He Mocked the Voice I Ruined to Save Him novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Gate 14

Stefano and her father's men meet her at the airport with a smooth apology and a threat, and she boards anyway, only to hear in Chicago that her father has already called the man waiting with her mother.

At ten to six the next morning, two of my father's drivers were waiting at the Charleston airport security line.

They stood on either side of the belt with their hands folded and their eyes on the door.

I had been awake all night. I had one suitcase, my mother's address, and four hundred screenshots on a phone I had not let out of my hand.

I did not take the front entrance. I came in through the parking garage and the baggage hall, and I got past them while they watched the taxis.

At gate fourteen I found out they had not been the only plan.

Stefano was sitting in the row facing the jet bridge, with a coffee in each hand and white roses across his knees.

He stood the second he saw me. His smile was the one he uses on bosses.

"Gi," he said. "Thank God. I have been calling you all night."

"I turned my phone off," I said.

"I know. I would have too." He held out a coffee. "Lidia went too far. I told her so the minute the music cut out. It was a stupid prank, and it was not mine."

He said it in a soft voice, the one he used at my hospital bed.

Five years ago that voice had made me feel safe.

I took the coffee because my hands needed something to do.

"Come to breakfast," he said. "We will sit with Nonna and fix this before it spreads. Nobody has to know you were upset."

I looked at his face for a long moment.

"I read the group chat," I said.

His smile stayed exactly where it was. That was how I knew.

"Which one?" he said.

"Bride Upgrade."

The smile went away.

His shoulders came down, and he leaned in close enough that the people at the next gate could not hear.

"Then you know the Families already voted," he said. "Your father signed. My grandmother signed. It is done, Gianna."

"It is not done," I said. "I have not signed anything."

"You do not have to." He took the roses off his knee and set them on the empty seat. "Listen. You walked out of your own engagement in front of two hundred witnesses. Under the law, that is a broken match."

"You laughed at me in front of those witnesses."

"And the broken match belongs to the house that was left." He said it patiently. "You have thirty days to come back and apologize to my family, or the Sartoris can demand you in front of the bosses. And then the debt flips."

Saving him had made a life debt I never called in. I did not ask which debt he meant.

"Every year you spent being the girl who saved me, you were owed," he said. "Walk away now, and you are the one who owes."

"Say it louder," I said.

"What?"

"Say it louder. The woman at the desk cannot hear you."

I had not whispered once since I was seventeen. People always leaned in to catch my words, and I used to hate it.

This time I let my voice fill the whole gate.

"Lidia wrote that I sound like a warehouse siren," I said. "You sent her a laughing face."

A man in a blue suit turned his head. The woman at the desk stopped typing.

Stefano's neck went red from the collar up.

"Keep your voice down," he hissed.

"No," I said.

Down the corridor my father's two drivers had finally spotted me. They started walking fast.

Stefano saw them and held up one hand, palm out.

He did not want them putting hands on me in a public concourse with an airport officer standing ten feet away.

"Last chance," he said, low and quick. "Come to breakfast, and I will make it small."

I counted to ten under my breath, slowly, all the way to the end.

Then I took the ring off my finger.

It was a good ring, big and old, the Sartori emerald. I dropped it into his coffee.

It sank with a small, clean sound.

"Tell your grandmother I said thank you for the dinner," I said.

The gate agent called my row. I walked down the jet bridge and did not look back, and nobody stopped me.

I was shaking when I found my seat. I pressed my forehead against the cold window and counted again.

The plane lifted off, and the burned boathouse lot slid past under the wing, a black square on the harbor.

In Chicago I walked out with my one suitcase into a bright, loud arrival hall.

My mother was standing at the barrier.

She was smaller than I remembered, with silver in her short hair, and she had both hands over her mouth.

I dropped the suitcase. She was already crying, and so was I, and for a few seconds neither of us said anything.

"You came," she said, finally. Her voice was shaking. "You really came."

"I should have called years ago," I said.

"You called today." She held my face in both hands. "That is the only day I care about."

Behind her, a man stood a little apart with his hands in the pockets of a dark coat.

He was tall, with grey coming in at his temples, and he had not taken his eyes off me since the doors opened.

His left sleeve was buttoned to the wrist, though the terminal was warm.

"Gianna, this is Dario Ricci," my mother said, wiping her eyes. "He is a friend. He drove me here."

"Miss Landolfi," he said. He had a quiet, level voice.

Then my mother's face changed, and she looked at him and back at me.

"There is something you need to hear before we leave the airport," she said.

"Your father phoned Dario an hour ago," she said. "He asked him to put you on the next flight back to Charleston."

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