This Time I Choose Mr. Mafia novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Witness

At the courthouse wedding Rhett arrives with a reporter and a paid doctor to call her unfit, Odessa unmasks the doctor on camera and kisses her new husband, and at his house she finds her own photo framed on his desk.

I didn't tell Damiano what Danielle said.

I wanted to see his face when I asked who wanted him dead, and there was no time before Monday.

The marriage court on the Daley Center's sixth floor smelled like floor wax and burnt coffee.

I wore a cream silk dress I'd bought on Saturday for a different kind of party.

Damiano wore charcoal, no tie, and a white rose in his buttonhole that Bruna had pinned there in the elevator.

"You look like a man going to his own sentencing," she told him.

"I've been to my own sentencing," he said. "I was less nervous."

"Are you nervous?" I asked him.

He looked down at me.

"Ask me again in ten minutes."

My father hadn't come.

The clerk was calling the couple ahead of us when the elevator doors opened down the hall.

Rhett walked out first.

Behind him came a young man with a camera on his shoulder and a woman holding a microphone with a Channel Nine sticker on it.

Behind them came an older man in a tweed coat with a neat gray goatee.

I knew that goatee.

I had stared at it across a desk on Lake Geneva while he wrote "unstable" on a form and didn't once look up.

Rhett put on his saddest face for the camera.

"I'm sorry to do this here," he said, loud enough for the whole hallway.

"But Odessa isn't well. She told four hundred people she'd died. Her family's worried sick."

The reporter swung the microphone toward me.

"Miss Kinnear, is it true you're being pressured into this marriage?"

"This is a psychiatrist," Rhett said, and laid a hand on the older man's shoulder. "He's prepared to make an assessment."

Damiano had gone very still beside me, the stillness of a man deciding how much damage to do.

I put my hand flat on his chest.

"Mine," I said quietly.

He looked at my hand, then at me, and stepped back half a pace.

I walked up to the doctor.

The camera followed me.

"Doctor," I said, "have you ever examined me?"

His eyes flicked to Rhett.

"I've been consulted by people close to you."

"That's not what I asked. Have you ever met me before today?"

"Not in person."

"Then what's your assessment based on?"

He opened his mouth and nothing came out.

"Let me help," I said. "I'd guess it's based on twenty thousand dollars. Is that about right?"

A sound went through the hallway.

The doctor's face went red above the goatee.

"That's slanderous."

"Then sue me," I said. "Under oath. I'll bring my bank records and Rhett can bring his."

The reporter lowered her microphone an inch and looked at Rhett.

The doctor said something about another appointment, turned, and walked back to the elevator so fast his coat flapped.

Rhett didn't move.

"Odessa. Think about what you're doing."

"I've thought about it," I said. "For about three years."

A clerk in a cardigan came out of the courtroom with a clipboard and looked at the camera, then at Rhett.

"Sir, you're not on my list, and press needs a permit up here. Out."

Rhett looked past me to Damiano.

Damiano smiled at him.

It was the most polite thing I had ever seen and it made the hair on my arms stand up.

Rhett left.

"Kinnear and Bastiani," the clerk called.

The judge was a tired woman with glasses on a chain.

Bruna stood at my left as our witness, still holding her coffee.

The vows took less than four minutes.

I said mine without my voice breaking, which surprised me.

Damiano said his like he was signing his name to something he meant to keep.

He slid a plain gold band onto my finger.

It fit exactly.

"You may kiss," the judge said, already reaching for the next file.

I expected something quick, for the record.

Damiano put one hand along my jaw and tilted my face up, slow.

His mouth touched mine once, light, a question.

Then I answered it, and he stopped asking.

He kissed me deep and sure, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, his other hand spread warm across the small of my back.

He pulled me into him until there was no air between us.

I forgot the clerk and the judge.

I forgot the camera and the tie and the clinic and the white ceiling.

I grabbed his lapel and kissed him back, and maybe I had.

Bruna cleared her throat very loudly.

"Sweet Jesus. There are children in the building."

Damiano lifted his head.

His eyes were black and his breathing wasn't steady.

"Ten minutes," he said against my mouth. "Now I'm nervous."

My father was standing at the back of the courtroom.

He didn't say anything, but he nodded at me once, and I had to look away.

The house on Oakley Avenue was red brick and gray stone, with a fig tree in the side garden.

Three of his men stood up off the steps when I got out of the car.

Damiano showed me the kitchen, the stairs, my room with my boxes already stacked inside.

Then he took a call in the hall, and I wandered into his study alone.

It was all books and leather and a desk the size of a boat.

There was one framed photograph on the desk.

It was me.

Twenty-two, in a black dress, laughing with a glass of wine in my hand at my gallery opening in River North.

Four years ago.

Long before Damiano Bastiani had any reason to know my name.

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