Oops, My Online Ex Is the Mafia Don novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: For Courage
With $1.3 million of her father's debt making her the Don's Saturday bride, Siobhan drives to Chestnut Hill with her book advance and a speech, and the faceless Don turns around and quotes her own breakup message back to her.
Three days before I married a mafia Don I had never seen, my cousin made me read my breakup text out loud.
"For courage," Bernie said.
She was sitting sideways on my father's white sofa with her red ponytail swinging and my phone in her hand.
"You dumped a man at two in the morning in six hundred words. You can survive a Saturday."
"Sure," I said. "Assuming I don't die of shame first."
She held the screen up to my face anyway.
The app was a reading app.
The man was called nightshift.
For fourteen months he had messaged me every single night, and I had never heard his voice or seen his face.
He knew everything about me.
I knew he worked nights in his family's import business and couldn't sleep before four.
"Read the end," Bernie said. "The part where you're magnificent."
I read it.
"I can't love a man who won't tell me his name."
His answer was still under it, one line, six months old.
"You'll know it the day you need it."
"Creepy," Bernie said.
"It was romantic at the time."
"Everything's romantic at two in the morning. That's why they invented sleep."
Outside the tall windows my father's stone fountain was spitting water at the hedges.
He bought this house in Gladwyne three years after my mother died.
I found out last night he bought it with money he didn't have.
The doorbell rang.
Neither of us moved.
My father came through the hall in his golf shirt, opened the door, and came back carrying a white box tied with black ribbon.
He set it on the coffee table.
"It's from the Tedesco house," he said.
He didn't look at me.
He hadn't looked at me since he sat on the end of my bed at midnight and cried into his hands.
One point three million dollars.
Card games, mostly. Some football.
All of it owed to the family that runs South Philly from a back room on Passyunk Avenue.
And the Don had made him an offer.
The whole debt, gone, if his daughter married him on Saturday.
Bernie pulled the ribbon.
Under the tissue paper was a wedding dress.
It wasn't white.
It was pale yellow, soft as butter, with tiers of tulle and a black velvet bow at the waist.
It was exactly the kind of dress I would have picked.
That was the worst part.
"There's a card," Bernie said.
It said, "Saturday, four o'clock. It should fit."
No name.
Just the letters L.T.
"How does he know your size?" Bernie asked.
My father looked at the carpet.
"I told him," he said. "He asked."
I stood up so fast the tulle slid off my knees.
"You told a stranger my dress size."
"Shiv."
"Did you tell him what I like for breakfast? Did you tell him I sleep with a fan on?"
"He's not a bad man," my father said. "Everybody says he's fair."
"He's buying a wife off a gambler, Dad."
He flinched.
I was sorry, and I was right, and I didn't take it back.
"I already signed," he said. "It's done."
Bernie looked at me.
I looked at the dress.
Then I went upstairs and opened my laptop.
Nobody in my family knew what I did all night in my childhood bedroom.
Nobody but Bernie.
I wrote a mafia romance called "Kiss the Ring" under the name honeybee.
Six hundred thousand people read it.
In July a publisher in New York bought it, and ninety thousand dollars of the advance was sitting in my checking account.
I had been saving it for an apartment.
I wrote a check for all of it instead.
Then I typed a repayment plan, fifteen thousand a month until the debt was gone, and signed the bottom.
When I came back down, Bernie already had her car keys.
"I'm not letting you go alone to a house full of guns," she said.
"You're going to wait in the car."
"I'm going to wait in the car with the engine running, like a professional."
The Tedesco house sat at the top of a hill in Chestnut Hill, old gray stone behind an iron gate.
A man in a dark suit opened the gate before I even rolled the window down.
They were expecting me.
Two more men walked me through a long kitchen that smelled like garlic and oranges.
An old woman at the stove looked me up and down and said something in Italian that made one of the men laugh.
They left me in a study lined with books.
A man stood at the window with his back to me.
He was tall, broad through the shoulders, his dark hair a little too long at the collar.
He didn't turn around.
So I talked to his back.
"Mr. Tedesco, I'm Siobhan Fogarty."
I put the check and the letter on his desk.
"That's ninety thousand dollars. The rest comes monthly. It's all written down."
He said nothing.
"I'm not a payment," I said. "I'm not a car wash or a football bet. I'm a person, and I'm not marrying a man who couldn't even show me his face."
My voice shook on the last word.
I hated that.
He lifted one hand.
The two men at the door stepped out and closed it behind them.
Then he turned around.
He was younger than I'd thought, maybe thirty-three, with a close dark beard and tired brown eyes.
He looked at me.
"You'll know it the day you need it," he said quietly.
Every hair on my arms stood up.
Six months.
Six hundred words.
Two in the morning.
He smiled, just barely.
"Hi, Bee."
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