Three years prior
I was curled up on the chaise longue in our library, reading, when a knock sounded. Liliana’s head rested in my lap and she didn’t even stir when the dark wooden door opened and our mother stepped in, her dark blond hair pulled back tightly and fasted in a bun at the back of her head. Mother was pale, her face drawn with worry.
“Did something happen?” I asked.
She smiled, but it was her fake smile. “Your father wants to talk to you in his office.”
I carefully moved out from under Lily’s head and put it down on the chaise. She drew her legs up against her body. She was small for an eleven year old, but I wasn’t exactly tall either with five foot four. None of the women in our family were. Mother avoided my eyes as I walked toward her.
“Am I in trouble?” I didn’t know what I could have done wrong. Usually Lily and I were the obedient ones; Gianna was the one who always broke the rules and got punished.
“Hurry. Don’t let your father wait,” Mother said simply.
My stomach was in knots when I arrived in front of Father’s office. After a moment to stifle my nerves, I knocked.
“Come in.”
I entered, forcing my face to be carefully guarded. Father sat behind his mahogany desk in a wide black leather armchair; behind him rose the mahogany shelves filled with books that Father had never read, but they hid a secret entrance to the basement and a corridor leading off the premises.
He looked up from a pile of sheets, grey hair slicked back. “Sit.”
I sank down on one of the chairs across from his desk and folded my hands in my lap, trying not to gnaw on my lower lip. Father hated that. I waited for him to start talking. He had a strange expression on his face as he scrutinized me. “The Bratva and the Triad are trying to claim our territories. They are getting bolder by the day. We’re luckier than the Las Vegas familia who also has to deal with the Mexicans but we can’t ignore the threat the Russians and the Taiwanese pose any longer.”
Confusion filled me. Father never talked about business to us. Girls didn’t need to know about the finer details of the mob business. I knew better than to interrupt him.
“We have to lay our feud with the New York Familia to rest and combine forces if we want to fight back the Bratva and the Triad.” Peace with the Familia? Father and every other member of the Chicago Outfit hated the Familia. They had been killing each other for decades and only recently decided on ignoring each other in favor of killing off the members of other crime organizations, like the Bratva and the Triad. “There is no stronger bond than blood. At least the Familia got that right.”
I frowned.
“Born in blood. Sworn in blood. That’s their motto.”
I nodded but my confusion only grew.
“I met with Salvatore Vitiello yesterday.” Father met with the Capo dei Capi, the head of the New York mob? A meeting between New York and Chicago hadn’t taken place in a decade and the last time hadn’t ended well. It was still referred to as the Bloody Thursday. And Father wasn’t even the Boss. He was only the Consigliere, the adviser to Fiore Cavallaro who ruled over the Outfit and with it the crime in the Midwest.
“We agreed that for peace to be an option we had to become family.” Father’s eyes bored into me and suddenly I didn’t want to hear what else he had to say. “Cavallaro and I agreed that you would marry his oldest son Luca, the future Capo dei Capi of the Familia.”
I felt like I was falling. “Why me?”
“Vitiello and Fiore have been talking on the phone several times in the last few weeks, and Vitiello wanted the most beautiful girl for his son. Of course, we couldn’t give him the daughter of one of our soldiers. Fiore doesn’t have daughters, so he said you were the most beautiful girl available.” Gianna was just as beautiful, but she was younger. That probably saved her.
“There are so many beautiful girls,” I choked. I couldn’t breathe. Father looked at me as if I was his most prized possession.
“There aren’t many Italian girls with hair like yours. Fiore described it as golden.” Father guffawed. “You are our door into the New York Familia.”
“But, Father, I’m fifteen. I can’t marry.”
Father made a dismissive gesture. “If I were to agree, you could. What do we care for laws?”
I gripped the armrests so tightly, my knuckles were turning white, but I didn’t feel pain. Numbness was working its way through my body.
“But I told Salvatore that the wedding would have to wait until you turn eighteen. Your mother was adamant you be of age and finish school. Fiore let her begging get to him.”
So the Boss had told my father the wedding had to wait. My own father would have thrown me into the arms of my future husband now. My husband. A wave of sickness crashed over me. I knew only two things about Luca Vitiello; he would become the head of the New York mob once his father retired or died, and he got his nickname ‘The Vice’ for crushing a man’s throat with his bare hands. I didn’t know how old he was. My cousin Bibiana had to marry a man thirty years her senior. Luca couldn’t be that old, if his father hadn’t retired yet. At least, that’s what I hoped. Was he cruel?
He’d crushed a man’s throat. He’ll be the head of the New York mob.
“Father,” I whispered. “Please don’t force me to marry that man.”
Father’s expression tightened. “You will marry Luca Vitiello. I shook hands on it with his father Salvatore. You will be a good wife to Luca, and when you meet him for the Engagement celebrations, you’ll act like an obedient lady.”
“Engagement party?” I echoed. My voice sounded distant, as if a veil of fog covered my ears.
“Of course. It’s a good way to establish bonds between our families, and it’ll give Luca the chance to see what he’s getting out of the deal. We don’t want to disappoint him.”
“When?” I cleared my throat but the lump remained. “When is the engagement party?”
“August. We haven’t set a date yet.”
