A Bullet for a Mafia Bride

Chapter 3

Every minute I spend here is a minute closer to Nico's car pulling back through that gate.

I don't know how long his meeting runs. I don't know if someone is watching the house. I don't know if my father is still breathing.

Three things I don't know, and I'm walking through a hospital corridor that smells like bleach and something underneath it — something sweet and chemical that sticks to the back of my throat — and none of it matters because I'm here now and if this is the last time I see him, I'm not going to miss it calculating my husband's schedule.

The reception desk takes my name. The woman types something, picks up a phone, and three minutes later a nurse appears and leads me to the third floor. Room 412. She opens the door without a word and steps aside like she's done this a hundred times before, delivered daughters to fathers who might not wake up.

He looks smaller. That's the first thing and it nearly puts me on the floor. My father — the man who ran a city from the back of a restaurant, who could silence a table of armed men with a single look — is lying under a thin hospital blanket with tubes running from both arms and monitors drawing slow green lines.

His back is wrapped so thickly he looks like he's been reassembled by someone working from memory. His face is slack. He looks like someone I don't know, and the grief of that — of not recognizing the strongest man in my world — stops my breathing.

I pull a chair to the bed. Reach for his hand. My fingers hover over his.

Please be warm. Please be warm the way you were when you braided my hair, when you put your arms around me and I believed nothing could touch me.

I take his hand. It's warm. And that single detail — the warmth still living in his skin — breaks something open in my chest that I've been holding shut since last night.

A sound comes out of me that isn't a word. Something animal and raw and I press my forehead against his knuckles and let it come because there's nobody here to punish me for it.

"I'm here, Papa." His skin smells like disinfectant and underneath it, barely, like the cigars he used to smoke on the balcony when he thought I was asleep.

"I'm going to find the money. I promise. I don't know how, but I will." His fingers don't move. The monitor beeps steady and indifferent. "I love you. Whatever happens. I love you."

The doctor catches me in the hallway. He explains what they've done — stabilized the bleeding, removed the shrapnel, kept him sedated because the pain would be unmanageable. Then the pause.

"How long can he wait? For the surgery."

He looks at me over his clipboard. "A month. At the absolute most. After that, the damage becomes irreversible."

A month. Thirty days to find a hundred thousand dollars in a house where I'm not allowed to touch the bank account.

I nod. Thank him. Walk to the elevator with my nails cutting half-moons into my palms because if I don't hold onto something I'm going to come apart in this corridor.

The taxi ride home takes twenty minutes. I spend every second building the lie — garden, bath, sleep — and dismantling each one.

My father would burn this city to the ground if he knew what Nico does behind closed doors. But Nico made sure I understood early — three months in, hand still wet from my split lip, he whispered that if I ever told my father, he'd end the alliance.

Without Catara trade routes running through Ferrante territory, my father's empire bleeds out in six months. So I stayed quiet. Wore long sleeves in summer. Because this marriage was a trade deal stitched together with my body, and pulling one thread unravels both families.

The taxi drops me at the corner. I walk the last two blocks on legs that feel borrowed. As I reach the house the front door is unlocked. That's the first wrong thing.

The second is his coat on the hook. The third is the silence — not the empty kind. The kind that's holding its breath.

Nico is sitting in the hallway chair facing the entrance. Coat still on. Like he came home, sat down, and hasn't moved. His eyes find mine and everything inside me turns to ice water.

"You dared to disobey me?"

"I…" My throat locks. "My father…"

He stands. Crosses the space slowly — each step deliberate, the walk of a man who wants me to count the seconds before impact. My shoulders curl inward, my weight shifts to the balls of my feet — the useless mathematics of a woman calculating which wall she'll hit.

"I know everything about your father." His voice fills the hallway. "And I told you — you can't see him. Haven't I said it clearly enough?"

His hand closes around my throat and my back hits the wall. The picture frame rattles. His fingers press into the sides of my neck — not enough to choke, just enough to remind me he could.

His other hand connects with my cheek and light splits across my vision like a crack in glass. The first tear falls before I can stop it.

I swore I wouldn't. I swore he'd never get this from me again but my body has overruled my pride and the tears are coming hot and fast and I can't — I can't make them stop.

"I won't do it again." The words come out crushed, wet, barely formed. "I'm sorry."

He slaps my other cheek. My head snaps sideways and the world goes white and then my body does something I don't ask it to — it leaves.

Not physically. But the girl standing against this wall stops feeling her own skin. My fingers go numb. My legs go numb.

The only thing still working is my mind and my mind is a terrible place to be right now because it's running calculations — how many more, will he use his fist this time, is this the night it goes further than it's ever gone, is this the night I don't get back up and whether this will ever end.

Tears are streaming down my face and mixing with the blood from my cheek and I can taste both — salt and copper, the flavor of this marriage.

"Louder."

"I'm sorry, Nico." My voice breaks on his name. "I'm really sorry."

He holds my throat a moment longer. His thumb presses into my pulse point like he's counting.

Then he lets go. My legs give out and I slide down the wall and the cold tile meets my spine and I'm sitting on the floor of my own house crying and bleeding and my body is still numb from the neck down.

But I saw him. I held my father's hand. It was warm. And sitting here on this floor with tears I can't stop and blood I can't wipe and a husband standing over me smoothing his cuffs like nothing happened — I would do it again.

"Good girl."

Two words. They land on me like dirt on a coffin. He turns toward the stairs. Then stops. Half-turns.

"Make yourself presentable. Tomorrow we have dinner. Morrante's heir is coming over."

Morrante.

The name catches somewhere behind my ribs — not a thought, something older. A long table. White tablecloth. My father's hand warm on my shoulder. A boy sitting across from me. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. Dark eyes that gave nothing away. He didn't smile. He just watched, the way some children watch — too still, too aware, already calculating.

I was eight. My father said it was a dinner between friends. Years later I learned the truth — that dinner was a deal. A betrothal. Binding. I was traded across a tablecloth before I could spell my own last name. Then the deal fell apart and my father gave me to Nico instead.

I press my back against the wall and touch my throat where Nico's fingerprints are blooming. My father's hand was warm twenty minutes ago. My throat is bruising now. And tomorrow the boy with the dark eyes walks into this house.

I remember him.