My Father Traded Me for the Don's Sister, So I Married the Don novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Contract Was Already Signed
Her father says the contract is signed; in the Don's hall she learns she is the trade for his hostage sister, crosses out 'given by her father' and signs by her own hand.
My father turned off the engine at the Don's gate and told me the contract was already signed.
"What contract?" I said.
Rain ran down the windshield and the wipers had stopped.
Behind the iron bars I could see a stone wall and two men with umbrellas.
"Yours," he said. "You're marrying him tonight, Raffi."
I looked at him.
My father is fifty-eight, with a silver moustache and a gold crucifix, and he had folded his hands on the wheel.
"You told me it was a dinner," I said.
"It is a dinner. After the wedding."
"I'm in my mother's black dress. I came straight from work."
He did not look at me.
"You look fine."
His phone lit up on the dash.
The photo showed him at the head of my mother's table, laughing with his whole face.
A dark-haired girl in a blue cardigan laughed beside him.
He had not laughed like that at me in six years.
He turned the phone face down.
"Who is she?"
"A guest," he said. "Don't start. Get out of the car."
A year ago he had moved me out of my own bedroom and into a rented flat over the hardware store on Amboy Road.
A widowed cousin needed the room, he said, and I would only be in the way.
I had not sat at that table since.
I got out of the car, and the rain soaked my hair before I reached the door.
Inside, the hall was stone and candles, and ten men stood along the walls with their hands folded.
A priest waited by the fireplace.
An old woman in an apron held a rosary.
A thin man in rimless glasses held a leather folder.
In front of the fire stood a man in a charcoal suit with the sleeves buttoned at the wrist.
I knew him from photographs on my father's desk.
Luca Vannelli.
He was tall and still, with grey at his temples, and he looked at me for a long moment.
"Raffaela Costanzo," he said.
My name sounded different in his mouth.
Then he looked past me at my father.
"Does she know?"
"She knows she's a bride," my father said.
"She knows nothing."
His voice stayed quiet and level, and every man on the wall went rigid.
"Tell your daughter, Aurelio. Tell her why my sister has lived in your house for a year, and I haven't been allowed one visit."
I turned around.
My father was smiling his cop smile.
"The girl has been treated like family."
"Say the word."
My father shrugged.
"Guest."
"Hostage," said Luca.
The old woman crossed herself.
"Gemma was twenty-three when your men put her in a van outside a bookshop in Locust Valley," Luca said to me.
"She's been in your father's house ever since. In a bedroom with a window seat, I'm told."
I had a window seat.
I had read every book I owned on it, and I had cried on it the night my mother died.
The room was warm and loud and I could not hear anything.
"Papa," I said. "The cousin's widow."
He didn't answer.
"There is no cousin's widow."
"Raffi," he said gently. "It's a good marriage. A Don's wife. You'll thank me."
"I'm not the bride."
Luca held out the folder.
I took it, because I did the books for the Villa Calabria, and I read everything before I signed it.
The contract ran four pages.
I found the line on the second one.
The Costanzo house would release Gemma Vannelli on the fourteenth day, and cede the Staten Island piers.
Raffaela Costanzo would marry Luca Vannelli, and stay in his house as surety until both were done.
At the bottom, in my father's loops: Given by her father, Aurelio Costanzo.
"I didn't ask for a wife," Luca said, low, so that only I heard. "I asked for my sister. He offered you."
"So I'm the trade."
"The contract binds him. It doesn't bind you."
He waited until I looked up.
"Walk out of that door and I'll have a car take you home. The paper still holds him."
I looked at him, and he meant it.
I looked at my father, who was studying the ceiling and waiting for me to be sensible.
If I left, Gemma stayed where she was and the war went on.
Men I had known since I was six would be buried.
And I had already been moved once, for somebody else, without being asked.
I would not be moved again unless I signed for it myself.
I took the pen from the priest's hand.
I drew a line through Given by her father.
Under it I wrote: By my own hand.
Then I signed my name, and the ink ran in the rain on my fingers.
Luca took my hand.
He turned it over and pressed his thumb to the inside of my wrist, on the pulse.
He held it there until it slowed.
"Send my father home," I said.
His eyes did not leave mine.
"Silvio."
"Raffi," my father said.
I didn't turn around.
I heard the door, and the rain, and the Lincoln starting.
I stood in the Don's hall with his thumb on my pulse, and I did not look back.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend