The Don's Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Locket on the Bride
Alone in labor on the night her secret husband weds another woman in church, Dalia sees the bride wearing her murdered mother's locket, gives birth to twins, and calls the one number she swore never to use.
My husband married another woman at seven o'clock on a Saturday night.
At seven-fifteen my water broke on the floor of my bakery.
I was alone, mopping, with the closed sign turned.
I called him from the kitchen floor.
It went straight to voicemail.
I called him from the cab.
Voicemail.
I called him from a wheelchair at Rush, with a nurse snapping a plastic bracelet onto my wrist.
"Is there a father?" she asked.
"He's at a wedding," I said.
She looked at my ring, then at my face, and didn't ask anything else.
Teo had promised me two weeks ago, standing in my flour with his coat still on.
"It's paper, Dalia. A church, a priest, no license. It's for the Table. Eight months and she goes home."
"If you do it, I'm gone," I'd said.
"You're carrying my children. You're not going anywhere."
Then he'd kissed my forehead and said, "When it starts, I'll be there. I swear on my father."
His father had been dead four years.
I should have known what that swear was worth.
By ten o'clock the contractions were two minutes apart.
By ten-thirty my phone lit up.
Not Teo.
Benedetta.
His little sister, the only Valenti who knew he had a wife. She had signed our marriage license at the county clerk's office fourteen months ago, in gold hoops and a borrowed blazer.
I answered on video.
Music blasted out of the phone. Violins, a crowd, glasses clinking.
Her face was red and furious.
"Are you okay? He doesn't have his phone. They took everybody's phone at the door, it's some old lady rule. I had to hide mine in my bra."
"I'm in labor," I said.
"You're what?"
"Rush. Fourth floor. Tell him."
"I'm trying! He's at the head table with her, and there are men in front of him like a wall." She turned the camera. "Look at this circus."
I didn't want to look.
I looked.
A ballroom with chandeliers and red roses on every table.
Teo at the long table in a black tuxedo, not smiling, a glass in his hand he wasn't drinking.
Beside him, a bride in white lace with a diamond tiara in her black hair.
Dark red lipstick. A smile.
"Who is she?" I said.
"Carlotta. Donna Ludovica Morra's long-lost granddaughter. Ruggero Cassio found her last year, the old lady's consigliere. Everybody keeps saying it like it's a miracle."
The next contraction hit and I bit the sheet.
When I could see again, the bride had leaned into the light to kiss Teo's cheek.
Something swung forward on a chain at her throat.
An oval gold locket with a tiny crown engraved on the lid.
I stopped breathing, and it wasn't the contraction.
"Benny," I said. "Get closer."
"What?"
"Her necklace. Get closer."
She pushed through the crowd with the phone held low.
The bride laughed at something and touched the locket with two fingers.
I knew that locket.
I had fallen asleep holding it every night until I was fifteen.
My mother wore it in the shower. She wore it to bed. She wore it the night two men in ski masks walked into our bakery, a week before Christmas, and shot her and my father over a cash register with three hundred dollars in it.
The police report listed it as missing.
I'd hidden in the walk-in cooler that night, and someone had taken my mother's locket off her neck while I was in there.
Now it was hanging on my husband's bride.
"Dalia? Dalia, you're scaring me."
"Hang up," I said. "Go get your brother."
The doctor came in. The nurse came in. Someone said "now" and someone said "push."
My son was born at eleven fifty-two, red and furious and loud.
My daughter came seventeen minutes later, after midnight, quiet, staring up at the lights.
Teo never came.
At one in the morning the nurse brought me the birth forms on a clipboard.
Mother's full legal name, exactly as it appears on your birth certificate.
I'd been writing Dalia Savino on every form for thirteen years.
My birth certificate said Dalia Morra Savino.
For thirteen years I had never once said the middle part out loud.
My mother had made me promise.
"That name gets people killed," she'd said. "Never say it. Never go to her."
Then she'd made me memorize a phone number, ten digits, over and over, at the kitchen table.
"Only if you are dying," she said. "Or your children are."
I looked at my son asleep in the plastic bassinet.
I looked at my daughter, still awake, still watching me.
I thought about a stranger wearing my mother's locket, sitting next to my children's father, while a room full of killers raised their glasses.
I wrote Morra on the line in block capitals.
Then I picked up my phone and dialed the ten digits I had never dialed in my life.
It rang five times.
A woman answered. Old, dry, wide awake.
"Who gave you this number?"
"My mother," I said.
There was a long silence. I could hear a machine hissing somewhere near her, slow and steady.
"Who is your mother?"
"Your daughter," I said. "And your great-grandchildren were born an hour ago."
I held the phone tighter.
"The woman who just married my husband is wearing my mother's locket."
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