All Chapters of She Said Yes to the Wrong Man: Chapter 11 - Chapter 15

It was eight months before the wedding and a very busy afternoon. The room above the restaurant where they had all chose for meeeting had no windows. That was the point. A long table down the center, low light from a single fixture overhead, the smell of garlic and frying oil coming up through the floorboards from the kitchen below, sitting underneath every other smell in the room like it owned the place. The chairs had been pushed back against the walls before anyone arrived so nobody had to decide where to sit, which told you everything about how many times this particular group of men had done this particular thing.Marco sat two seats from the head of the Moretti side. Close enough to matter. Far enough back to watch.He was thinking about a supply problem on the eastern route when the Romano folder came out.Standard. Every peacekeeping meeting produced its own archaeology, old agreements surfaced and pointed to across the table like relics, proof that something had been settled o

Dante's assistant came to knock at nine exactly to get her prepped for the day. She had been awake since six, sitting in the chair by the window watching the garden come into light with the handkerchief on the nightstand and Sophia's note folded inside it and the memory of a door handle turning in the dark still sitting in her chest like a stone that couldn't shift. She'd heard Leo wake at around seven, heard him pad to the bathroom and back and drop into bed again, while staying in her chair and watched the security man make his circuit in the garden below and thought about all the things she was not going to say in the meeting that was always going to happen. As she had known it was coming since she arrived. You can't just walk into a house like this and not eventually sit across a desk from the man who owned it and hear the terms spelled out. She closed the door of her room behind her and went downstairs. The study felt different in the morning light. Harder somehow, the dark wo

Leo was crouched over the drain again with his newly recruited friends and had watched him investigate that drain every afternoon for four days and still didn't know what he found so interesting about it. He was down there with Nico now, both of them peering at the flagstones like whatever lived in that drain owed them an explanation, while Petra stood above them with her arms folded in the particular way of a seven year old who had decided to supervise and wasn't going to pretend otherwise.Ava sat on the stone bench with her coffee and let the afternoon sit around her for a minute.The courtyard was on the south side of the mansion, sheltered on three sides by the body of the house, the walls rising two floors above and throwing a long shadow across the flagstones. The sun had just cleared the roofline on the west side and was coming in at a low angle, warming the stone under her feet and catching the old iron ring set into the far wall above the bench. She could hear the fountain fr