Married To The Mafia King, Pregnant With His Heir

Isabella POV

The evening had been ordinary right up until it wasn’t, which was the cruelest part of how it happened, because I had spent the whole day thinking about wedding colors that would never matter and a future that had already stopped existing without my knowledge.

I had come home from the flower shop with samples of ivory ranunculus tucked in tissue paper, the kind Marco said reminded him of the morning we met, and I remember laughing to myself in the car about how ridiculous it was to fall in love with a flower because a man once said something sweet about it.

The house was quiet when I let myself in, quieter than it should have been for a Tuesday evening, and the only light on was the one over the stove, the same bulb my mother used to leave burning for me whenever I came home late as a teenager.

I found my father at the kitchen table, and something about the stillness of him made the ranunculus samples feel suddenly foolish in my hands.

“Sit down, Bella,” he said.

I did not sit down. Something in the way his voice cracked on my name told me that whatever came next would not be something I wanted to hear sitting comfortably, and my body seemed to understand this before my mind caught up.

“What happened?” I asked.

My father would not look at me. He stared at the wood grain of the table and his fingers drummed.

“The Rossi family,” he finally said. “I owe them more than I can ever repay.”

The words landed like stones dropped into a still lake, sending ripples through every certainty I had about my life.

My father was not a reckless man. He was careful, methodical, the kind of man who counted his blessings twice before spending them, and to hear that he had gambled everything away to a family whose name alone made grown men lower their voices felt like waking up in a stranger’s house.

“How much?” I asked, though some small, terrified part of me already understood that the number would not matter.

“Enough that they could have killed me tonight,” he said. “Enough that the only reason I’m still breathing is because I offered them something more valuable than money.”

I felt the floor tilt beneath me, though I hadn’t moved an inch.

“What did you offer them?”

He looked up then, and for the first time in my life, I saw my father as something smaller than the man who used to lift me onto his shoulders. He looked like a man who had already made peace with becoming a coward, and was only waiting for me to catch up to that same peace.

“You,” he said. “I offered you, Bella. You marry Damiano Rossi tomorrow, before sundown, or they burn this house down with both of us in it.”

The tissue paper slipped from my fingers, ivory petals scattering across the floor. My hands found the back of a chair and gripped it hard.

“You sold me,” I said, and my voice sounded so scary I almost didn’t recognize it as my own.

“I saved you,” he replied. “I saved both of us.”

I wanted to scream at him that there was no saving in this, that he had simply traded his life for mine and called it love, but the words tangled in my throat.

Instead I turned and walked out of the kitchen, because I was going to say something that could never be unsaid between a daughter and her father.

I called Marco before I even reached the stairs and he answered on the second ring.

“Bella,” he said. “I was going to call you.”

“You already knew.” It wasn’t a question. It was a verdict, delivered the moment I heard the hesitation in his voice.

The silence on the other end of the line lasted long enough to answer for him.

“I found out yesterday,” he finally admitted. “Your father came to me first, before he went to the Rossis. He asked if I could help him with the debt.”

“And you said no.” My grip on the phone tightened until my knuckles went white.

“I don’t have that kind of money, Bella. Nobody does.”

“But you knew what he was planning,” I said. “You knew he was going to sell me to a man I’ve never met, and you let me find out from him.”

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Marco said, and there was something in his voice that sounded almost relieved.

I ended the call without saying goodbye, because I understood in that moment that the man I had planned a life with had already, quietly, let me go.

The betrayal did not come as a single blow. It came as a slow unraveling.

I don’t know how long I stood at the top of the stairs, staring at nothing, before I heard the cars pull into our driveway. Three of them, black and gleaming under the porch light, their engines cutting off in perfect unison.

My father’s voice drifted up from below, thin and pleading, addressing someone with the kind of forced warmth.

I moved to the window and looked down, and that was when I saw him for the first time. Damiano Rossi stepped out of the middle car like a man who had never once in his life needed to hurry and his dark coat settling around him.

He didn’t glance at the house. He didn’t glance at my father, who was already talking too fast, too eager, too desperate to please.

He looked up, straight at my window, as if he had known exactly which one was mine.

I stepped back from the glass, my heart hammering against my ribs, but it was too late. He had already seen me, and something told me a man like that did not forget a face once he had claimed it.

Minutes later, my father’s voice called up the stairs, tight with a fear I had never heard from him before.

“Bella. Come down. Mr. Rossi would like to meet his bride.”

I stood at the top of the stairs for a long moment before I made myself move, pressing my palm flat against the wall to steady my breathing, forcing my face into something that could pass for calm even though nothing underneath it felt calm at all. Whatever I was about to become, I was not going to let this man watch me fall apart doing it.

I walked down those stairs on legs that did not feel like my own and when I reached the bottom, Damiano was already waiting, studying me.

“You’re smaller than I expected,” he said, his eyes moving over me slowly, missing nothing. “But that won’t matter by tomorrow.”

“I haven’t agreed to anything,” I said, forcing steel into my voice that I did not feel in my chest.

He almost smiled then, the kind of smile that held no warmth at all, only certainty.

“You don’t have to agree, Isabella,” he said. “You only have to be ready by sundown.”