I Let My Sister Have the Man Who Broke My Heart novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Her Husband for That

I did not run from him, and I did not let Luca step between us.

"Terrace," I said to Cesare. "Two minutes. Luca will watch the door."

Luca looked at me, and I gave him the smallest nod.

He stayed by the glass doors with his hands in his pockets, and the music started again behind him.

The terrace was cold, with the ocean black below the railing and the potted palms wrapped in white lights.

Cesare took his gloves off one finger at a time.

"That was well done," he said. "You walked a man into a trap and let him pull his own tooth."

"I told him a number."

"You've changed."

"So you keep saying."

"I like it." He smiled. "I'd have married you anyway, you know. Even without the books."

"No, you wouldn't."

His smile thinned.

From his inside pocket he took a folded paper and held it between two fingers.

"Your mother signed this before you had unpacked," he said. "It hands the management of every Rossetti account to the Albano family, in return for my protection of her name."

"I don't believe you."

"Read it."

I took it.

It was a single typed page with her signature at the bottom, in the round, upright hand I had known since I could read.

Donatella Rossetti.

Under it, the date.

It was the day after my courthouse wedding.

My mother had sent me to Miami and then, the next morning, sold my work to the man I had been sent to escape.

I read it twice.

My hands did not shake.

"She did this for you," Cesare said. "She did it so you'd have a husband with a good name when your sick one dies."

"I have a husband."

"For a few months."

"Cesare."

A heel rang on the flagstones behind me.

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