The Don's Contract Bride

Chapter 3 - Sold Off To My Father’s Rival

Mrs. Russo did not ask if I was tired. The stern housekeeper walked ahead of me down a hall that smelled like polish and roses and opened a door to a large bedroom.

“This will be your room, Miss Harlow,” Mrs. Russo said.

As I walked across the bedroom, the plush carpet ate the sound of my funeral shoes. The bed had been turned down like I was a guest who had chosen to be here. White sheets. Too many pillows.

Mrs. Russo went to the closet and opened it as if I might not find it on my own.

Dresses with the tags still on, coordinated by color. Shoes in neat rows, all my size. A black gown that would have covered our mortgage for two months hung next to a silk blouse the color of Renata’s pearls.

“Everything should fit,” Mrs. Russo said. “Please find something more suitable to wear. Mr. Moretti wants you in the study in half an hour. I’ll come for you.”

She left and closed the door behind her.

I looked at all the clothes. Everything I touched would fit, including the shoes. They had known my sizes before Paulie Rizzo knocked on my mother’s door.

I chose a simple silk dress in navy blue and a pair of ballet flats in a complementary color. When I hung up my simple black funeral dress, it looked like a crime compared to the fine items in the closet. I eyed myself in the mirror and had to admit that the new dress looked good on me. I carefully removed the tag attached to my sleeve. I gasped to see that the dress cost almost five hundred dollars.

I couldn’t imagine ever spending that much on a piece of clothing. It seemed obscene, especially after how much my mother had struggled to pay her hospital bills at the end of her life. All of that debt was mine now, I realized.

*****

Mrs. Russo quietly led me down to the study and left me at the open door.

The study was dim with heavy curtains and lined in bookshelves packed with leather bound tomes. A large mahogany desk that had never known a past-due stamp was the centerpiece of the room. Marco stood beside the fire with a glass in his hand like he’d been posed there. He had taken off his jacket. The gray at his temples was more prominent in the firelight.

“Bella. Come in. Sit.”

There were two chairs in front of the desk. I took the one farthest from the fire. He stayed standing. On the blotter was a folder, thin, and the baby photograph Paulie had shown me, lying face up. There was my mom’s smile. My fat fist. Marco’s face, younger, already sure of himself.

“You look like her when you frown,” he said.

“Don’t talk to me about her.”

He nodded once, as if he had expected that. He set the glass down and opened the folder. I saw my mother’s name in someone else’s type. Hospital bills. Bank notices. A number at the bottom that made my stomach drop.

“I can make this disappear,” he said. “The foreclosure. The bills. All of it. Your name stays on the deed.”

I looked up from all the scary numbers. “What do you want?”

“There is a man,” Marco said. “Luca Romano. I need you to marry him.”

He said it the way other fathers said college or come home by ten.

I laughed. “I met you today.”

“I know,” he said. “I want you to know that I tried to have a relationship with you, but your mother wouldn’t allow it. She also wouldn’t accept a penny from me. She wanted to protect you. I can’t blame her.”

My eyes blurred with tears at his mention of my mother and knowing the choice she had to make.

“But now it’s my duty to protect you,” said my father. “It’s my duty to protect this whole family, and that means you marrying Luca.”

“I’m not marrying a stranger because you showed me a picture.”

“Luca is not a stranger to this family. His father and I—” He stopped. Started again. “There is a war, between his family and mine. And I’m losing. He’s willing to take a wife instead of killing my sons. Instead of killing me. You marry him, the shooting stops, and that house stays yours.”

“And if I say no?” I asked, lifting my chin in defiance and looking him in the eye.

Marco tore his eyes away from me and looked into the fire instead. "Then I can't protect what Elena built. And I can't protect you. Luca knows you're my daughter, so you're in as much danger as the rest of us." He was quiet a moment. "And it's not only Romano you'd need to worry about. There are men on my own side who'd be glad to see this deal fall apart. Men who think I've gone soft."

"Is that who Vincent meant? Greco?"

Something flickered across Marco's face - surprise, maybe, that I'd been listening that closely. "Vincent talks too much." He didn't say no. "Salvatore Greco has been with this family longer than you've been alive. That doesn't mean he agrees with everything I do."

"Should I be afraid of him?"

"You should be careful of everyone right now," Marco said. "Myself included. But especially Luca Romano. He’s not someone you can outrun, trust me on that."

He slid the folder toward me.

“You don’t have to love him,” Marco said. “You just have to show up to the wedding. Tomorrow night.”

“I want to read what I’m signing.”

Something moved behind his eyes and died there.

“There will be papers,” he said. “The important parts will be explained to you.”

“By you.”

“By whoever needs to explain them.” He closed the folder before I could put my hands on it. The baby picture stayed out, my mother smiling with so much hope it broke my heart.

“Get some sleep, Bella,” he said. “Be ready by seven tomorrow. I’ll send a car.”

“And if I don’t get in it?”

Marco looked at me then. Not like a father but like a man doing the math.

“Then your mother’s house goes to the bank, and you find out what this city does to a Moretti girl who isn’t standing next to me. The moment you walked into this house, that name was burned into you, whether you wanted it or not.”

He turned to the fire again, dismissing me.

“Tomorrow night,” he said. “Il Toscano. You’ll meet him before the ceremony. Be polite. He’s not a patient man.”

Mrs. Russo was already in the hall, as if he had somehow summoned her. She didn’t ask how it had gone. She walked me back to the room with the turned-down bed and the closet full of a girl they had invented.

I sat on the white sheets in five hundred dollars of silk and looked at my mother's keys in my hand. Tomorrow I would sit across from a man who wanted my father dead.

I did not sleep. I stared at the gate through the window and practiced the word no until it sounded like someone else's voice.

But I already knew I wouldn't say it. Not because I'd changed my mind. Because somewhere between the study and this room, I'd understood that “no” wasn't actually a choice on the table.

Tomorrow night, I would put on the dress. I would walk down the aisle. And I would find out exactly what kind of man I'd just married in exchange for a house I might never even get to live in.