The Mafia Boss's Silent Bride

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eady gone by the

bed, which I hadn't actually shared with him, had been left untouched the night before, since he'd shown me to a room of my own without much explanation beyond the fact that it wa

d looking at the contract still sitting where I'd left it the night before, and I thought, not for the first time, t

voided looking at directly. My mother had told me to disappear that day in the hospital hallway, and some small, stubborn part of me had gone along with it not just out of fear, but because some part of me had wanted, desperately, for her to finall

adn't known she had, and I understood within about thirty seconds of her s

cern, just an observation on my presentation. "You sho

I just watched her, waiting for

u don't argue, you don't question him in front of his people, and you certainly don't do whatever it is you did to make him agree to any of this in the first place." Her eyes narrowed slightly, like she still hadn't fully worked o

nough to walk away from a life neither of us had chosen. But the old habit was faster than the anger, and my hands stayed still in my lap, and I nodded instead, because some part of m

a logistics update on how I was supposed to perform being someone's wife. I sat with that for a while after she'd gone, the particular hollo

in the afternoon, th

nd I usually tried to be, at least internally, there was a small and familiar voice underneath the decision that sounded a lot like hope. Maybe if I did this right, if the table looked nice and the food was good and I looked like the kin

ut never really stopped carrying. It was the same hope I'd carried into every conversation with my mother since I was nine years old, the quiet bel

hed it back down, the way I a

liberate instead of accidental, hair down instead of pulled back, and I set

etly cold across from an empty chair. He walked into the kitchen still in his suit, tie loosened, exhaustion sitting differently on him than

might have been acknowledgment or might have been nothing, and then he walked past me toward the hal

ifferent from the one I chose for myself every day. This one wasn't mine. This one had j

I understood, before I even understood anything else, was that he hadn't come to wake me. He hadn't come to check if I was even still in the kitchen. He'd gone to his room and closed his door and let me sleep sitting uprig

ng slightly while I did it. Then I walked to my own room, down the opposite hallway from his, and closed my door the same way h

st beli