my seat belt. I saw two men get out. One wore a Vescari jacket, its white crest visible under the road lamps. "Back up," I said. Carlo shifted into reverse, but another vehicle had stopped behind us. My fingers found the folder beside me. Inside were the accounts I'd copied that afternoon. There were payments I couldn't explain, shipping losses that had never happened, and my authorization on documents I had never seen. I slid the folder under the front passenger seat. The man in the Vescari jacket approached my window. I locked the doors, though I could hear the others spreading out around the car. "Carlo," I said, "drive." He turned to look at me. I had known him for fourteen years, long enough to recognize the fear in his face. "I'm sorry, Sofia," he said. Someone struck the rear window. Glass broke across the seat. I threw my arms over my head, and the car door opened and all I kne was pain before everything went dark. Then my mother's voice woke me. "Sofia? Beatrice will be here at ten." I pushed myself upright, still holding my hands against my head. Nothing hurt. No glass lay on the bed or on the floor beside it. My mother knocked again. "If you want coffee, come down now. Valentina has already eaten." The room was mine, but it wasn't the bedroom I had shared with Marco for six months. My old cream curtains covered the windows. The chair beside the dresser held the black dress I'd left there before moving out of my parents' house. Even the shallow dent in the wardrobe door was still there. I reached for the phone on my nightstand. My hand shook so badly that I dropped it onto the duvet. The date on the screen was eleven weeks before my wedding. I had died six months after it. For a long time I stared at it. I checked the year, opened my messages, then checked the date again. Yesterday's texts were about a fitting. My mother's last message told me the seamstress would arrive at ten. There was no record of my call to Marco from the car, no wedding photographs, and none of the account files I had copied before the ambush. The phone slipped from my hand. I got out of bed and crossed to the bathroom, where I turned on the cold tap. I held my wrists under the water and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair fell over one shoulder. There was no glass in it and no blood on my face. I gripped the edge of the sink until my fingers hurt. I was twenty-eight again. I had been twenty-nine in the car. Outside my room, my mother tried the door. "Sofia?" "I'm awake," I answered. "Then hurry. Beatrice isn't changing her schedule because you stayed up working again." My mother's footsteps moved away down the hall. I remembered this morning. Valentina had worn the necklace my grandfather left me for the wedding, and I had asked for it back. By lunch, my mother had persuaded me to apologize for embarrassing my sister. I turned off the tap and dried my hands. I still remembered the glass striking the back seat, but I could not spend the morning trying to explain how I had come back. My grandfather's records were in this house. In my first life, I had gone through his old files only in the last week, looking for shipping records. I had missed whatever was there about the port deal. Beatrice would arrive in less than an hour. I pulled on dark trousers and a white shirt, put my hair up, and went downstairs. The Bellandi house was quiet apart from dishes in the kitchen and a low conversation from the breakfast room. Two men stood outside the front entrance. My father had kept security at the house for years; I knew both their names and neither of them had any reason to stop me moving around inside. My mother sat at the table with a coffee cup and a stack of invitations. Valentina was beside the window, scrolling through her phone with her feet tucked beneath her chair. She looked up when I entered. "You look awful," she said, lowering the phone. "Did you actually sleep?" Valentina's hair was still damp from her shower. She wore a soft blue blouse and the diamond necklace my grandfather had given me. The oval stone rested against her skin, with two smaller diamonds on either side. I had kept it in a box upstairs the night before. I stopped at the end of the table. "Where did you get my necklace?" Valentina touched the stone and gave me a small smile. "I wanted to see how it looked with this top," she said. "I'll give it back." My mother glanced up from the invitations. "After the fitting. Beatrice should see it with both dresses, and Valentina's neckline is similar to yours." "It's mine," I said. "Nobody said otherwise." My mother set down her pen. "Don't start the day by accusing your sister." Valentina unclasped the necklace slowly. "It's all right, Mom. Sofia can have it." I held out my hand. Valentina folded the chain into my palm, and I closed my fingers around it. I had spent six months of marriage yielding whenever someone told me a request was too small to fight over: a seat beside Marco at dinner, a change to a guest list, even the access code to an account I managed. Valentina taking the necklace felt familiar for a reason. I looked at Valentina. "Don't take things out of my room again." Her smile vanished. "I only borrowed it. Your door was open." "You still knew it was mine." My mother pushed back her chair. "That's enough, Sofia. We have a long day, and I need both of you to behave." I put the necklace in my trouser pocket. "I'll be ready for Beatrice." I took a cup from the sideboard and filled it with coffee. My mother watched me, probably waiting for the apology she'd received the first time. I poured in milk and asked where my father was. "At the office. He'll be back before lunch." She turned an invitation toward me. "I want you to check the guest list after the fitting. The Rinaldis added another table." Another table meant another argument about who would be seated close to the family. I remembered spending that afternoon making calls to people Marco had promised invitations without telling me. When I was done, my mother had thanked Valentina for helping. "I have company work this afternoon," I said. "Your father can handle it for one day." My mother held out the list. "Marco's family needs these names confirmed." "I'll speak to Dad about the work when he gets home." I didn't take the paper. Valentina looked between us, then set her phone on the table. "I can do the calls," she offered. "Sofia has been so busy lately." My mother smiled at her. "Thank you, sweetheart." The coffee had gone lukewarm. I had signed a proxy for the port deal the day after this fitting in my first life. If a copy was in Granddad's office, I wanted to read it before my father came home. "I need to check something in Granddad's office," I said. My mother picked up her pen. "Leave his papers alone. Your father has the estate matters under control." "It's a company document." "Then ask your father for it." I set down my cup. "I'll be upstairs when Beatrice arrives." My mother called my name as I left the breakfast room, but I kept walking. She wouldn't send the guards after me for opening an office door. She would tell my father at lunch, and he would come to speak to me. That gave me a few hours. My grandfather's office was at the back of the ground floor. Nobody had changed much since his death. The shelves were crowded with shipping ledgers, framed photographs, and the awards he thought were too ugly to display elsewhere. A leather chair faced the desk. When I was younger, he'd let me sit in it while he explained the numbers in his reports. He had left me a voting interest in the holding company instead of cash. My father had told me Granddad wanted to make sure I always had a place in the family business. I had believed him. The day after this fitting, my father had put the restructuring and voting proxy in front of me. Marco told me the Rinaldis' investment in the port expansion depended on it. I signed without independent advice, and months later learned the agreement let my father vote my shares for years. Marco used that authority to push through a transfer I would have opposed. I unlocked the desk with the small brass key my grandfather had given me. It was still on my key ring. The top drawer held pens, a spare pair of reading glasses, and a packet of receipts. I checked the lower drawers and found the blue file in the last one. Bellandi Holdings was printed on the tab in my grandfather's handwriting. I carried the file to the desk. My share certificate was inside a protective sleeve, followed by a copy of the trust distribution and a list of matters requiring a shareholder vote. I photographed each page, checked that the small print was legible, and sent the images to a personal email account my family did not know about. I turned to the next sheet. The proposed port expansion appeared in a memo dated three months before my grandfather died. He had written questions in the margins about the Rinaldis' financing. Beside the projected revenue, he'd drawn a line under a missing source of funds and written, Who is guaranteeing this? The next page was his formal reply to the proposal. He had refused it pending an independent audit of the Rinaldis' financing. His signature sat beneath the date, four days before he died. My father had told me the families began discussing the expansion after the funeral. He hadn't merely left out an old negotiation. He was bringing back a deal Granddad had stopped, and tomorrow he wanted my vote to do it.