My Father Sold Me at Eighteen, but the Mafia Lord Was the One in Debt to Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Rule
In the back of the Lincoln, Luca reads the note and tells her his term: he will not touch her until she says; she learns he married her to catch a thief, and he leaves her the key and sleeps in the car.
He did not take the folder from me in the church, and he did not ask.
He walked me out through a side door into the late afternoon, with one hand never quite touching the small of my back.
A black Lincoln was idling at the curb.
A driver opened the rear door and looked at the pavement.
"Quarter House," Luca said.
I got in with my mother's skirt in both fists.
He got in on the other side and left a full seat of leather between us.
The partition rose, and the car pulled away from St. Ann's, past the old brick factories of Ybor City, past the iron balconies and the chickens in the street.
For three blocks he said nothing.
I held the folder against my chest through the lace.
"May I see it?" he said.
It was the first time anyone had asked me for something that day.
I took the pages out, warm from my skin, and handed them across the seat.
He read the way a man reads a bill he already knows he can't pay.
He read the first page twice.
He turned to the second, which was my mother's short codicil in her own small slanting hand, naming me as holder on my eighteenth birthday.
"Forty-one days," he said, without looking up.
"Yes," I said.
"You turned eighteen in August."
"The fourteenth," I said.
"And Ottavio set the wedding for the twenty-fourth of September."
He still wasn't looking at me.
"Your father signed the contract on the second."
"Ottavio brought it to my father's office himself," I said.
"I was there.
"He said it was too delicate for a courier."
Luca turned his head, slowly, and I watched him do arithmetic.
The scar through his eyebrow went white.
"Did you know?" I said.
"About the note?"
"About any of it."
"I knew nothing about it until you read it aloud in front of a priest," he said.
His voice was level.
"I came to that church to settle a debt of four hundred and ten thousand dollars.
"I thought I was the creditor."
"You were wrong," I said.
"I was wrong," he said.
He said it flatly, with no wince, and I found I liked him better for it.
Then I remembered the other thing.
"Why did you come?" I said.
"Nobody marries a girl he's never met over a card debt.
"Men like you take the factory and send the daughter home."
The driver turned a corner.
Luca folded the pages back along my mother's creases and held them out to me.
I took them.
"Because Ottavio wanted me to," he said.
"And because someone in my house has been robbing it for seven years, and I couldn't prove who.
"Your father's factory books were the only paper in Tampa I hadn't seen.
"Ottavio kept finding reasons I shouldn't."
I stared at him.
"You married me for a ledger."
"I agreed to the marriage for a ledger," he said.
"I did not agree to be the man who owes you eight hundred and ninety thousand dollars.
"That part, you gave me."
He did not look sorry.
He did not look pleased either.
I should have been frightened.
Instead I felt something hot and clear come up inside me, and it was fury.
"So I was bait," I said.
"You were a signature on a contract.
"I didn't see your face until you were at the altar."
"That is not an answer."
"No," he said.
"It isn't."
He didn't try to make it one.
The Lincoln turned onto Bayshore Boulevard, with the water flat and bright on one side and the big old houses lined up on the other.
It stopped in front of a pale stucco house behind an iron gate, with a courtyard and a fountain I could hear from the street.
The driver opened my door.
Luca got out first and came around to stand beside it.
He did not offer his hand.
"Here are my terms," he said.
"Three of them.
"Say them back to me if you want, or throw them out."
I stepped onto the sidewalk and lifted my chin.
"Go on."
"One.
"I will not touch you until you tell me to.
"I meant what I said in the church.
"If you never tell me, I never will."
My throat tightened.
"Two.
"You have your own room at the top of the stairs.
"The lock is on your side of the door."
"And three?"
"You go nowhere without a driver.
"Not because I own you.
"Because whoever robbed my house just learned you hold a note he can't afford, and he was standing six feet from you when you read it."
I said nothing.
He took a ring off his own key chain.
It had a single brass key on a faded green ribbon.
"That's your door," he said.
He held it out by the ribbon so that his fingers never came near mine.
I took it.
"Where will you sleep?" I asked.
"Downstairs," he said.
"That is your house," I said.
"I'll manage," he said.
He walked past me to the iron gate and spoke a few words to the guard.
I stood in the courtyard in my mother's wedding dress with a key on a ribbon in one hand and a bill for eight hundred and ninety thousand dollars in the other.
The fountain ran.
A long time later, from the upstairs window of the room that was now mine, I watched Luca Ricci lock the gate, loosen his tie, and fold himself into the back seat of the black car at the curb.
He meant it.
He was going to sleep in the car.
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