Lost Your Mind novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Church Door
Giulia brings the Don and his council to St. Cecilia to see the truth about her fiance, and the locked chapel door opens on Dario with a novice nun wearing the family ring.
On a Tuesday morning, I brought the Don of the Corradi family and four of his advisors to St. Cecilia Church.
I told them I wanted to inspect the new roof my father's company was paying for.
The roof was fine.
I wanted them in the hallway by the side chapels, and I wanted them there before eleven.
Six weeks earlier, I had started dreaming things before they happened.
The first dream was small. I saw my assistant's coffee tipping over a contract, and it did, two days later.
The last dream was the one I couldn't shake.
In it, my fiance Dario Corradi walked out of our wedding and was gone.
His car went off the pier and blew apart in the harbor, and the police found one bloodstained cuff link and no body.
I stayed his widow for three years, because the Corradi and Ferrante families needed the alliance to look whole.
Then Dario came home alive, with a woman and a little boy.
My father bowed his head in a boardroom and signed our docks over to him.
I woke up with my hands shaking and a name in my mouth.
Benedetta.
I had never heard it before.
On Sunday my assistant followed Dario's two bodyguards to St. Cecilia, where she found out a novice named Benedetta had been meeting him in a locked room for months.
Dario called them donations to the church.
I told my father everything.
He didn't ask if I was sure.
He only said, "Then we do it where his father can see."
Now we stood in the hallway, and Donna Livia Corradi took my hand in both of hers.
She had come with her husband, because she never missed a church visit.
"Giulia, you look tired," she said.
"Wedding nerves," I said.
"They pass." She patted my knuckles. "Dario's been here so often lately, praying before the wedding. I told Ettore, he's finally acting like a Don."
"I hoped you'd say that, Donna," I said.
I kept my eyes down so she wouldn't see what was in them.
Behind her, her younger son leaned on his cane by the window.
Nico Corradi had driven his mother here, because he drove her everywhere.
He wore a black suit, and the cuff on his left wrist was held by a small silver link with a D engraved on it.
The cuff on his right wrist had only a plain button.
Donna Livia saw me looking.
"Dario's," she said. "Nico lost one of his own and borrowed his brother's. He thinks I haven't noticed."
"Mama," Nico said, very evenly.
His grey eyes moved from his mother to me and stayed.
He knew something was wrong.
He didn't say it.
Don Ettore stood at the head of the group with his hands behind his back.
"Where's this roof," he said.
"This way," I said, and led them the wrong way on purpose.
We passed the confessionals and a statue of a saint with a chipped hand.
Two men in dark jackets stood in front of a closed door at the end of the hall.
They were Dario's men.
They saw the Don and went white.
One of them shifted sideways to block the handle.
"Don Ettore," he said. "Sir. This room's being cleaned."
"On a Tuesday, in the middle of the morning?" my father said, very pleasantly.
The man swallowed.
I looked at Don Ettore.
He wasn't a fool.
He had a son who had never once gone to church early in his life.
"Move," the Don said.
Neither man moved.
Don Ettore didn't raise his voice.
"I buried both your fathers. Move."
They stepped aside.
I could hear something behind the wood, a woman's breath, a man's low laugh.
Donna Livia put a hand to her pearls.
My father looked at me, and I looked at the door.
There were still a hundred ways this day could go. I could say my nerves had gotten the better of me and take everyone to see the roof.
I would marry Dario in three months and bury my father's docks beside him.
So I put my hand on the handle and pushed the door open.
Dario turned from the altar rail with his shirt hanging open, and his first look at me was glad.
It was the easy, boyish look he gave me whenever I walked into a room.
Benedetta was pinned in front of him, her veil on the floor, her mouth red, her neck marked.
Her hands were around his shoulders.
On her finger, catching the light from the stained glass, was the Corradi family ring.
The ring that was meant for my hand.
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