My Mafia Husband Never Filed Our Marriage, So I Walked Out Pregnant novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Study Door
Lena hears her best friend tell Damian their marriage was never filed, walks into the study and sets her ring on his desk.
Lena Hartwell was holding a doctor's report outside her husband's study when her best friend told him the marriage was not real.
Her hand stopped on the brass handle.
Earlier she had been in the back of a cab, laughing out loud, alone.
The driver had looked at her in the mirror twice.
She had pressed one hand over her mouth and the other flat against her coat, over a stomach that showed nothing yet.
She was nine weeks along.
For three weeks her husband had rolled toward her every morning, laid his palm on her stomach and asked, "Any news?"
She had planned a dozen ways to tell him.
A pair of tiny socks in his desk drawer.
A note under his coffee cup.
Or she could just put the report in his hand and watch his face.
He would lift her off the floor.
Her best friend would scream.
Her mother would cry, and her father would pretend he had something in his eye.
Lena had been smiling when she reached for the door.
Then her best friend's voice came through the wood.
"She thinks she's your wife."
The smile went first.
"She is my wife," her husband said.
"No, she isn't."
Phoebe sounded close to tears.
"The certificate was never filed. The copy in your safe is just paper."
The report bent in Lena's fingers.
Behind the door, ice shifted in a glass.
"I gave her vows," Damian said. "My name. My house."
"You gave her a performance."
The courthouse hallway came back to her whole.
Her father in the suit that still smelled like the cedar chest.
Her mother crying before anyone had said a word.
Phoebe in pale blue, holding the bouquet and complaining that the lilies stained her dress.
Phoebe had signed the certificate as the witness.
Damian had put the ring on Lena's finger and run his thumb over her knuckle.
You are mine now, agapi mou, he had said. Forever.
She had slept that night with her hand on his chest, waking twice to check that the ring was still there.
"You are still engaged to Cassandra Pappas," Phoebe said.
Lena's thumb crushed the edge of the report.
"The arrangement is not your concern," Damian said.
"It became my concern when you married my best friend and never actually married her."
"I meant every word of those vows."
"Then file it."
"I can't."
"Because your grandfather ordered you to marry Cassandra?"
Damian said nothing.
He did not deny it.
He did not tell Phoebe to take it back.
There was only the small click of ice settling.
Phoebe gave a thin, unhappy laugh.
"So Cassandra gets the church, the name and the heir, and Lena stays hidden in Manhattan as your mistress."
"Do not call her that."
His voice had dropped.
It was the voice he used when a waiter stared at Lena too long, or when one of his guards stood too close.
Once she had mistaken that voice for love.
"What else should I call her?" Phoebe asked.
"My partner."
"Your secret."
"My wife."
"She is not your wife, Damian."
Lena should have opened the door right then.
She should have walked in and set the report on his desk.
She should have asked which part had been real, the ring, the vows, or the baby he had asked her to make with him.
Her hand would not turn the handle.
Every month, his driver carried a sealed envelope to her parents' house in Queens.
Damian called it the mortgage thing and would not say more.
Her father never mentioned it, and he went quiet whenever Damian's name came up.
The thought slipped through her and was gone.
Her knees locked.
Behind the door her husband was breathing, and he still had not said that it was a lie.
So she stopped waiting for him to say it.
Lena turned the handle and pushed the door open.
Damian stood by the cabinet with a glass in his hand.
Phoebe stood at the desk, mascara running, and she turned first.
"Oh, Lena," Phoebe whispered. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know you were here."
Damian's face went still.
"Lena," he said.
"Is it filed?" she said.
He put the glass down.
"Lena, listen to me."
"Is it filed, yes or no?"
"No."
The word was quiet and it was the whole answer.
She pulled the ring off her finger.
It came off easily, and that hurt more than she expected.
She set it on the desk, on top of his blotter, with a small click.
"Lena." He took a step toward her.
"Don't."
She folded the doctor's report in half and put it back in her pocket.
He would never know what it said.
Not today.
Phoebe reached for her arm.
"I'll come with you. You shouldn't be alone."
"I'm fine."
She was not fine, and she walked out anyway.
In the hall his guard straightened.
"Mrs. Karras?"
"Get me a cab," she said.
The guard looked past her at the open study door.
Then he went out to the curb without arguing.
She sat in the back seat with her coat buttoned to the neck.
Her phone buzzed before the cab reached the corner.
It was a text from Damian.
Do not go to your parents' house. Please.
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