Sold to a Marseille Don, So He Knelt at My Father's Grave novel · Chapter 8 of 24
Chapter 8: The Fair
Antone's POV
The santon fair ran the length of the cours, two hundred wooden stalls under strings of white lights.
I had not walked it in eleven years.
Mattei used to buy a new shepherd every December and hide it in his coat for my mother.
I told myself I came because the wife of the Orsini house could not be seen to keep a bad stall.
That was a lie, and I knew it by the third row.
Hers stood at the far end, between a baker of marzipan and a man selling nougat.
She wore a green scarf and fingerless gloves, and she was bent over a tray of tiny drummer boys.
She looked up when my shadow fell across the cloth.
"You," she said. "What are you doing here?"
"Shopping."
"For what?"
I looked along the long table.
It held the whole Nativity, the Virgin and Joseph, the ox and the ass.
The kings wore painted gold crowns, in rows of clay no taller than my hand.
Every face was different.
They were not the smooth round dolls of the souvenir shops.
The shepherds had weather in their cheeks, and the baker had flour on his sleeve.
"All of it," I said.
"All of it what?"
"The row. Twenty-four figures. Have them sent to the house."
"You can't buy the stall," Vannina said, low. "People are watching."
"I know," I said.
"I need to sell one at a time, Antone," she said. "That's how the fair works."
"Then I will buy one at a time, until you run out."
A woman beside us stopped with a paper bag of nougat and stared.
Two stalls down, a man elbowed his wife.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Sold to a Marseille Don, So He Knelt at My Father's Grave are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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