My Don Married My Pregnant Sister So I Choose His Mafia Rival novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Veil
Cosimo lifts the veil on Angelina wearing Marcella's emerald and finds a sealed black envelope where his bride should be; Marcella walks down from the choir loft and asks his rival Ettore Sarno to marry her, and Ornella screams that Ettore killed her father.
In my world, a Varrone wedding was never just a wedding.
It was a peace treaty with a priest standing over it.
That June morning, the Five Families filled the same cathedral for the first time since my father was shot.
The Bay Ridge boss sat on the left with his sons.
The old man from Howard Beach sat beside him with his cane across his knees.
The Sarnos had the back row, where everyone could keep an eye on them.
Ettore Sarno sat at the end of it, alone, with a folded newspaper on his knee.
The truce said the groom's oldest enemy had to watch the vows, so the whole city would know the war was over.
I watched all of them from the choir loft, behind the organ pipes.
Nobody looked up.
Down at the altar, Cosimo Varrone stood in his black tuxedo with his hands folded.
He was thirty-four, and he had been the Don for three years.
Today he was marrying me, and my father's chair at the table was coming with me.
His family had an old rule.
The groom couldn't see his bride's face until the vows were sealed.
Cosimo loved the old rules.
That was why he never looked under the veil.
The bride came up the aisle alone, because my father was dead and I'd refused anyone else.
She wore the lace dress I'd had fitted three times.
My grandmother Assunta sat in the second pew in her navy church hat, staring straight ahead.
She was the only person in the building who knew.
"Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?" the priest asked.
"I do," Cosimo said.
He said it the way he gave orders. Like there had never been a question.
The bride's answer was a whisper.
He didn't notice that either.
The priest sealed the vows and stepped back.
Cosimo took the edge of the veil in both hands and lifted it.
My sister Angelina looked up at him with tears in her big dark eyes.
My emerald was on her finger.
Cosimo didn't move.
Five hundred people stopped breathing.
"Where is she?" he said.
Angelina didn't answer.
She looked down at the bride's kneeler beside her, where I was supposed to kneel for the blessing.
There was a black envelope lying on the velvet.
It was sealed with red wax, stamped with the Varrone crest.
His own seal.
His mother had handed it to me a week ago, to close the thank-you cards.
Cosimo picked up the envelope and broke the wax with his thumb.
His knuckles went white.
There was only one photograph inside.
It was Cosimo, asleep on pink sheets, with my sister's bare arm across his chest.
The clock on her nightstand said 5:02.
He turned it over.
On the back, in my neat handwriting, it said, "Don't hurry, Cosimo. This is only the first."
At five that morning, I'd gone down the hall to wake Angelina, because she'd promised to do my hair.
Her door was open a crack.
Cosimo's shoes were on her rug.
He was asleep in her bed with his mouth open, the man who had held my hand at my father's funeral.
The shower turned off.
Angelina came out of her bathroom in a towel, holding a white plastic stick.
She saw me and didn't even flinch.
She turned the stick around so I could see the two pink lines.
"Nine weeks," she said. "Don't make that face, Marcella. He was always going to choose me."
"Then why is he marrying me at ten?"
"Because you come with the piers." She smiled. "I come with his son."
I took out my phone and photographed the bed.
The flash went off.
Cosimo didn't wake up.
He slept like a man with nothing on his conscience.
"Do you want him?" I asked my sister.
"I have him."
"Then wear my dress."
She laughed.
Then she saw my face, and she stopped laughing.
She said yes before I finished telling her how.
Now I put my hand on the loft railing and came down the stairs.
The old steps creaked under my boots.
Every head in the cathedral turned.
I walked down the center aisle in my father's navy pea coat over black trousers and a sweater.
No veil. No lace. My hair still in the knot I'd tied at five.
"Marcella," Cosimo said from the altar.
Low. A warning.
I didn't stop.
I walked past him.
I walked past my sister, who was holding his photograph now and crying for real.
I walked past his mother, Ornella, who rose out of the front pew in black silk.
I walked all the way to the back row.
Ettore Sarno looked up at me.
He had a pen in one hand and the newspaper crossword on his knee.
He'd been doing it through the vows.
"Mr. Sarno," I said. "Are you married?"
"Not this morning."
"Do you want peace on the Staten Island piers?"
He looked past me, at Cosimo standing at the altar with my sister's veil in his fist.
"I'd like to know why you're asking."
"Because I'm asking you to marry me," I said. "Today."
The whole cathedral heard it.
Somebody in the Bay Ridge pews laughed out loud and turned it into a cough.
Ettore didn't laugh.
He studied my face for a long moment.
Then a scream split the cathedral.
Ornella was standing in the aisle with her pearls in her fist.
"She's marrying the man who killed her father!"
The old man from Howard Beach lifted his head.
The Bay Ridge boss's sons put their hands inside their jackets.
Every face in the building turned to Ettore.
I turned too.
I waited for him to say it wasn't true.
Ettore capped his pen and set it down on the newspaper.
He didn't say a word.
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