Oops! I Mistakenly Kidnapped The Mafia Don’s Heir

Chapter 1

ESTELLE

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"Fourteen pounds fifty… that's not right." My mum recounted, her voice doing that wobbly thing it did when she was trying not to cry in front of us.

I could fix this. Right now.

The money I'd been hiding under my mattress for six months could sort our grocery situation for weeks. Instead, in three hours, it was buying me a one-way ticket to Sicily where, according to my friends, I was finally going to get my cherry popped by some Mediterranean god with wandering hands, whatever that was supposed to look like in practice.

I was officially going to hell. Straight there, no detours, no purgatory stopover to reconsider my life choices along the way.

"Mum, it's fine," Danny called from the sofa, not looking up from his Xbox. My baby brother thought seventeen made him the man of the house, bless him. "I don't need breakfast anyway."

"Don't be stupid, love. Growing boys need proper meals." Mum was trying for cheerful but landing somewhere closer to manic, the way she always did when money got tight.

My phone buzzed. Vivian: Car's outside in 15. Please tell me you're not having second thoughts about Operation Deflowering.

Another buzz from Millie: I've packed three types of condoms and a morning-after pill. We're not taking any chances. This is happening, Stell.

Christ, my friends were mental. Absolutely, certifiably mental, and somehow I loved them more for it.

"Who's messaging you?" Danny had developed an annoying sixth sense about my phone lately.

"Nobody important." I shoved it in my back pocket before he could see Millie's text about contraceptives. Last thing I needed was my kid brother knowing the intimate details of my nonexistent sex life, or worse, repeating any of it back to Mum.

"Must be somebody important if you're grinning like that." Danny's eyes narrowed with the particular suspicion only a younger sibling could muster.

"I'm not grinning."

"You're definitely grinning." He said it like he'd caught me committing an actual crime.

"Danny, leave your sister alone," Mum sighed, giving up on making our pathetic grocery budget stretch any further than it already had. "Estelle, love, you're not going out again tonight, are you? You've barely been home since graduation."

"Just meeting the girls for a bit. Might crash at Vivian's if we watch films too late."

Six months ago, I couldn't lie to save my life. Now I was basically a professional deceiver, the kind who could look her own mother dead in the eye and talk about grocery money while a plane ticket sat folded in my knicker drawer.

First about the money I'd been squirreling away from my weekend job at Waterstones, folding notes into an old sock like some kind of Victorian orphan hoarding coins for the workhouse. Then about why I kept disappearing with Vivian and Millie for "study sessions" that were actually planning sessions for this trip. Now about vanishing to a private island off Sicily where, apparently, I was going to finally understand what all the fuss was about, whatever that meant exactly, since neither of my friends had ever explained it in terms I could actually picture.

"That sounds lovely, darling. Tell Vivian's mum I said hello."

Danny was still giving me suspicious looks. "Since when do you voluntarily sleep anywhere that's not your own bed? You're like a bloody cat, you hate sleeping anywhere else."

"Since Vivian's mum makes actual food instead of…" I gestured at our bare cupboards, "whatever this is supposed to be."

"Oi! There's perfectly good pasta in there!"

"Plain pasta with no sauce isn't food, Danny. It's student depression fuel."

"Sauce costs money!"

"Everything costs money, you muppet. That's not the point."

"Enough, you two," Mum laughed, and for a moment she looked younger. Less tired. Less like she was carrying the weight of our little broken family on her shoulders.

This was exactly why I had to go. This moment right here. The way her whole face changed when she forgot, even for a few seconds, to worry about us.

Because if I stayed, I'd keep being the one who gave up uni nights out to work extra hours, who quietly transferred money into the household account and pretended I hadn't noticed the balance dropping, who told herself that being needed was the same thing as being happy.

Twenty-three years old and I'd never been kissed on a beach. Never had a holiday romance. Never done anything remotely stupid or spontaneous or just for the hell of it. I'd built my entire adult life around being reliable, and somewhere along the way I'd forgotten that reliable people were allowed to want things too.

According to Vivian and Millie, this was a tragedy of epic proportions that required immediate intervention, the kind usually reserved for national emergencies or particularly dramatic soap opera plotlines.

"Love you both," I said, kissing Mum's cheek and ruffling Danny's hair as I headed for the door with my secretly pre-packed bag.

"Love you too, sweet girl. Don't stay out too late."

If only she knew that "too late" was going to be approximately one week from now.

God forgive me. I'd need it, and probably a fair bit more, once she eventually figured out where her daughter had actually disappeared to.

"I cannot bloody believe you actually did it!" Vivian shrieked the moment I slid into the back of the taxi. "I genuinely thought you'd bottle it and we'd find you hiding under your bed eating sad beans on toast."

"I don't eat sad beans on toast," I protested.

"You eat poverty beans on toast," Millie pointed out from the front seat. "Which is basically the same thing but with more guilt and self-loathing."

"I hate you both."

