The Don's Deadliest Obsession novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Other One Goes
At the alliance dinner, Gaspare slaps his pregnant daughter Giulia and offers Serafina in her place; she steps out and says yes, and the enemy Don is wearing her dead mother's bracelet.
My father slapped my sister across the face in front of two hundred guests.
It happened at the alliance dinner, in the back room of his own restaurant on Arthur Avenue.
Half the room wore Brancato black.
The other half wore Quintero grey, and none of them had touched the food.
Thirty years of killing sat at those tables, and tonight everyone was pretending to be friends.
I was at the family table next to Giulia, with a glass of water in front of me.
It had a slice of lemon in it and no ice.
I hadn't ordered it.
"Who sent this?" I asked the waiter.
"Don Quintero's man called this morning, miss," he said. "He wanted to know how the Brancato women take their drinks."
"He's being polite," Giulia whispered. Her hand was cold on my arm. "He's never even met you, Sera."
She was right, so I drank it.
Giulia hadn't touched her plate.
She was twenty-nine, four years older than me, and she was the color of the tablecloth.
"I'm going to be sick," she said.
"Hold on," I whispered. "Papa's about to stand."
"I know." She pressed her napkin to her mouth. "Sera, I can't marry him."
I knew why.
She had told me three weeks ago, in the bakery storeroom, with flour on her hands and a baker's apprentice waiting outside.
Eleven weeks.
Nobody else in the world knew.
My father rose from the head of the table with a glass in his hand, and the room went quiet.
Gaspare Brancato was fifty-eight, silver at the temples, with a gold ring on every finger and a smile that people trusted.
I had trusted it for twenty-five years.
"Friends," he said. "Enemies, until tonight. Tonight my eldest daughter becomes the bridge between our houses."
He turned to her. "Giulia. Stand up and show them."
Across the room, Tadeo Quintero stood up too.
I had only ever seen him in newspaper photographs.
He was taller in person, with a scar through his left eyebrow and eyes the color of rain.
He wasn't looking at the bride.
He was looking at me.
Giulia pushed her chair back and stood.
She took one step, swayed, and put her hand out for the table.
She missed it.
She went down on one knee and her glass shattered on the floor.
Somebody gasped.
I was already moving, but my father reached her first.
"Get up," he said, low and pleasant, the voice he used for waiters.
"Papa, I'm sick, I just need a minute."
"I said get up."
She tried.
He hit her.
The sound of it went through that room.
Giulia fell sideways against my chair, and her hand went flat over her stomach, and my father's eyes dropped to it.
He didn't understand yet.
I did.
Two of the Quintero men had a hand inside their jackets.
Tadeo lifted two fingers, and they stopped.
My father straightened his cuff.
"My eldest has always been weak," he said to the room, smiling. "A bridge has to hold a man's weight. This one won't."
Then he looked at me.
"The other one goes then."
Nobody breathed.
I was kneeling on the floor with my arm around my sister, with her blood on my sleeve where the glass had cut her wrist.
My father had just sold me, in front of two hundred people.
He hadn't even asked.
Giulia's fingers closed on my dress.
"No," she whispered. "Sera, no."
If I said nothing, Giulia was the bride.
She would be sick in Tadeo Quintero's house for nine months, with a baby my father would count as his own property.
And if the Quinteros ever learned whose it was, the baker would die first and my sister second.
I pulled her hand off my dress and kissed it.
Then I stood up in front of everyone, and I wiped her blood on my skirt.
"I'll go," I said.
My voice shook once and then stopped.
"I'll marry him, Papa. On one condition. My sister goes home with me tonight and nobody touches her."
My father's smile slipped.
It was a small thing, and I was the only one who saw it.
"Serafina, sit down."
"Done," said Tadeo Quintero.
He hadn't raised his voice.
He had crossed half the room while my father was still drawing breath, and nobody had stopped him.
He stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the cold on his coat.
"Her condition is accepted," he said to my father without looking at him. "Your daughter is safe in my house. Both of them are."
He held out his hand to me, palm up, to seal it.
I put mine in it.
His fingers were warm and he held on a moment too long.
Then I saw his wrist where his cuff had slid back.
A thin gold bracelet with a tiny sparrow on it.
My mother's bracelet.
We had buried her in it fifteen years ago.
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