My Father Traded Me for the Don's Sister, So I Married the Don novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: Wanted

Raffaela's POV

For a week after the Villa Calabria, Luca asked me my name every morning.

He did it the way he did everything, once and plainly, with the coffee in his hand and his sleeves still undone.

"Name?"

"Raffaela Maria Vannelli," I said, on the first day, to see what he would do.

He closed his eyes.

On the eighth night he took me out across the lawn to the pool house.

I wore my coat over my nightgown, and he did not say why.

The snow was long gone.

The grass was wet, and the air smelled of mud and first green, and the glass doors of the pool house were steamed over again.

He had lit the heater on the deck.

Two folded blankets lay on the long cedar lounger beside the hot tub, and a bottle of Rosalba's lemon wine sat sweating in a bucket.

"You planned this," I said.

"I planned it for three days. Then I lost my nerve for two."

"You don't lose your nerve," I said.

"I do around you."

I sat down on the lounger and he stayed standing, which was wrong, because he never stayed standing when he was nervous.

He walked to the rail and looked at the dark water of the Sound.

"I want to tell you why the walls," he said.

"You don't have to."

"I do. I've told Silvio and I've told a priest and I've never told anyone who had to live inside them."

I pulled the blanket over my knees and waited.

"My father was shot at a sit-down," Luca said. "Three years ago. In a room like the one we stood in. I was across the table."

"The scar."

"That's the other one. His went through the lung." He spoke flatly, as if reading a list. "I carried him out. He was heavy. He kept saying my name in the car, and then he stopped."

The wind moved the steam.

"I went home and I put bars on every window on the second floor. I doubled the guards. I built the wall higher. Gemma was twenty-one, and she stood in the kitchen and said, 'Luca, it's too much,' and I told her it was never enough."

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