"You love us. We're about to get you properly shagged by a gorgeous Italian stallion with abs you could grate cheese on."

"Please stop saying things like that where the taxi driver can hear you." I gestured frantically at the poor man who was clearly pretending not to understand English, though the twitch at the corner of his mouth suggested otherwise.

"Relax, babe. Everyone knows Italian men are walking sex gods. It's basically a scientific fact." Vivian was practically vibrating with excitement. "Did you see the photos of that island? It's like something out of a bloody fairytale. White sand, crystal blue water and mysterious rich families who only open it to the public one week a year." She said the last part like it added credibility rather than raising red flags, which, in hindsight, should have been my first warning sign.

"Which is either incredibly romantic or the setup for a horror film," Millie added cheerfully, in the exact same tone she'd use to comment on the weather.

"Don't say things like that!" I smacked her arm. "I'm nervous enough as it is. This is my first time on a plane, first time leaving England, first time doing anything remotely adventurous, and you're talking about horror films?"

"Stell, love, you need to calm down. You're vibrating like a tuning fork." Vivian grabbed my hands, which were indeed shaking. "This is going to be amazing. You're going to have the time of your life."

"What if I'm rubbish at it? What if—"

"What if you actually let yourself have fun for once in your life instead of overthinking everything to death?" Millie interrupted. "Seriously, Estelle. You've spent the last three years working your arse off, getting top marks, never going out, never doing anything for yourself. This is your graduation present to yourself."

"A graduation present that cost me six months of wages and left my family counting grocery money," I muttered.

"Your family will be fine for one week. Your mum's tougher than you think, and Danny's not going to starve. You, on the other hand, are going to die of terminal responsibility if you don't do something completely mental soon." Millie said it with the particular authority of someone who had never once in her life worried about anyone but herself, which, I had to admit, made her strangely convincing on this particular subject.

The taxi pulled up to Gatwick and my stomach dropped somewhere around my shoes.

This was actually happening. I was actually about to get on a plane to Italy with my two best mates who'd made it their personal mission to get me laid before my twenty-fourth birthday, as though virginity were some sort of expiration date I was rapidly approaching.

"Right," Vivian said, paying the driver with a flourish. "Phase one complete. Now for phase two: getting through airport security without you having a complete mental breakdown."

"I'm not having a mental breakdown."

"You're hyperventilating."

"I am not—" I stopped. I was definitely hyperventilating.

I pressed a hand to my chest, trying to remember how normal people breathed when they weren't spiraling about the fact that they'd never actually left the country before, let alone boarded a plane by themselves, let alone done either of those things while carrying a suitcase packed with clothes designed specifically to be taken off by a stranger.

Everything about the last three hours felt like it belonged to someone else's life. Someone braver, someone who didn't calculate the cost of every decision down to the penny before making it. But here I was, standing in the departures hall with my hands shaking and my best friends practically dragging me toward security, and there was no version of this where I turned back now.

"Breathe, Stell. In and out. Think about gorgeous Italian boys with tanned skin and mysterious eyes."

"That's not helping!"

"Think about finally understanding what Millie's always going on about when she disappears with random blokes."

"Oi!" Millie protested. "I don't disappear with random blokes. I disappear with carefully selected blokes who meet very specific criteria."

"What criteria?" I asked, grateful for the distraction as we wheeled our cases through the terminal.

"Must be fit, must have a big dick, must know how to use his fingers and tongue, and must not expect me to make him breakfast in the morning."

"Those are terrible criteria."

"They're excellent criteria. Which is why you're going to have the most amazing week of your life, because Italian boys tick all those boxes and more." Millie said it with total conviction, the way she said most things, as though the universe simply had no choice but to align itself around her expectations.

"Jesus, I need a fucking break." I said it under my breath, but Millie caught it anyway, because Millie caught everything, which was equal parts wonderful and exhausting depending on the day.

"You'll get plenty of breaks once we're horizontal on a beach somewhere with cocktails the size of my head," she said, linking her arm through mine as we joined the security queue. "Chin up, Estelle. This is the beginning of your villain arc."

"I don't want a villain arc. I want a normal, boring holiday where nothing embarrassing happens to me."

"Boring is for people who don't have us as best friends," Vivian said cheerfully, waving her passport at the increasingly unimpressed security guard. "Lucky for you, we've decided that's simply not an option this week."

I wanted to argue, but honestly, there wasn't much point. The three of us had been a package deal since sixth form, through every heartbreak, every bad decision, every 3am phone call that started with "you'll never guess what happened."

If they'd decided this was the week I finally let loose, there wasn't much I could do to stop them short of physically fleeing the country, which, given that we were already at the airport, felt increasingly like a lost cause.

Besides, some small, traitorous part of me wanted this too. Wanted the version of my life where I wasn't just the responsible one, the reliable one, the one who never got to be reckless because someone always had to hold everything together.

Maybe, for one week, that someone didn't have to be me.