My Stepsister Ran From the Wedding, So My Stepmother Sold Me to the Man Who Hates Her Mother novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Mrs. Bellanca

Marcello sets his rules in front of his men and Nina is sent to the end of the compound with no dinner; at midnight she takes a knife and a plate and walks out to the dock gate.

The Bellanca house sits on the bluff behind the seawall, and I rode up to it in the back of a black car in a wedding veil.

Nobody had thrown rice.

Nobody had kissed me either, except for the one dry press of Marcello's mouth on my cheek in front of the priest.

His driver was a young man with a thick neck, and he opened my door without looking at me.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"The driver, ma'am," he said. "That's all they call me here."

"Does everyone here talk this much?"

"Yes, ma'am."

The compound had a gate and a wall and a long white house with a porch around three sides.

Behind it the lights of the Strand came on one by one along the water, and I could smell the ice house from the drive.

I knew that smell.

It was cold stone and brine and wet sawdust, and I had carved swans in the Bellanca cold store at four in the morning for six years.

I had never once been invited through the front door.

They took me to a study with a wall of ledgers and a desk the size of a skiff.

Marcello was standing at the window with his jacket off and his cuffs still buttoned.

The driver shut the door and stayed against it.

"Sit," said Marcello.

I stayed standing.

He turned and looked at me for a while.

Up close, his eyes were so dark they were nearly black, and the scar through his eyebrow was older than I had guessed.

He had a hard mouth that did not move much.

"Three rules," he said.

"Only three? I had you down for ten."

"You eat where I tell you."

I waited.

"You go where the driver takes you. And you don't use my name on that dock."

"I've never used your name on the dock."

"You'll want to," he said. "Everyone does, once they marry in."

I laughed, once, because it was that or throw something.

"You haven't asked me a single question," I said. "Not who I am, not why I came."

"I know who you are," said Marcello.

"You said it at the altar. You were wrong."

"I'm rarely wrong about this."

"About what?" I asked.

His face did not change.

"The woman who left a man dead on Pier 19 nineteen years ago," he said. "You have her hair."

I touched my braid before I could stop myself.

Black, straight, and heavy.

"My mother was a nurse," I said. "She died when I was six. She never set foot on a dock in her life."

"Then you can tell me so over supper. Not tonight." He nodded at the driver. "She's at the end of the east wing. Her own bath."

"Is that a kindness?" I asked.

"It's a door that locks from the outside," said Marcello.

The driver's hand twitched on the knob.

"Marcello," he said, quietly.

"Open it."

The driver opened it.

The room at the end of the east wing had a bed with an iron frame and a window over the seawall.

It also had a dead bolt on the outside of the door, and I found that out when I tried the handle at eight o'clock.

I sat on the bed and unpinned Priscilla's veil, one pin at a time.

At nine the housekeeper brought a tray with a glass of water and a dry roll.

She did not meet my eyes, and she left.

At ten I smelled garlic and shrimp from somewhere down the hall.

It was the long table.

I could hear forks and low voices and a glass set down.

Somebody laughed.

Then I heard Marcello's voice, level and cold through the floor.

"She eats in her room."

"The first night?" said a woman, old and dry.

"She eats in her room."

I stood up.

I am a dock girl, and I have been hungry before, but never at somebody else's feast with the door locked.

I looked at the lock, and then at the window.

The window opened onto the porch roof, and the porch roof ran down to the garden.

It was an easy drop.

I'd come off worse jumping from the Mary Ignazia's wheelhouse onto the pier.

I kept my black work dress on, because it was the only one I trusted.

At midnight I went out through the window in my bare feet.

I crossed the porch roof and dropped into the roses, and the thorns got me on the left calf.

The kitchen door was unlocked.

It was always unlocked in a house like this, because the people who were trusted to use it never thought of locking it.

The long table was clear, and the pantry was bolted with a brass padlock.

On the sideboard sat the leftovers under silver covers.

I took a plate and put on it the end of a loaf, six fried shrimp, a pile of cold peppers and a slab of cheese.

Then I took the cook's boning knife off its magnet, because the dock had taught me never to cross a dark yard unarmed.

I walked out of the Bellanca house through the front door, which was not locked either.

The sea air hit my face and I breathed it in.

The path to the seawall ran past the iron gate that let onto the Pier 19 road.

I ate the first shrimp standing under the gate lamp, and it was the best thing I had ever tasted.

"Where are you going, Scalise?"

He was standing in the dark beside the gate post, in his shirtsleeves, with his hands in his pockets.

I did not drop the plate.

I took another shrimp off it and chewed.

"To eat where I want," I said.

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend