The Mafia Don's Vetoed Bride novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Veto
At her mother's wake Vivi overhears that the death is faked and that her best friend bore her fiance's son. She returns the ring and vetoes the burial in front of two hundred guests, and a rival Don offers her his car.
On the morning of my mother's wake, I learned she wasn't dead.
I had spent the night on my knees beside her coffin, in the long front room of our house.
The lid stayed shut.
My father had said the crash left her too damaged to be seen.
My oldest brother had stood in the doorway until I stopped begging.
At dawn I went to the kitchen for water, and I heard voices in my father's study.
My family has a rule we call the Veto.
Every one of us may stop one family decision a year.
A vetoed decision waits twelve months, however big it is.
I had been engaged to Edoardo Mancuso for five years.
Papa vetoed our wedding the first year and again the fifth.
Mama wanted a longer engagement.
My brothers took the years in between, one wanting the Mancuso books audited, the other wanting time to get used to it.
This year the wedding was set for Saturday, and nobody had a veto left but me.
On Tuesday my mother died.
I stopped at the study door with the glass in my hand.
"Every veto was spent," Carlo said. "A dead mother was the one thing nobody could overrule."
"Silvia can't fly yet," Fabio said. "When she's strong, Mama comes home, and we say the hospital made a mistake."
Then Edoardo spoke, in the calm voice he used for business.
"Someone fetch Vivi a blanket. She's been on her knees all night. I'll tell her about Silvia and me, and Lugano, when she's rested."
"She'll cry for a week, the way she did the other times," my father said. "Then she'll get over it."
"Leave her to me," Edoardo said. "I'll tell her we marry next year. She'll wait. She always does."
My fingers went cold around the glass.
My mother was alive.
My best friend had given birth to my fiancé's son.
Silvia Pagano had lived in our house since she was sixteen, after her father died saving mine in a car crash.
We all owed her.
Carlo and Fabio fought over who got to drive her anywhere.
I was the one who told Edoardo, "She has no one. We should look after her too."
So I had knelt all night beside a box with nothing in it.
I put the glass down on the hall table.
I took off the ring I had worn for five years, and there was a pale band of skin under it.
By noon, two hundred people had filled the front room.
The heads of six other families sat in the first rows.
At the door, a man in a charcoal coat shook my father's hand and left a white envelope in it.
My father put it in his pocket without looking.
He did the same every spring, and Carlo called it dues.
I walked to the coffin and stood beside my mother's photograph.
Edoardo came up at my elbow in a black suit, his hand already reaching for my back.
"Vivi, you haven't slept. Come sit."
"I'm going to say something," I said, "and I want everyone to hear it."
"Viviana," my father said from the front row.
The room went quiet.
"This year every veto in this family is spent except mine," I said. "I never used it. I'm using it now."
Carlo half rose from his chair.
"I veto the burial. Nobody puts this coffin in the ground for twelve months."
Someone near the back whispered my mother's name.
I turned to Edoardo and put the ring in his palm.
"Nobody has to veto our wedding this year," I said. "It's off. I did it myself."
He closed his hand around it.
For the first time since I had known him, he didn't have a sentence ready.
"You're grieving," he said at last.
"Then it won't hurt to open the lid."
Nobody moved.
Fabio looked at the floor.
My father's jaw worked, and Carlo didn't look at the coffin at all.
That was my answer, and the whole room watched them give it.
"Miss Lanzetta."
The man in the charcoal coat had come up the aisle without anyone stopping him.
He was tall, maybe thirty-five, and he held his hat in one hand.
"My name is Cassio Rinaldi," he said. "If you're finished here, my car is at the curb."
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