Mafia Boss & His White Rose novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Offer
Noelle walks into a mafia social club and offers herself for her sister's place in an experimental heart trial; the boss refuses her body in front of his men and offers a written fake engagement instead.
I walked into the Carraro social club at eleven at night with my sister's rejection letter in my coat pocket.
Nine men stopped playing cards.
The room smelled of espresso and cigar smoke and old wood, and nobody in it was surprised that a woman had come through that door.
They were only surprised that she hadn't knocked.
"We're closed, sweetheart," said the heavy man nearest me.
He wore a camel coat and three gold rings, and he tipped his chair back.
"I'm not here for the club," I said. "I'm here for Domenico Carraro."
The heavy man laughed.
At the back table a man in a charcoal three-piece suit put down his cards and looked up.
He had black hair going grey at the temples and a thin white scar through his upper lip.
He did not laugh.
I crossed the floor in my work boots, with petals still stuck to the knees of my jeans from the shop.
"My name is Noelle Everhart," I said. "My sister is twenty-two, and her heart is going to stop."
Nobody moved.
"Your family's foundation runs a trial at the Giulia Carraro Heart Institute. It's the only treatment for what she has."
"The trial is full," the man in the camel coat said. "Ask the clinic."
"I asked the clinic. I asked them four times."
I took the letter out and set it on the table in front of Domenico.
"They said the only person who can open a place is you."
He didn't pick it up.
"Then you came to the wrong man at the wrong hour," he said.
His voice was low and unhurried, and it made the room go quieter than the rest of them had.
"I know what I came to," I said.
My hands were shaking, so I put them flat on the felt.
"I'll do whatever you want. Whatever you want from me, for as long as you want it."
The heavy man whistled.
"Well, Dom," he said. "That's the most honest offer anyone's made this family in years."
Somebody at the card table snickered.
I kept my eyes on Domenico.
"Take it, cousin," the heavy man said. "She's offering. Open a door for her sister and then open one for yourself."
Domenico stood.
He was taller than I'd expected, and he moved slowly.
"Fabio," he said, not looking at him. "Sit on your hands."
The heavy man stopped smiling and sat back.
Domenico came around the table and stopped an arm's length from me.
He smelled of cedar and clean cold air.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked.
"I don't buy women," he said, loud enough for every man in the room. "Not for a cure, not for a favor, not for a night. Put that offer away and never make it to anyone again."
Heat climbed my neck.
"Then what do I do?" I said. "She's twenty-two."
"You sit down."
"I didn't come here to sit."
"Noelle Everhart," he said, as if he were trying out the name. "Sit down, and I'll tell you what I do want."
A chair scraped behind me.
I sat.
Domenico took a pad of the club's order slips out of his vest and wrote on it in a small square hand.
The room watched him.
"The Table votes on the first of December," he said, still writing. "Eleven old men decide whether I keep this chair. A boss my age who has no wife is a boss they can replace."
"You want a wife."
"I want a fiancée. For six weeks. At dinners, at the Table, on my arm, with a ring on your finger."
"And in your bed," Fabio said.
Domenico didn't turn.
"Nothing in this is owed in her person," he said, and he wrote it, and underlined it twice.
He tore off the slip and pushed it across to me.
I read it under the yellow lamp.
Fiancée until December 1. Ring, dinners, the Table. Nothing in this agreement is owed in her person. Pippa Everhart's place in the trial is signed tonight, and it stands if Noelle ends this tomorrow.
Under it he had signed his full name.
My eyes burned.
"You'd give her the place even if I walk away," I said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
He took a phone from his pocket and dialed a number from memory.
"Because I don't want you here for her," he said. "I want you here, or not at all."
Someone answered, and he said, "It's Carraro. Put the Everhart girl in the trial tonight. Her sister's coming at nine."
He listened, said "Yes" once, and hung up.
Then he turned the slip over, and on the back was a second line in the same careful hand.
For four years you've brought white roses to my mother's tomb every Sunday, and the card has said D.
I stared at it.
I had never once asked who D. was.
"I paid for those roses myself," Domenico said quietly. "I wanted to know who chose white every week."
At the card table, Fabio had stopped laughing altogether.
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