Unmaksing my Mafia Groom

Chapter 5

I wake to silence. Not the comforting silence of safety, but the hollow quiet of someone who has everything and nothing at the same time. The mansion breathes around me—slow, silent. The hiss of the air-conditioning. The distant footsteps of men who move like shadows. The soft clink of glass in rooms I don’t belong to.

Sunlight cuts through heavy drapes and lays across my face. For a fleeting second, I think about pressing my palm to the window and throwing it open, letting the city rush back into me. But the glass is too thick for that.

And yet, I can’t lie to myself. Last night was the best night of sleep in my nineteen years. The bed soft, the duvet lush, the air so clean it feels like distilled water

I look at the small bag I brought. Nothing inside belongs here. How do you pack the life you were born into when the life you’re forced into is an entirely different universe?

A knock. The door pushes open before I can answer. A maid young, polite, with nails too perfect for this place steps in with a tray. I cross my arms tight over my chest, bracing against a cold that doesn’t exist.

“Good morning, Madam,” she says. Her voice is smooth, practiced, as if she’s been trained to sound sweet even to the devil.

The word Madam lands like an insult. My smile is brittle. “Keep it. I don’t want your ceremonies.”

She flinches but bows her head, careful, cautious. “Breakfast will be in the dining room when you’re ready.”

When she leaves, I sink to the edge of the massive bed and dig my fingers into the mattress, desperate to feel something real. My father’s laugh echoes in my head, the last sweet we shared, the way he’d tug the hem of my shirt with impatient tenderness. The memories push against my chest until I smile through tears. I’m not truly alone not as long as he lives inside me.

I dress in what I know—my hustler’s uniform: the tight skirt, the old T-shirt, the shoes with the frayed strap. Bruno’s men brought expensive things last night silk, satin, colors that don’t trust me and I don’t trust them. I refuse them. I want my skin to remember where it’s been.

The rules come quickly. A man I’ve only ever seen on the edges of whispers and dark streets appears at my door. He doesn’t knock. He doesn’t announce himself.

“Do not leave the eastern wing after dusk,” he says. His voice is blunt, no room for softness.

I raise my chin. “I wasn’t planning to take a tour of your estate. Who appointed you the warden of my life?”

He doesn’t laugh. His steps are measured, each one carrying weight. “I appointed myself the man who keeps you breathing.”

The audacity cuts deep. I want to slap the possessiveness out of his mouth. My fingers twitch but instead I spit out, “I’m not your responsibility.”

“You are my responsibility,” he answers, so simple it terrifies me. The way he says it makes the air itself dangerous.

The days slip into a rhythm that feels wrong. Meals appear I don’t touch. Men stand at the corners of rooms, guarding, watching. They respect Bruno the way people respect storms faces lowered, movements small. I scan through their eyes for something… anything to help my mind and I realize I am not a “nobody “ here; I’m a flag planted, a commodity under close watch. .

So I resist in small ways, sharp ways. I eat late on the floor of my room. I slam doors. I scream at portraits like the paint might scream back.

But every act of rebellion sinks under his gaze. Once, I wake to find a blanket tucked over me, the weight careful, almost stolen. Another time, he leaves a cup of tea on my table with a note scrawled in bold letters: Drink. You look like you haven’t fed in days.

He watches me. Not like a predator. More like a man mapping me learning my patterns, my weaknesses, my secrets. It unnerves me. He sees things I never said: like the twitch in my shoulder when nightmares come, the way my hands curl and my lips seal when topics about my father are raised. Each detail he notices presses against a part of me that swore I’d never need anyone again.

The first time he shields me in public happens the night I stupidly agree to follow him out. I don’t agree because I trust him. I agree because I’m tired of being invisibly tucked away. Maybe I want to see the world from his side—or maybe I want to learn the language of power he speaks.

We arrive at a private club, the kind of place where men gamble and decide people's futures over cigarettes and whiskey. Indeed the town knows nothing about how pepper controls their lives.

I feel like a rat in an ivory maze. Conversations buzz about shipments, contracts, money stacked higher than the people crushed under it. Women in satin and diamonds lean on arms I want to break.

I try to shrink, to be invisible behind him. But nothing in this room is anonymous. Whispers are knives here.

One man leans back in his chair like he owns gravity itself. His eyes lock on me. He smirks at my frayed shoes, the way a hawk smirks at a broken wing.

“You brought a charity case tonight, Bruno?” His voice is oily, loud. Laughter breaks around the room like glass.

Heat floods my cheeks. Shame, old and bitter, claws at my throat. I open my mouth, ready to spit back, when a weight settles on my shoulder.

“Do you mind?” Bruno’s voice is quiet, but the room shakes under it. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t threaten. He just moves, steady and unstoppable, standing between me and the man like a wall.

I expect violence—a hand on the man’s throat, a gun, something brutal. But Bruno only leans in and says two words.

“Back off.”

That’s all. But the way he says it folds the man’s smirk into fear. Chairs scrape as men shift uneasily. The laughter dies, choked in their throats. The man who mocked me swallows, his smile cracking.

“You’ll learn respect,” Bruno adds, voice like iron. His hand still rests on my arm—not soft, not gentle. A claim.

In that moment, the club shrinks and the world stretches. I should hate him. I should scream that I don’t need his shield. But my knees tremble. My throat closes. Gratitude—unwanted, humiliating—swells in me like a tide, and I despise myself for feeling it.

When we step back into the night, the city smells the same diesel and distant rain but I know something inside me has shifted. I saw the devil stand between me and humiliation. He did it without blood, without effort. Just presence.

And it terrifies me.

For the first time since that pavement ran red with my father’s blood, someone chose me. Deliberately. In front of witnesses.

And I can’t decide if that makes me safer or more of a prisoner.