Wedded to my Sister's Mafia Groom

Chapter One

Alessia POV

“Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?” the priest said as I stood there frozen and not entirely sure of what I was doing right now.

“Say ‘I do’, dear,” he urged when I stayed quiet for longer than was appropriate.

“I do,” I repeated back to him like I was reciting something in a language I had never been taught.

The words left my mouth and the priest continued droning away.

The man across from me – Matteo Ricci, and my husband now, God help me – slid a ring onto my finger, and I felt the weight of the cold metal like a noose.

Final.

It was wrong in a way that only things belonging to the dead can feel wrong.

This was Isabella's ring. She had worn it to the final fitting three weeks ago, turning her hand in the light while our mother cried and said she looked like a queen.

Now it sat on my knuckle and I stood in Isabella's dress, in Isabella's church, surrounded by Isabella's life, while somewhere in the east wing of this marble mausoleum of a mansion, my sister was lying on the floor of a bedroom with a pool of blood surrounding her.

I found her four hours ago.

I don't know what I expected when I pushed open her door after she hadn't answered my knock, but it hadn't been that. The worst worry I had was that at the last moment she had gotten cold feet and run away.

The lock gave on the second push and then Isabella was there, lying on the cold tile. Still in her wedding underthings, as though she had been in the middle of getting ready and had simply – stopped.

There were no signs of a struggle. No overturned furniture, no broken glass, nothing scattered or torn. Just my sister, arranged across the floor with little to no thought.

Her coat was missing and her keys were gone. The door had been locked from the inside, but the key was nowhere in the room.

For a brief, stupid moment, I thought she was sleeping.

But the longer she lay there, the more I realized that it was a stupid, futile hope. Her skin was already too pale.

I stood in the doorway for what felt like a very long time, my hands gripping the doorframe tightly until my knuckles turned white.

My chest heaved like it might collapse in on itself.

I stood there, lost in shock, long enough for the light to shift and the bustling sounds of the wedding preparations to reach me – footsteps, voices, someone below calling instructions about the floral arrangements. It all felt surreal.

I closed the door and I thought, as clearly as I had ever thought of anything in my life: if I walked downstairs and told them what I found, people would die tonight.

It was not a feeling but a fact.

I knew my father.

So I knew what a dead bride meant to a man like Vittorio DeLuca, and I knew what it would mean to the men on the other side of this alliance who had been looking for a reason to put their guns back on the table.

The peace between our families was three years and a wedding away from becoming permanent. It was held together with wire and goodwill and not much else, and if I said the words Isabella is dead before those vows were spoken, that thin fragile wire would snap.

So I didn't rush out of the room in a panic.

Instead, I did something terrible.

Something I would likely never be forgiven for.

I walked into the room.

I picked up the wedding dress.

I hesitated for a brief moment.

God, this was stupid and suicidal.

The fabric slipped in my hands. I almost dropped it.

But a voice that sounded much like Isabella's whispered in the back of my mind.

It's the only choice.

I swallowed, picked up the veil and shoes, and then I walked out, closing the door behind me.

It took less than twenty minutes to change into my sister's clothes.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub in my own room for twenty minutes and breathed until I could stand without my legs failing me.

Then I walked down the stairs, took my father's arm, and let him lead me toward a man I had never properly met.

I opened my mouth.

And I said yes.

---

The reception swallowed the next three hours.

I smiled at people whose names I didn't know. I accepted embraces from women who pinched my cheeks and told me I looked beautiful, just like my mother, what a blessing.

All despite the fact they couldn't see my face past the veil that only my husband could lift on the wedding night.

I drank one glass of wine, but I didn't really taste it.

Across the room, through the heads and shoulders and the thick blue haze of cigarette smoke, I watched Matteo Ricci move through his guests with the ease of a man who has never once questioned whether he belongs in a room.

He shook hands with only those he deemed important and he said very little.

He had the particular stillness of someone who is always watching something no one else has noticed yet.

Once, from across the room, he looked at me.

Just a glance – two seconds at most – but it felt like he stripped me naked with that single look. I didn't want that much attention on me at all. It felt suffocating.

I looked away first.

I should not have looked away first.

But my heart was doing something unsteady in my chest and I was still thinking about the locked door, the missing key, the terrible logic of what I had done, and I was not ready to hold his gaze on top of all of it.

By midnight the guests were gone and the soldiers remained, blending into the shadows and furniture.

Someone led us upstairs. The door closed.

And then it was just the two of us.

He stood at the window for a long time with his back to me, watching the last of the cars move through the gates below.

I sat at the vanity and kept my hands still in my lap and told myself to breathe.

Just breathe, Alessia.

You have survived the last twelve hours.

You can survive the next twelve minutes.

Then he turned around.

Looking at me the way a man looks at something that didn't quite fit his expectations.

He was suspicious.

But he didn't know why yet.

I held his gaze this time from behind my veil, gulping.

I didn't look away as I whispered,

“Hello, husband.”