The Don's stolen Bride

The knock on my apartment door came at 11:47 p.m., which was never good news. I almost didn't answer. Three years of waiting tables at a diner on the wrong side of Chicago had taught me that anything after eleven was either a drunk, a cop, or a landlord. I wasn't in the mood for any of the three, and I had a six a.m. shift I was already dreading. But the knock kept coming — slow, deliberate, patient in a way that made my skin prickle. Not a fist pounding out of anger. A hand that expected to be let in eventually, and had all night to wait if it came to that. I looked through the peephole and saw two men in suits that cost more than my yearly rent, standing in my dim hallway like they'd wandered in from a different building. "Ms. Voss," the taller one said, before I'd even opened the door, his voice pitched low enough that it wouldn't carry to my neighbors. "My name is Alessandro Reyes. I'm an attorney representing the estate of Marco Voss." I frowned, keeping the chain on. "I don't know a Marco Voss." Something flickered across his face — pity, maybe, or surprise that I truly didn't know. "He was your grandfather." "My grandfather's dead. Died before I was born. That's what my mom always—" "Your mother," he said carefully, "told you a great many things to keep you safe, Ms. Voss. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this on her behalf, but she's not able to anymore, and there isn't a great deal of time. May we come in?" I should have called the actual police, not whatever quiet, expensive kind of security these two clearly were, with their earpieces and the way the younger one kept glancing down the stairwell like he was counting exits. But there was something in how Reyes looked at me — like he already knew how this was going to go, and felt genuinely sorry about it. I let them in. It took him twenty minutes to turn my entire life into a lie. My grandfather, Marco Voss, had run one of the largest crime syndicates on the East Coast for thirty years. My mother — sweet, quiet, waitress-shift-working Carol Voss, who I'd buried two years ago after a car accident that suddenly didn't sound so accidental anymore — had been his only daughter. She'd run the moment she found out she was pregnant with me, changed our names, cut every thread that could be traced, and spent the rest of her life making sure nobody ever pulled us back into that world. She'd almost succeeded. Almost. "Your grandfather was killed six days ago," Reyes said, watching me absorb it the way a doctor watches for a reaction to bad news he's delivered too many times before. "Shot in his own home, in his own study. The organization is fractured without him. There are people who will use his death as an opportunity, Ms. Voss, and unfortunately, as his only living blood relative, that includes you." "I don't want anything to do with this," I said, and I meant it with my whole chest, my hands pressed flat against my knees to keep them from shaking. "I don't want money, I don't want a title, I don't want to be part of whatever this is—" "There is a peace accord on the table," Reyes said, cutting through my panic like it was static on a bad line. "Negotiated before your grandfather died, meant to end a war that has already cost eleven lives this year alone. It requires a marriage between the Voss bloodline and the Marchetti family. Until this week, no one on our side even knew you existed to fulfill it." The floor tilted slightly. I gripped the arm of my secondhand couch. "Marchetti," I repeated. I'd heard the name — everyone in this city had heard the name, the way you hear about a storm that's always somewhere else, never quite over your own roof. Until now, apparently. "You're telling me you want me to marry a stranger. A criminal, from what I'm gathering." "I'm telling you," Reyes said, not unkindly, "that if you refuse, there is a very real chance you don't survive the month. And if you agree, you become the one person in this city both families need alive." I laughed, short and disbelieving, the sound scraping out of me before I could stop it. "That's not a choice. That's a threat wearing a suit." "No," he agreed quietly, and something in his voice made it worse, not better. "It isn't a choice. I'm sorry, Ms. Voss. Truly, I am." Through the window behind him, headlights swept slow and bright across the far wall — a car pulling up outside my building that hadn't been there thirty seconds earlier. Reyes's jaw tightened. He didn't look surprised. He looked like a man whose timeline had just been cut in half without warning. "They found you faster than we hoped," he said, already standing. "Ms. Voss, grab whatever matters most to you. We have to leave. Now." "Who found me? Marchetti's people?" Reyes didn't answer. He was already moving toward the window, his other hand sliding inside his jacket in a way that made my stomach drop straight through the floor. "Ms. Voss." His voice had gone flat, urgent, stripped of the careful lawyer's courtesy from ten minutes ago. "I need you to trust me for the next ten minutes, and then you can hate me for the rest of your life if you want to. But right now — we have to go." Downstairs, a car door slammed. Then another. Reyes was already at my closet, pulling out the first coat he found and shoving it into my shaking arms, his eyes never once leaving the street below. "Now, Elena. Whatever you're taking with you, take it now — there's no time left to think it over."