All Chapters of Five Minutes Cost the Don His Bride: Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

A sharp thud came through the phone.Sofia had tossed it onto the table, believing the call had ended.She had forgotten to hang up.I heard her laugh.“How many minutes do you think she’ll last before she calls for help?”Dad answered first. “Three. She’s been afraid of thunderstorms since she was a child.”“I say two,” Sofia said eagerly. “The last time I locked her in the wine cellar, she called Dante in less than a minute.”Mom offered a token warning. “Don’t take it too far. The engagement gala is in two days. Five minutes at most, or she’ll come home sulking again.”“Relax. She’ll call Dante first.”Then Sofia turned to him.“Dante, when she begs you to come get her, you’ll go, right?”“Yes.”“Then make her wait five minutes.” She drew out the words in a coaxing whine. “You always rescue her so quickly that I never get to see her truly scared. Wait until she’s crying and begging before you go. Please?”Silence filled the other end of the line.Two seconds passed.Then Dante said,

The next afternoon, I returned to the Moretti estate with my suitcase to collect my passport and work documents.Sofia was sitting on the living room carpet, editing the video she planned to show at our engagement gala. My parents and Dante were gathered around her.On the screen, I was fifteen years old, hiding in a school bathroom and crying.That day, Sofia had covered the school hallways with pages from my private journal, then read aloud a letter I had written to a boy.She had sped up the sound of my crying and added ridiculous music.The video cut to footage of me having a panic attack after she locked me in the wine cellar.“This part is the funniest,” Sofia said. “We have to show it tomorrow.”Mom glanced at the time.“You just had your follow-up appointment yesterday. Don’t exhaust yourself over a video.”Dad also urged her to let someone else finish the editing.Dante recognized the footage from the wine cellar.When it first surfaced years ago, he had stayed with me all nig

Emma kept the camera trained on Dante.He stood with my engagement ring clenched between his fingers, staring down at it for a long time.Whispers spread through the ballroom. Sofia stood nearby, tears already filling her eyes.“Dante, I was only trying to make her laugh. I didn’t know she would take it this far.”Dante didn’t answer.His phone vibrated again. My scheduled email was still waiting on the screen.He opened the attachment.Sofia’s voice and mine filled the ballroom.“Of course I knew you hated it.”“That was why I did it. If you laughed along with everyone else, where would the fun be?”All the color drained from Sofia’s face.She lunged for the phone, but Dante raised it beyond her reach.The recording continued.“I make you cry. I make you lose control. I make everyone believe you’re sensitive, cruel, and incapable of taking a joke.”“Then all I have to do is let my eyes fill with tears. They protect me and force you to apologize.”Mom went rigid.Dad had been ordering

Sofia couldn’t accept that no one was protecting her anymore.Three days later, she emailed the footage of my panic attack to every senior executive in the Milan division.In the message, she described herself as a cancer survivor being punished by her jealous, vindictive sister. She also claimed that I was emotionally unstable and unfit to oversee an acquisition worth hundreds of millions of dollars.The head of Human Resources looked concerned when she forwarded the email to me.“If you need some time, we can postpone this afternoon’s negotiations.”“That won’t be necessary.”I didn’t show my colleagues the recording of Sofia admitting what she had done. Nor did I expose every cruel thing she had done to me over the years.I submitted only the roadside-assistance records, her harassing emails, and the metadata showing when the private videos had been created and distributed.“This is personal harassment. My attorney will handle it, and it won’t affect the acquisition.”The negotiatio

Six months later, I returned to New York on behalf of the Milan headquarters for the Group’s annual meeting.The acquisition I led had increased the European division’s profits by twenty percent. The board voted unanimously to confirm me as Head of European Mergers and Acquisitions.At the end of the meeting, the New York executive who had once encouraged me to give up the Milan opportunity came over and shook my hand.“Ten years isn’t long enough,” he said with a smile. “Headquarters hopes you’ll stay in Europe forever.”“That depends on whether they keep giving me work worth staying for.”I smiled as I answered.When I left the conference room, my parents were standing at the far end of the hallway.They didn’t approach without permission. They simply nodded to me from a distance.For the past six months, they had sent me one email each month. They no longer urged me to come home or asked me to forgive Sofia.Sofia had moved out of the estate, started living independently, and entere