I Transmigrated Into the Mafia Don’s Doomed Bride

Alessandria's POV 

The clock on the wall said eleven forty-seven, and Alessandria Rinaldi was still typing.

Her back hurt from sitting too long in a chair that was never made for long nights. Her eyes were dry and sore from staring at the same numbers on the same screen. Her stomach made a small, sad sound because she had forgotten to eat dinner again, and the only thing in her fridge was half a bottle of water and a lemon that had seen better days.

The apartment was small. One room for sleeping, one room for living, and a tiny kitchen that was really just a corner with a stove. The walls were thin, so she could hear the neighbors fighting in the flat above her, and the pipes made a knocking sound every time someone ran the water. She had lived here for three years, and she still had not hung a single picture on the wall. There was no point. She was never home long enough to look at them.

Outside, the wind was loud. Rain hit the window in hard, angry sheets, and every few minutes the glass shook like someone was knocking on it from the other side. A storm had been building all evening, and now it had finally arrived.

She saved her work and leaned back in her chair. The report was done. It was forty pages long, full of numbers and charts and words she did not even understand, and her boss would open it on Monday, look at the first page, and send it back with a note that said make this clearer. It happened every single week. She had stopped hoping for a thank you somewhere around the second year.

She picked up her phone and opened the book she had been reading on her lunch break.

The title was Blood and Vows, and it was the third mafia romance she had read this month. It was not a good book. The writing was bad in places, and the story moved too fast, and the female lead was so weak that Alessandria wanted to reach through the screen and shake her. But she could not stop reading, and the reason was simple. The male lead was named Tiziano Vescari, and he was the kind of man she would never want in real life but could not stop thinking about. He was tall and dark and dangerous, with eyes that looked like they could see straight through a person, and he had killed more men than she could count. He owned half the city. He owned judges and policemen and men in suits who smiled at him and then went home and locked their doors twice.

The chapter she was reading now was the wedding chapter. Serafina, the female lead, had just married Tiziano, and she was walking to the wedding bed with her hands folded and her head down like a well-trained dog. And Tiziano, in this chapter, had already decided to kill her before morning. He was going to blame the Moretti family, the ones he was at war with, and use her death as an excuse to burn the whole city down.

Alessandria threw her phone onto the desk and spoke out loud to the empty room, because there was no one else to talk to and she had gotten used to the sound of her own voice.

“This girl is so stupid. If I was her, I would have stabbed him in his sleep by now. He is beautiful, fine, I will give him that. He is very beautiful. But he is a monster. You do not sit there and fold your hands and wait to die. You find a knife. You find a door. You find something.”

She rubbed her face with both hands and looked at the storm outside. The rain was coming down so hard now that the streetlights looked like they were underwater.

The lights in the apartment flickered once.

She looked up.

They flickered again, and then the computer screen went black, and the little lamp beside it popped with a sound like a small firecracker and died. The whole flat went dark. The fridge stopped humming. The knocking in the pipes went quiet. Everything stopped at once.

Alessandria sat very still in the dark and waited for her eyes to adjust. The rain was the only thing making noise now, and it sounded louder without the machines.

Then she heard something above her head. A soft sliding sound. The sound a heavy thing makes when it starts to fall.

She looked up just in time to see the thick paperback copy of Blood and Vows coming off the top shelf. It had been sitting up there for a month, and she had never even opened the paper copy, because she read everything on her phone.

It hit her on the side of the head, hard.

For a moment there were stars in front of her eyes, white and bright and spinning. She tried to stand up, but her legs felt like they belonged to someone else, and the floor came up to meet her. She put a hand out and caught the edge of the desk, but her fingers were weak and slow, and the darkness got darker, and then the darkness was everything.

---

She woke up standing.

That was the first strange thing, because she never woke up standing. She woke up lying down, usually with her face in the pillow and her phone buzzing somewhere under the blanket.

The second strange thing was the light. It was warm and gold and there was a lot of it, and it came from candles and from high windows and from lamps hanging on long chains. It was not the grey light of a stormy night in a small flat.

The third strange thing was the dress. It was white and heavy and it went all the way down to the floor, with lace on the sleeves and a long train spread out behind her on the marble. Her hands were holding a bouquet of red roses so big that she could not see her own feet. The roses smelled sweet and strong, and under the smell of roses there was the smell of wax and perfume and too many people in one room.

She looked down at her hands. They were small and pale and smooth, with short, clean nails and no scars on the knuckles. They were not her hands. Her hands had a thin white scar on the left thumb from a kitchen knife, and a small dark mole near the wrist, and nails bitten down to nothing from years of stress.

These were not her hands. These were someone else’s hands. Someone soft. Someone who had never worked a day in her life.

The floor was white marble with grey veins running through it, and she was standing on it in white shoes that pinched her toes. People were sitting in rows of chairs on both sides of her, all of them dressed in dark clothes and hats, all of them with their faces turned toward her. The men looked heavy and quiet. The women looked at her like they were measuring her and finding her too small.

There was music playing somewhere. Soft and slow. The kind of music that plays in old films when a woman in a long dress walks down a staircase.

She turned her head to the right, and her heart stopped.

He was standing beside her, holding her hand.

He was taller than she had imagined, and she had imagined him many times. His shoulders were wide, and his hair was black and pushed back from his face, and his eyes were dark and cold and fixed on her like she was a problem he was deciding how to solve. His jaw was sharp. His mouth was a straight, hard line. He was wearing a black suit that looked like it cost more than she made in a year, and his hand around hers was warm and hard, and she could feel every rough patch on his palm.

She knew that face. She had seen it on the cover of the book. She had seen it in her own head every night for two weeks.

Tiziano Vescari.

Her mouth opened before her brain could stop it.

“Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no.”

The music stopped. The priest stopped. Every head in the room turned. Beside her, Tiziano’s eyes got colder, and his hand tightened around hers just enough to hurt.

She looked at the priest. He was an old man in white and gold, holding a small black book, and he was staring at her with his mouth open like a fish.

He cleared his throat and looked down at the book and spoke in a slow, careful voice.

“Do you, Serafina, take Tiziano to be your husband, to love and to obey, for the rest of your days?”

Serafina. He had called her Serafina.

Alessandria looked down at the white dress and the small pale hands and the red roses, and the whole world tilted sideways. She was not Alessandria anymore. She was inside the book. She was inside the body of the girl who was supposed to die tonight.

Her legs shook. Her throat closed. Her mind screamed at her to say no, to run, to push through the crowd and find a door and get out of this place.

But the priest was waiting. The whole room was waiting. And the man holding her hand was watching her with those dark eyes, and something in them said that if she embarrassed him in front of these people, she would not live long enough to regret it.

So she said the only word that would keep her breathing.

“Yes.”