My Mafia Husband Called Me Unfaithful Then I Married His Enemy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Third Time
Elisa wakes beside a stranger for the third time, signs her divorce papers in front of her husband and his lawyer, and refuses to beg. Then her mother's nurse writes: do not sign anything until you've talked to her.
The divorce papers landed on the hotel bed beside my hip, and the man asleep next to me didn't stir.
It was the third time he had found me like this.
"Sign it," my husband said. "You leave with nothing, and our son stays with me."
The first time, I begged him to believe me.
The second time, I went to the police.
This time I held out my hand for a pen.
My husband didn't move.
His lawyer did.
Vittoria Neri stepped up in her gray suit and opened the folder she had carried in.
The pages were already tabbed in yellow.
"Do you understand what you're signing, Elisa?" she asked. "I can go through it slowly."
Her voice was kind.
She was the one who scheduled my visits with my son.
She decided which of his presents he was allowed to keep.
Once she left me waiting on her porch for forty minutes because he hadn't finished his lunch.
Now she wanted to be sure I understood.
"Just give me the pen," I said.
My husband caught her wrist before she could hand it over.
"The first time, you swore you didn't know him," he said to me.
"I didn't."
"So it was an accident that you ended up in a room with Massimo Montanari."
Everyone in the room knew that name.
Massimo Montanari was the Don of the Montanari family, and the Gallis' oldest enemy.
He had been standing by the door when I woke up that first morning, telling someone on the phone that the hotel had sent him to the wrong room.
He was gone before Tommaso arrived.
It hadn't mattered then, and nothing I said had mattered since.
"The second time," Tommaso went on, "you told me you didn't know how you got there."
I remembered the emergency room.
I remembered the nurse asking if there was someone safe I could call.
I had given her my husband's number.
Tommaso looked at the sleeping man. "And now this."
My head ached, and my mouth tasted bitter.
I remembered one drink at the bar downstairs and then nothing, until I woke up beside a stranger.
Vittoria worked her wrist free. "Let her sign, Tommaso."
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he dropped the pen on the bed.
I turned to the tabbed pages.
I wrote my name carefully: Elisa Sartori Galli.
Vittoria took the papers the moment the ink was dry. "She's signed."
Tommaso kept his eyes on me.
He had expected tears.
He expected me to scramble after him into the hallway, explaining, while his guards studied the carpet.
I had done that twice already.
Ask the hotel, I had said. Check the cameras. Dario needs his mother.
This time I put the cap back on the pen.
"I'll collect my things tomorrow."
"Vittoria will have them packed."
"And Dario?"
"You're not taking him." His voice hardened. "After this, you should be grateful I'm letting you walk out."
Two of his men stood outside the open door.
Neither one looked at me.
I felt his words where I always did, behind my ribs.
But I didn't argue.
"I'm not going to ask Vittoria for another visit," I said.
His jaw tightened, just for a second.
It was small, but I saw it.
For four years he had known exactly what to threaten me with.
Take Dario away, and I apologized.
Cancel a visit, and I stopped asking questions.
Say my mother's care depended on peace, and I kept the peace.
Now he stared at me, because I had stopped following the rules he wrote.
"You're giving up your son?"
"I'm done begging her for him."
Vittoria closed the folder. "Alberto wants this settled today. And you can't separate the two, Elisa. Dario lives in the house, and I'm the one who looks after the house."
She said it gently.
The last time I saw Dario, he wouldn't kiss me goodbye, and Vittoria told me not to force him.
Now Tommaso was waiting for me to fight for one more supervised hour.
I looked at the papers in her hands.
"You have what you came for," I said.
Neither of them answered.
I woke up half an hour before they came.
That was long enough to find my clothes.
It was long enough to see a message light up the stranger's phone: Her husband's coming. Stay put.
It came from a number with no name.
I could have run.
But there would still have been photographs, and another report, and another man's word set against mine.
So I stayed on the bed and let them find me.
So I signed.
When they were gone, I dressed with my back to the sleeping man and left without looking at him.
In the elevator my phone buzzed with a message from my mother's night nurse.
Your mother fell in her room around four. She's bruised but stable.
She's been asking for you.
A second message followed.
The plums a visitor brought on Thursday are still on her windowsill.
She never eats them, but she won't let us throw them out.
I almost smiled.
Then a third message came in.
She says to tell you: whatever they put in front of you, don't sign it until you've talked to her.
I stood in the elevator holding the phone.
I had signed twenty minutes ago.
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