The Rossi vow

Episode5

The Deadline

Camille

Bella found me still sitting in the dark at nine o'clock, the two-top table littered with cold coffee and a business card I hadn't touched.

"You're freaking me out," she said, flipping on the string lights. "What happened? Did the bank call again?"

"Sit down."

Something in my voice must have carried the weight of it, because she sat without her usual commentary, burgundy-tipped curls falling into her face as she leaned across the table. I told her everything — the men, the folder, the impossible number, the storm-grey eyes and the offer that wasn't an offer.

She went pale under her freckles. "You're not actually considering it."

"He said your scholarship account gets frozen if I say no. He knew the account number, Bells. He knew things about us I didn't think anyone outside a bank could know."

"So we fight it. We get a lawyer, we—"

"With what money?" My voice cracked, and I hated it, hated how thin and scared I sounded in the shop that was supposed to be the one place I never felt small. "I don't have a lawyer fund, Bella. I have flour and an oven that's held together with a prayer and a wrench."

She reached across the table and took my hand, flour-dusted and shaking, in both of hers. "Then we lose the shop. We start over. I'll drop out, I'll get a job, we'll figure it out together, the way we always have. You are not marrying a stranger to save a building, Cam. Dad wouldn't want that."

"Dad," I said quietly, "apparently owed the Rossi family two million dollars and never told either of us. I don't think I know what Dad would want anymore."

We sat with that for a long moment, the string lights humming faintly overhead, and I thought about my father's handwriting on that loan, the loops and the hard-pressed T's, unmistakably his — and about the look on Damian Rossi's face when he said he knew exactly when my father died. Not a guess. Not sympathy. Knowledge.

There was something underneath this debt that had nothing to do with money, and every instinct I had, the same instinct that had kept this bakery alive through three years of grief and broken equipment and rent I couldn't afford, told me that the only way to find out what it was would be to get close enough to the Rossi family to see it for myself.

"I'm doing it," I said.

"Camille—"

"Not for the shop. Not just for the shop." I turned the business card over in my fingers, the embossed numbers catching the light. "He knows something about how Dad died. I saw it on his face. If I say no, I lose the bakery and I lose the only thread I have back to the truth. If I say yes—"

"If you say yes, you marry a mafia boss you met three days ago," Bella said, and for the first time her voice cracked too. "You could disappear into that world, Cam. People don't just visit families like that. They get swallowed."

"Then I won't let myself get swallowed."

It sounded braver than it felt. I'd spent three years building a spine out of duct tape and stubbornness, learning to be the kind of person who didn't need saving because there had been no one left to save me — but sitting in my father's chair with my sister's frightened eyes across the table, I understood, for the first time in a long time, that stubbornness alone might not be enough to survive whatever came next.

I texted the number on the card at 11:58 p.m., four minutes before my deadline, three words I'd rewritten a dozen times before sending: I'll do it.

The reply came back in under a minute, as if he'd been sitting there the whole time, waiting on a stranger's answer with more patience than I'd expected from a man who ran an empire on fear.

Car will be there at 8. Wear something you don't mind burning later. — D.

I read it three times, then a fourth, and felt something twist in my chest that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite anything I had a name for yet — the first small c***k in the wall I'd built between what I owed this man and what I might, God help me, start to feel for him if I wasn't careful.

Bella read the text over my shoulder and made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. "Burning later. What does that even mean?"

"I have no idea," I said, and it was true, and it would be a full week before I understood — standing in a borrowed ivory dress in a chapel full of men who looked at me like an asset instead of a bride — exactly what kind of fire he'd meant.

That night I couldn't sleep. I lay on my narrow bed above the bakery, listening to the pipes tick and settle the way they always did after the ovens cooled, and tried to picture the life I'd just agreed to walk into. I'd built my whole adult identity out of not needing anyone — out of proving, over and over, that I could carry whatever the world handed me without asking for help. And now, in the space of four days, I'd agreed to marry a stranger because I couldn't carry this one alone.

It didn't feel like defeat, exactly, lying there in the dark. It felt like something closer to the truth: that some debts were too big for stubbornness to pay off by itself, and that the bravest thing I'd ever done might turn out to be admitting that.

Somewhere across the city, in a house I'd never seen, a man with storm-grey eyes was probably not sleeping either, for reasons of his own that I didn't yet understand, and wouldn't for a long time — not until the two of us had bled a little, in our separate ways, for the same buried truth.

At 8 a.m. exactly, a black car pulled up outside the bakery, and I locked the door behind me for what I didn't yet know would be the last time I ever opened this shop as only my father's daughter

, and not yet, also, a Rossi.