THE MAFIA'S FORCED BRIDE

CHAPTER 1: TITLE:HIS CONTRACT HARLEY "I would never let this happen. Have you even thought about her? How would this make her feel? What would the church say, that we sold our daughter to a Mafia king?" My mother's voice reached me before I'd even closed the front door behind me. It was hoarse, cracked at the edges, the kind of voice that only comes after hours of crying. I froze in the entryway, my keys still dangling from my fingers, straining to make sense of what I was hearing. The house was quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Wrong quiet. No hymns drifting from the kitchen radio. No murmur of my father's voice from an online prayer meeting. No clatter of pots, no smell of dinner starting. Just my mother's voice, saying things my brain refused to piece together into anything that made sense. "We didn't have a choice, and you know it." That was my father. I had never, not once in twenty years, heard him speak like that. Flat. Hollow. Like something inside him had already given up. My legs carried me forward before my mind caught up, each step down the hallway heavier than the last, like I already knew that whatever waited in that living room would change everything. I found my mother first, curled into the corner of the sofa, a ball of tissue pressed to her trembling mouth, her shoulders shaking with sobs she wasn't even trying to hide anymore. And then my father. He stood at the window with his back to me, hands clasped behind him, staring out at nothing. In his hands he held a thick brown envelope, and something about the way he gripped it, knuckles pale, like it might slip away and take him down with it, made my stomach drop before he'd said a single word to me. "Mom? Dad? What's going on?" My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. Dad turned. His eyes were rimmed red, glassy with tears he was fighting not to let fall. I had seen my father cry exactly once before, four years ago, in a sterile hospital corridor, the night before I went into theatre for my heart transplant. Seeing that same look on his face now, in our living room, on an ordinary Tuesday evening, knocked the breath clean out of me. My bag slid off my shoulder and hit the floor. I didn't even hear it land. "Dad. Talk to me. Whatever this is, we'll sort it out. Together." Nothing. Just silence, and the sound of my mother's crying behind me. "You're scaring me." That seemed to break something loose in him. Wordlessly, he crossed the room and held the envelope out to me. My hands were shaking so badly it took two tries to open it, and when I finally pulled the papers free, my heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. It was a contract. I recognized my father's signature immediately, the same looping A he'd taught me to write my own name with when I was six. Beneath it, two other signatures I didn't recognize. My eyes moved across the page, and the words rearranged themselves into something my mind kept trying to reject. In the event that the principal debt, plus all accrued interest, is not settled in full prior to the twenty first birthday of Harley Anderson, the debtor hereby surrenders all rights and claims to the above named, who shall thereafter become the sole property and lawful wife of the lender… I read it twice. Then a third time, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less monstrous if I just looked hard enough. "Dad." My voice had dropped to a whisper. "What is this?" He closed the distance between us, took off his glasses with one hand, and rested the other on my shoulder. Without the lenses, his eyes looked older, rawer, stripped of whatever composure he usually wore like armor. "Baby, some things are just out of our control. I needed to save your life. I couldn't watch you die on that table. I needed that surgery to happen, no matter what it cost." His voice thinned with every sentence, until it was barely more than breath. "I didn't mean for it to come to this. Please, find a way to forgive your father." The last word broke apart entirely as the tears he'd been holding back finally spilled over. "Dad, I don't understand." I could hear the tremor in my own voice now, matching his. My mother rose from the sofa and pulled me into a hug so tight it was almost bruising, her whole body still shuddering with sobs. "Baby, we took a loan. A loan to save your life. And now he's calling it in. He wants to marry you. That's the payment." I pulled back from her, needing space, needing air, needing this to be some kind of terrible misunderstanding. "Marry who?" My father reached into his pocket for his handkerchief, wiped his face, and when he spoke again his voice had steadied into something almost formal, the voice he used for things he couldn't afford to say twice. "Don Carlos. Don Carlos is the man." The name landed like a peal of thunder directly over my head. I knew that name. Everyone in this city knew that name, the way you know to fear a storm before it arrives. I opened my mouth to speak and found there was nothing there. No air, no words, nothing. "He's the one who helped us when there was nowhere else left to turn," my father pressed on. "No insurance company would touch your case. No bank would lend us enough. I couldn't sit there and watch you die, so I signed. And I would sign it again. If this is the price of keeping you alive, then so be it." Something in my chest cracked clean in half. How could my own father say those words to my face? Tears blurred my vision, and a lump rose in my throat so thick I could barely breathe around it. "How long?" I didn't even know why I'd asked. My mind was already made up. I would never marry that man, not if it was the last decision I ever made. "I said." My voice cracked but didn't waver. "How long do we have before this debt is due?" My father looked to my mother, silently begging her to take this one, and she met my gaze instead, her eyes swollen and exhausted. "Baby, even with ten years, we couldn't pay this back. Let alone two weeks. It's an impossible amount of money." Her voice was gentle, careful, the way you'd talk someone down from a ledge. But gentle wasn't going to reach me. Not tonight. "So your answer is to hand me over to a man who has more blood on his hands than years on this earth?" The words tore out of me louder than I intended, echoing off walls that had never heard me raise my voice before. "Dad, what happened to everything you taught me? All those sermons about faith, about hope, and now you're handing your own daughter to a demon?" Neither of them answered. They only looked at me, not with anger, not even with shame, but with something far worse. Pity. I bent down, scooped my bag off the floor with hands that wouldn't stop trembling, and turned toward the stairs. I made it two steps before the words left me, quiet but unshakable. "I would rather die than marry a criminal.”