The Don Saved Me From the Ice, Then Buried Me in the Sea novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cage at the Christ
Viola is tortured in a prank, locked in a diving cage by her fiance, and cut free by a stranger. She lets the coast think she drowned.
The night before my wedding, Dario took me out in his boat to dive to a bronze statue on the seabed.
He had promised to show it to me since the night he proposed.
Years ago he had pulled me out of a frozen lake, and I had trusted him with my life ever since.
We were anchored in the dark with the engines off when four men in pirate masks climbed over the rail.
They tied my wrists and hung me upside down off the stern.
They dunked me in the black water and hauled me up, again and again.
I swallowed seawater and kept my mouth shut.
Then they towed a net pen alongside, shoved me into it, and I found three sharks swimming in the dark with me.
They tortured me for an hour and I never begged.
Then Dario came charging across the deck, shouting my name.
They knocked him flat and kicked him until the blood ran out of his hair.
That was when I broke.
I dropped to my knees on the wet planks and begged them to stop.
"Please. Take me, not him. Please."
The man nearest me pulled off his mask and doubled over laughing.
It was my little sister, Ilaria.
"Oh my God, Viola." She wiped her eyes. "You look so pathetic down there on your knees."
She held up her phone.
"I got every second of it. I'm playing it at the wedding."
Behind her, Dario sat up.
He wiped his face with his sleeve and grinned at me.
"Relax, amore. It's ketchup."
"Ilaria bet me you would kneel to save me. I said you never would."
"I lost, so thank her. I never knew how much you loved me until tonight."
I could not speak.
I was nine weeks pregnant, and I had told him so that very morning.
He had cried and kissed my stomach.
Now he knelt in front of me and stroked my wet hair, and his voice went soft.
"Come on. I promised you the Christ, didn't I? Just the two of us, right now."
"I'll make it up to you."
I let him.
That is the part I still cannot forgive myself for.
I went down with him into the dark water, seventeen meters, to the bronze statue with its arms raised.
At its feet sat a steel cage the dive schools use for shark shows, chained to the rock.
"Get in," he signaled. "I want a photo."
I swam in.
He shut the door and snapped a padlock through the bars.
Then he put his mask close to mine and spoke over the dive radios built into our full-face masks.
"I lost the bet, Viola. A Castellani man keeps his word."
"So the wedding tomorrow has to be Ilaria's."
"You would make a scene. Stay here and watch the plankton glow, and I will come back for you when it is over."
He kicked away.
His old steel dive watch caught my light, the one too big for his wrist.
He had told me it was his father's.
I watched his fins until they were gone.
Something inside me died with them.
I looked at my air gauge.
A third left, and the needle was still dropping.
He was not coming back in time.
Not for me, and not for the baby.
I grabbed the bars and shook them, and the chain barely moved.
I tried the hinges.
I tried the padlock with my knife, and the knife was gone from my belt.
He had taken it before we left the boat.
So he had planned this, and not for one minute of that hour had it been a joke.
I wanted to scream into my regulator.
I made myself breathe slowly instead, to stretch what the needle had left.
I had begged once tonight and it had been a game for them.
I would not do it twice.
I beat my dive light against the bars, three hits, then three more.
Nothing came.
The gauge went down another notch.
Then a second light opened in the dark behind the statue.
A diver in black came straight at the cage with bolt cutters in his fist.
He cut the padlock in one bite, swung the door wide, and pushed his spare regulator into my hand.
I took it and breathed his air.
On a slate he wrote: CAN YOU SWIM?
I nodded, and we went up together along the chain, slowly, stopping where he stopped.
We broke the surface in a rocky cove behind the point.
Across the water, Dario's yacht had its deck lights on.
None of the searchlights moved.
The diver pulled me into a small boat, and the radio on his dash crackled.
"Coast Guard, this is Dario Castellani." His voice shook and cracked. "My fiancée dove and never came back up. Please hurry."
He sounded perfect.
I reached for the microphone to say I was here.
The diver caught my wrist.
"He locked you in," he said. "Do you think he wants you found?"
Then Ilaria's voice came on the radio, sobbing.
"We'll hold the wedding tomorrow anyway. It's what she would have wanted."
I put the microphone down.
So I let them think I had drowned.
"Good," said the diver, and pulled off his hood.
"Stay dead, and you can watch him marry her."
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