This Time I Choose Mr. Mafia novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: I Choose Him
Odessa wakes at her 26th birthday gala seconds after dying in her first life, walks past Rhett in front of four hundred guests and chooses mafia boss Damiano Bastiani, who tells her he'll keep her safe from the man she just rejected.
The last thing I heard in my first life was my stepsister's voice.
"You should have picked the gangster. At least he'd have made it quick."
Then the clinic ceiling went white, and the white went out.
The next thing I heard was four hundred people singing "Happy Birthday."
I was standing in my father's ballroom with a champagne flute in my hand.
The glass was cold against my fingers.
My fingers were warm.
They hadn't been warm in two years.
"I was dead," I said out loud.
The woman beside me laughed and held her phone up higher to film the cake.
"Not yet, honey. You're only twenty-six."
Twenty-six.
I looked down at my dress.
Dark green silk, cut low in the back, the color my mother always wore.
I had worn this dress exactly once, on the night of my twenty-sixth birthday.
The night I said Rhett Ambler's name in front of everyone I knew.
The chandeliers of Kinnear Hall blazed over the dance floor.
And my father, Clifton Kinnear, stood on the little stage by the cake, tapping a spoon against his glass.
He was alive.
The last time I'd seen him, he'd been in a box at Graceland Cemetery.
"Thank you all for coming," he said. "As most of you know, my daughter has an announcement tonight."
People laughed.
Everyone in that room knew Kinnear Shipping owed sixty million dollars by the first of June.
Everyone knew two men had offered to cover it if I married them.
And everyone knew which one I'd pick.
Rhett stood by the cake table in a navy blazer, blond and golden, smiling at me.
His right hand rested on the small of my stepsister's back.
Danielle wore pale pink and leaned into it.
Nobody looking at the stage could see his hand.
I could see it.
I had seen it in my first life too, and decided it meant nothing.
Within a year of my wedding, that hand would sign my father's name on transfers he never made.
Within two, my father would die of a heart attack in a jail cell, waiting for a trial.
Within three, I would be in a locked room on Lake Geneva, and Danielle would be wearing my ring.
"Odessa," my father said, and held his hand out to me. "Come up here, sweetheart."
The crowd turned to look at me.
I handed my champagne to a waiter.
My knees felt like water.
My mind felt like ice.
I looked for the other man.
He was exactly where I remembered him, alone by the terrace doors.
Damiano Bastiani.
He wore a black suit with no tie, his collar open, his hands in his pockets.
Nobody stood within ten feet of him.
The guests had spent the whole night walking around him like he was a hole in the floor.
In my first life I had laughed at his offer, with Danielle, in the powder room.
I remembered one other thing about Damiano Bastiani.
By the spring I turned twenty-seven, he was gone, and nobody ever found him.
A husband who wouldn't last.
A name the Amblers were afraid of.
I started walking.
Rhett pushed off the table and came toward me with his hand out and his good smile on.
I walked straight past him.
I felt the air move as his hand closed on nothing.
The string quartet faltered and stopped.
My heels sounded very loud on the parquet.
Somebody whispered, "Where's she going?"
Damiano took his hands out of his pockets when I was halfway across the room.
He didn't come to meet me.
He watched me come to him.
Up close his eyes were so dark I couldn't see where the pupils ended.
"Mr. Bastiani," I said.
"Miss Kinnear."
His voice was low and unhurried.
"Is your offer still good?"
"It doesn't expire."
I turned around to face the room.
Four hundred faces stared back at me.
My father's spoon was still lifted against his glass.
"I choose him," I said, loud enough for the back of the ballroom.
The silence cracked into noise.
A man swore.
Somebody's glass hit the floor and broke.
Danielle's mouth had dropped open, and for once she forgot to look sweet.
Rhett recovered first.
He laughed, easy and warm, and spread his hands to the crowd.
"She's had too much champagne," he said. "She hasn't been well tonight. Odessa, come here."
"I've had half a glass," I said. "And I've never been better."
"You don't know what you're doing."
"I know exactly what I'm doing, Rhett. That's what you can't stand."
His smile stayed on his mouth, and the rest of his face went cold.
I knew that face.
I had seen it through the window of a locked door.
A warm hand closed around mine.
Damiano had laced his fingers through mine without asking, and he held on.
"We marry Monday," he told the room. "You're all invited to stay home."
A few people laughed before they could stop themselves.
My father put his glass down very slowly.
Damiano bent his head until his mouth was by my ear.
"If you change your mind before Monday," he said quietly, "I'll still keep you safe from him."
I went still.
Nobody knew.
Not one person alive knew what Rhett was going to do to me.
"From who?" I whispered.
Damiano lifted his eyes and looked straight across the ballroom at Rhett.
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