The Mafia Princess Engaged to Her Father's Enemy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ring
At the engagement dinner meant to end a three-year war, Raffi takes an emerald from a man she has never spoken to, on her own terms. Then the windows shatter and her father goes down, and Emanuele's gun is still warm.
My father handed me to my enemy between the antipasto and the fish.
He did it with a nod.
Vittorio Montalto had not asked me whether I would wear the ring.
He had asked me to be at the Hall by seven, in the sage dress my mother liked.
So I was.
The long table ran down the middle of the Via Sant'Anna banquet hall, forty chairs on each side.
Montalto on the left, Cortese on the right, and a gap of white tablecloth between us wide enough to bury a war in.
Every man had checked his gun at the door, and every man had kept a second one.
I knew because my cousin Mariano winked at me across the candles and patted his left ankle.
He was the one person in that room who made me feel eleven years old and safe.
"Raffaella," my father said, and the room went quiet.
The Cortese heir stood up from the far end of the table.
I had seen Emanuele Cortese in newspaper photographs for three years, always beside a burned car.
He was taller than the pictures, with a dark beard, green eyes, and a charcoal vest he wore open.
He walked the length of the gap without hurrying.
Forty Cortese men watched his back, and forty Montalto men watched his hands.
He stopped in front of my chair and opened a small black box.
An emerald sat in it, square and old, the color of deep water.
"My mother's," he said.
His voice was lower than I expected, and completely flat.
"Your father and mine agreed to this before mine died. I am told it ends the war."
I looked at the ring.
I looked at the stranger holding it.
Then I looked at my father, who was studying his wine glass.
I had spent twenty-three years being a thing people decided things about.
I took the ring out of the box myself.
"Say it again," I told Emanuele, "but ask this time."
Somebody at the Cortese end of the table choked on a laugh.
His eyes did not move off my face.
"Will you wear it?" he said.
"For my father," I said. "Not for you."
I pushed it onto my finger, and it fit.
"It isn't yours," I said, loud enough for both families. "I'm borrowing it for the peace."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth, and was gone.
"Understood," said Emanuele Cortese.
Then my father stood to make the toast.
He had the glass up and his mouth open on my name when the gallery above us exploded.
There was a glass wall up there, a mezzanine where the band played on Saturdays.
It came down in one long white sheet over the head of the table.
I heard the first shot as a crack and the second as a punch, and the third I didn't hear at all because I was already moving.
A hand closed on my arm and yanked.
The tablecloth went over my head and the floor hit my knees.
Emanuele Cortese had dragged me under the table, and his body was over mine, hot and heavy and smelling of cedar.
Above us there was screaming, and boots, and the flat bang of a gun fired by someone very close.
It was his.
I felt the recoil through his chest.
"Stay," he said into my hair.
I have never taken an order well.
I went out the far side on my hands and knees through broken glass and spilled wine.
My father lay on his back beside his overturned chair.
His white shirt front was red from the shoulder to the center of his chest, and he was looking at the ceiling.
"Papa."
I pressed both hands over the hole and felt it pulse against my palms.
"Papa, look at me."
His eyes found me.
His lips moved, and no sound came out.
"Don't talk. Somebody call someone."
My own voice came out shrill and strange, a girl's voice.
I tore my mother's silk scarf off my neck and packed it into the wound and leaned all my weight on it.
Blood came up between my fingers and ran down my wrists into the sage dress.
A pair of shoes stopped beside me, and then Emanuele was kneeling on the other side, pressing his hand over mine.
His other hand still held a gun.
I saw it plainly, ten inches from my face.
The barrel was smoking, and the metal was still warm when it brushed my knuckles.
"Get your hands off her," Mariano said.
He was on his knees at my father's head, white-faced, his glasses crooked, and he was not looking at the gallery.
He was looking at the gun.
"Everybody saw it," my cousin said, and his voice carried to the back of the hall.
"Cortese shot him."
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