He Mocked the Voice I Ruined to Save Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Broken Alarm
At her engagement dinner Gianna's ruined voice is played over the speakers as a joke and her fiancé laughs, so she walks out and finds the group chat where her own father plans to swap her for her sister.
At our engagement dinner, two hundred guests laughed at my voice, and my fiancé let them.
The banquet hall speakers crackled halfway through the ceremony.
Then my own voice came out of them, low and rough, reading my vows.
It was a private recording. Someone had cut it so that every hoarse, trailing note sat on top of a fire alarm shriek.
The big screen behind the head table showed the title: Broken Alarm.
I had practiced those vows once, alone in my room, into my own phone.
An hour earlier my half-sister had zipped me into my gown and told me nobody would care how I sounded.
My fiancé had pressed a glass of honey tea into my hand before the toasts.
"For your throat, Gi," he said, and kissed my knuckles. I thought it was kind.
The long table was full of both families' relatives, dock bosses and allies who had come to witness the union of our houses.
Every one of them knew why my voice sounds like this.
Five years ago I dragged him out of a burning boathouse.
The smoke left a scar on my neck and a voice that never healed.
I went back in for a second man in the loft before I collapsed. My fiancé told me later that man died in the ambulance. I never learned his name.
My fiancé sat beside my half-sister and did not tell anyone to turn it off.
The cousins laughed first. Then he laughed, and the bosses took it as permission.
The waiters smiled into their trays.
I counted to ten under my breath. I always do that when I am scared.
At ten, I put down my napkin.
So I stood up and walked out through the middle of the hall.
Nobody stopped me. At the head table my father, Salvatore, looked down at his plate.
Stefano Sartori and Lidia, my half-sister, watched me go.
I took a taxi to the house my mother had left me by the harbor.
I sat on the dark stairs and called a number in Chicago that I had not dared to dial in years.
"Can I come stay with you?" I said. "I can't do this anymore."
For two seconds there was only silence on the line.
My mother, Teresa, did not ask whether I had fought with Stefano again. She did not tell me to last one more night for the good of the Families.
She said, "Yes. Come home."
Twenty minutes later a flight confirmation landed in my inbox. Seven tomorrow morning, Charleston to Chicago.
A text from her followed.
"I don't care whose heir he is. You saved his life and this is what it cost you. He has no right to use it against you."
"Whether you ever fix your voice is your choice, not theirs. I'll be at the airport."
My phone buzzed again. Lidia had sent a photo.
She was hanging on Stefano's arm, and he was looking down at her with a softness I had not seen on his face in years.
Under it she had typed: "You left too early. The best part was next."
I did not answer. I turned the phone face down on the stair.
The shared tablet was still lit on the hall table, open to our wedding album.
I picked it up to delete the dress fittings and the venue visits.
My thumb barely touched the screen when a banner slid across the top.
The group chat was named Bride Upgrade.
I thought I had misread it. Then I opened it and saw the three members.
Stefano. Lidia. And my father, head of the Landolfi family.
The history went back months.
The first photo showed Stefano kissing Lidia on a hotel terrace. It was sent the afternoon I had driven my father to his doctor.
Lidia had written: "When are you finally going to tell Gianna?"
Stefano had answered: "She'll never let me forget she saved my life. It gets harder every week."
Further down, they were discussing how to handle me with dignity.
Stefano was afraid the bosses would call him ungrateful if he dumped the girl who had pulled him from a fire.
Lidia had a solution. "Let her humiliate herself first. If everyone thinks she's too sensitive to behave, you leaving her looks reasonable."
Stefano had sent her my practice recording from my own phone while I was in a fitting room.
Lidia had cut in the alarm days ago.
She had even sent a picture of me trying on gowns, with a red circle drawn around my scar.
"How do we hide this in the official photos?" she wrote. "The second she opens her mouth, the whole ceremony sounds like a warehouse siren."
Stefano had replied with a crying-laughing face.
My father had not stopped them. He had only told Lidia not to post it on a public account where a rival family could see it.
Then my father had sent a spreadsheet.
It listed the banquet deposit, the bosses attending, and the harbor partnership between the two houses.
It listed which routes and percentages could be kept if the bride was changed.
No line in it asked whether I would be hurt.
Lidia asked, "What if she refuses to step aside? The invitations are already out."
My father had answered at once. "You and she are the same Landolfi blood. If you take her place, the Sartoris will not have to renegotiate."
Stefano had added: "Don't worry about the venue or the witnesses. We only need to correct the bride's name on the certificate."
My fingertips went numb on the glass.
I took a screenshot of every message, from the terrace photo to the last line.
While I was still saving them, a new banner slid down from my father.
"She will run to her mother in Chicago. Put men at the airport by six. She does not land."
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