Chapter 3: I Do To The Devil

**Nadia**

The chapel was the size of a closet.

That was my first thought when we walked in. White walls, two rows of empty chairs, a single aisle that took maybe ten steps to cross. A plastic flower arrangement sat at the altar, dusty at the edges. The officiant was a small man in a rumpled grey suit who looked like he had done this a thousand times and stopped finding it interesting around the five hundredth.

No guests. No music. No photographer hovering at the edges waiting to catch the moment.

Just Dominic, Raffael, and me.

I stood at the entrance and told myself to move. My feet did not immediately cooperate.

This was insane. I knew it was insane. I had known it was insane from the moment I picked up the pen, and I had signed anyway, and now I was standing in a Vegas wedding chapel at whatever hour this was with a man whose last name I had only learned an hour ago.

Dominic stopped beside me. He did not offer his arm. He did not look at me with reassurance or nerves or any of the things a person was supposed to feel standing at the entrance of a chapel. He just waited, hands in his pockets, like we had simply paused on a walk.

"You can still leave," he said quietly.

It was not kindness. It was information, delivered the same way he delivered everything. Flat and certain.

I looked at the altar. Then at him.

"So can you," I said.

Something shifted in his expression. So small I almost missed it. Then it was gone.

He walked forward. I walked beside him.

The officiant cleared his throat as we reached the altar and opened a small book that looked like it had seen better decades. Raffael took a position two steps back, witness by default, expression giving away nothing.

"We'll begin," the officiant said.

Begin. As if this were a meeting.

I pressed my hands together in front of me and focused on the plastic flowers behind his head. They were trying very hard to look like roses. They were not succeeding.

"Repeat after me," the officiant said, looking at Dominic first.

Dominic repeated the words. His voice was even and unhurried, each line delivered with the same weight as everything else he said, which was either deeply unsettling or oddly steadying. I had not decided yet.

Then the officiant looked at me.

I opened my mouth.

The words came out quieter than I intended but they came out. Every line. I did not stumble. My voice shook on exactly one word and I pressed through it and kept going because I was not going to fall apart in a ten-step chapel in front of a man who looked at panic like it was simply a condition to be waited out.

When I finished, the officiant glanced between us with the mild expression of a man processing a transaction.

"By the power vested in me," he said, "I now pronounce you married."

Married.

The word sat in the air between us like something physical.

I waited for it to feel real. It didn't. It felt like watching myself from outside, like the Nadia standing at this altar was someone I did not fully recognize yet.

Dominic turned to me. He did not move immediately. He just looked at me for a moment, and I could not read what was behind it. Not warmth. Not calculation exactly. Something more careful than either.

Then he reached out and took my hand.

Not possessive. Not a performance. Just his fingers closing around mine, brief and deliberate, before he let go.

I did not know why that undid me more than anything else had.

We signed the license. Raffael signed as witness. The officiant handed over a copy with the same energy he would use to hand over a receipt, and then we were walking back down the aisle, ten steps, out through the door and into the Vegas night.

The air outside was warm and smelled like car exhaust and something sweet from a food cart down the street. Neon lights blinked from every direction, oblivious. A group of women in matching sashes stumbled past laughing, completely unaware that my entire life had just restructured itself in the time it took them to get from one bar to the next.

The limo was waiting.

I got in. Dominic followed. Raffael closed the door and took the front.

The silence inside was immediate and total.

I sat with my hands in my lap and looked out the window at the city moving past. My ring felt strange on my finger. I kept noticing the weight of it, which was something I had not expected. I thought I would feel nothing. Instead I felt everything, too much and too fast and none of it with names yet.

"You're quiet," Dominic said.

"I'm thinking."

"About?"

I turned to look at him. He was watching me with that same careful attention he had used at the bar, like he was mapping something.

"About what I just did," I said.

"And?"

"And I haven't decided how I feel about it yet."

He nodded once, like that was a reasonable answer.

Then he turned fully toward me and reached out. His fingers curved under my chin, not rough, not gentle exactly, just certain, tilting my face toward his.

I let him. I was not sure why I let him. Maybe because I was too tired to decide what resistance looked like right now, or maybe because some part of me that had been scared all night recognized that whatever Dominic Marcello was, he was not Garrett. He was not someone who would look at me like an inconvenience.

His thumb traced along my jaw, slow and deliberate.

"Tonight you stop being his," he said. His voice was low, almost quiet, like the words were for me specifically and not for the air between us. "You become mine."

I held his gaze.

My heart was hammering. I was aware of it the way you became aware of your own breathing once someone pointed it out. I was also aware that I was not afraid of him, not exactly, which surprised me given everything. What I felt was closer to the feeling of standing at the edge of something very high and not yet knowing whether you were about to fall or fly.

I did not pull away from his hand.

"Then you should know something," I said.

He waited.

"I'm not easy to own."

His eyes stayed on mine for a long moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something quieter than that.

"Good," he said.

He let go of my chin and turned back to the window.

I turned back to mine.

The limo slowed.

Then it stopped.

Raffael opened the door. “We’re here.”

I stepped out. And froze.

It wasn’t a house.

It was a mansion.

Stone stretched wide and tall, lit in soft gold. Massive columns framed the entrance. The doors alone looked taller than any room I had ever lived in. The drive curved behind us, gates already closing with a heavy final sound.

My chest tightened.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Welcome to the Marcello Manor, little dove” Dominic said.

My new home.

The words hit anyway.

I looked back at the mansion. At the size of it. The silence of it. The way it stood there like it didn’t just exist, it owned everything around it.

This wasn’t temporary.

This wasn’t something you walked away from.

I swallowed.

“You bring all your contracts here?” I asked.

“Only the ones that matter,” he said.

I felt that.

Didn’t like that I felt it.

Dominic turned and walked toward the doors like the place answered to him.

I hesitated for one second.

Then I followed.

Because somewhere between signing my name and stepping out of that car, I had already crossed the line.

And there was no going back.