That was in two months. I nodded numbly. I loved reading romance novels and whenever the couples in them married, I’d imagined how my wedding would be. I’d always imagined it would be filled with excitement and love. Empty dreams of a stupid girl.
“So I’m allowed to keep attending school?” What did it even matter if I graduated? I would never go to college, never work. All I’d be allowed to do was to warm my husband’s bed. My throat tightened further and tears prickled in my eyes, but I willed them not to fall. Father hated it when we lost control.
“Yes. I told Vitiello that you attend an all-girls Catholic school, which seemed to please him.” Of course, it did. Couldn’t risk that I got anywhere near boys.
“Is that all?”
“For now.”
I walked out of the office as if in trance. I’d turned fifteen four months ago. My birthday had felt like a huge step toward my future, and I’d been excited. Silly me. My life was already over before it even began. Everything was decided for me.
***
I couldn’t stop crying. Gianna stroked my hair as my head lay in her lap. She was thirteen, only eighteen months younger than me, but today those eighteen months meant the difference between freedom and a life in a loveless prison. I tried very hard not to resent her for it. It wasn’t her fault.
“You could try to talk to Father again. Maybe he’ll change his mind,” Gianna said in a soft voice.
“He won’t.”
“Maybe Mama will be able to convince him.”
As if Father would ever let a woman make a decision for him. “Nothing anyone could say or do will make a difference,” I said miserably. I hadn’t seen Mother since she’d sent me into Father’s office. She probably couldn’t face me, knowing what she’d condemned me to.
“But Aria—”
I lifted my head and wiped the tears from my face. Gianna stared at me with pitiful blue eyes, the same cloudless summer sky blue as my own. But where my hair was light blond hers was red. Father sometimes called her witch; it wasn’t an endearment. “He shook hands on it with Luca’s father.”
“They met?”
That’s what I’d wondered as well. Why had he found time to meet with the head of the New York Familia but not to tell me about his plans to sell me off like a better whore? I shook off the frustration and despair trying to claw their way out of my body.
“That’s what Father told me.”
“There has to be something we can do,” Gianna said.
“There isn’t.”
“But you haven’t even met the guy. You don’t even know how he looks! He could be ugly, fat and old.”
Ugly, fat and old. I wished that were the only features of Luca I had to worry about. “Let’s google him. There have to be photos of him on the internet.”
Gianna jumped up and took my laptop from my desk, then she sat down beside me, our sides pressed against each other.
We found several photos and articles about Luca. He had the coldest gray eyes I’d ever seen. I could imagine only too well how those eyes looked down at his victims before he put a bullet in their heads.
“He’s taller than everyone,” Gianna said in amazement. He was; in all the photos he was several inches taller than whoever stood beside him, and he was muscled. That probably explained why some people called him the Bull behind his back. That was the nickname the articles used and they called him the heir of businessman and club owner Salvatore Vitiello. Businessman. Maybe on the outside. Everybody knew what Salvatore Vitiello really was, but of course nobody was stupid enough to write about it.
“He’s with a new girl in every photo.”
I stared down at the emotionless face of my future husband. The newspaper called him the most sought after bachelor in New York, heir to hundreds of millions of dollars. Heir to an imperium of death and blood, that’s what it should say.
Gianna huffed. “God, girls are throwing themselves at him. I suppose he’s good looking.”
“They can have him,” I said bitterly. In our world a handsome exterior often hid the monster within. The society girls saw his good looks and wealth. They thought the bad boy aura was a game. They fawned over his predator-like charisma because it radiated power. But what they didn’t know was that blood and death lurked beneath the arrogant smile.
I stood abruptly. “I need to talk to Umberto.”
Umberto was almost fifty and my father’s loyal soldier. He was also Gianna’s and my bodyguard. He knew everything about everyone. Mother called him a scandalmonger. But if anyone knew more about Luca, it was Umberto.
***
“He became a Made Man at eleven,” Umberto said, sharpening his knife on a grinder as he did every day. The smell of tomato and oregano filled the kitchen, but it didn’t give me a sense of comfort as it usually did.
“At eleven?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even. Most people didn’t become fully initiated members of the Mafia until they were sixteen. “Because of his father?”
Umberto grinned, revealing a gold incisor, and paused in his movements. “You think he got it easy because he’s the Boss’s son? He killed his first man at eleven, that’s why it was decided to initiate him early.”
Gianna gasped. “He’s a monster.”
Umberto shrugged. “He’s what he needs to be. Ruling over New York, you can’t be a pussy.” He gave an apologetic smile. “A wuss.”
“What happened?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know. If Luca had killed his first man at eleven, then how many more had he killed in the nine years since?
Umberto shook his shaved head, and scratched the long scar that ran from his temple down to his chin. He was thin, and didn’t look like much, but Mother told me few were faster with a knife than him. I’d never seen him fight. “Can’t say. I’m not that familiar with New York.”
I watched our cook as she prepared dinner, trying to focus on something that wasn’t my churning stomach and my overwhelming fear. Umberto scanned my face. “He’s a good catch. He’ll be the most powerful man on the East coast soon enough. He’ll protect you.”
“And who will protect me from him?” I hissed.
Umberto didn’t say anything because the answer was clear: nobody could protect me from Luca after our wedding. Not Umberto, and not my father if he felt so inclined. Women in our world belonged to their husband. They were his property to deal with however he pleased.
