My Don Married My Pregnant Sister So I Choose His Mafia Rival novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: The Question

"Ask it," I said.

He held the bird out to me.

"He's asking. I'm just the driver."

I took the homer in both hands.

It was warm and quick-hearted, and it didn't struggle.

The capsule on its leg was the size of my little fingernail.

My hands weren't steady anymore.

I couldn't get the clip open.

"Your hands," Ettore said. "Let me."

He thumbed it open.

Something small and gold dropped into my palm, beside the bird's feet.

A ring.

Thin and old, worn almost flat on one side, with one small pearl set in it.

"My grandmother's," he said. "She wore it sixty years. She took it off once, to knead bread, and she said she felt naked the whole afternoon."

I looked at it.

I couldn't look at him yet.

"We're married," I said.

"We're married on the back of another man's wedding program, in a line behind a couple in matching sneakers." He put his hands in his pockets, then took them out again. "I want to do it properly. In the cathedral, in front of God and the families. With nothing written on the back."

"Veil and all?"

"Veil and all."

The bird shifted in my hands.

I thought about lace I'd had fitted three times.

About standing in a choir loft behind the organ pipes, watching another woman lift it.

"One condition," I said.

"Name it."

"You see my face first." I finally looked at him. "Before the vows. Not after. I lift that veil myself, at the altar, and you look at me, and then you decide. I'm not marrying any man again who doesn't know who's under there."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"I've known who was under there since the nor'easter," he said.

"Then it won't take you long."

His mouth moved.

"Is that a yes, Captain?"

"It's a yes, husband."

His shoulders dropped, all the tension going out of him.

He took the bird back from me and opened the coop door and put it inside, very gently.

Then he took the ring out of my palm and put it on my finger.

It fit.

Of course it fit.

His grandmother had rope hands too.

"A year to the day," I said. "Mid-June. Same cathedral."

"The priest won't like it."

"The priest married my sister to a murderer under a veil. He'll like whatever I tell him."

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