The Cursed Mafia King's Obsession

"You'll wear white," my father said, his voice leaving no room for argument. "And you'll smile in front of the guests tomorrow."

I stared at him from across his office, my fingers tightening around the fabric of my dress.

"Smile?" I repeated, barely able to believe him.

"Yes, Maya." His expression remained cold. "Whatever you feel, whatever you think, you will keep it to yourself. Tomorrow is important to this family, and I will not have you embarrassing me in front of our guests."

He spoke as though tomorrow were some ordinary celebration. As though I wasn't being forced to marry the man whose house had taken my sister's life.

He didn't look up from the papers on his desk when he said it. He never looked up when he was deciding something for me, as if my face might change his mind, so it was safer for him not to see it.

"I'm not marrying him."

"You are."

"Elena married him first. And he killed her."

That got his eyes on me, finally. Cold, the way they always went when I said her name. "Your sister's death was a tragedy. It has nothing to do with your future or him."

"She told me never to marry him." My voice cracked in the middle of it, and I hated that it did. "The last thing she ever said to me, and you want me to walk into the exact house that killed her."

"Nothing killed her but her own weakness." He set down his pen, precise, like even that small motion had been decided in advance. "You are not weak, Maya. You'll do what this family needs."

I stood in the doorway of his office, in the house I'd grown up in, and understood, really understood for the first time, that my father would hand me to Lucian Vale the same way he handed over a shipment or a signature. Something useful. Something that prevented a war from starting.

I walked out without answering, because there wasn't an answer that would change anything, and because I'd already decided, somewhere between *she's dead* and *nothing killed her*, that I wasn't going to be in that house tomorrow when the priest arrived.

My room still smelled faintly of Elena's perfume. I'd taken the bottle from her vanity the week after the funeral, when no one was looking, and kept it on my windowsill like it might mean something if I never let it run out.

*Never marry him, Maya, because I know he will come for you.* She'd grabbed my wrist hard enough to leave a mark, two days before she died, in the kitchen where no one could hear us. *Promise me. Whatever they tell you afterward...promise me you won't.*

I'd promised because she was scaring me, not because I understood what I was promising then. I understand it now. And I finally understood exactly what she'd been trying to save me from.

I packed a light bag I could run with - cash I'd been hiding for eight months in the lining of a coat no one ever checked, a phone I planned to leave behind the moment I was far enough away. I didn't pack anything that would slow me down, which meant I didn't pack anything that mattered. No photographs. No letters. Nothing that would break my heart to lose if someone caught me before I got out.

I'd planned this for months after my sister died. The house went quiet around midnight. My father's men rotated the gate every four hours, and I'd spent two weeks pretending to sleep so I could learn exactly when the shifts changed.

I was aware of the blind spot by the old service gate, the one nobody used because the cameras there had never worked properly. I knew because Elena had shown me years ago, back when slipping out for a few hours felt like the biggest rebellion either of us could manage. *Everyone needs one door nobody's watching,* she used to say, grinning like it was worth more than anything our father owned.

I will use that door tonight.

I sneaked out through the gap in the hedge where the service gate met the wall, my bag pressed flat against my stomach, so it wouldn't catch on anything, my breath so shallow I was sure someone would hear it before they saw me. Every window in the house behind me was dark. That didn't make me feel safer. It made me feel like the house itself was watching and simply choosing not to say anything yet.

I counted the seconds it took to cross the back lawn the way I'd counted them a hundred times in my head over the last two weeks, except now my legs wouldn't move the way I'd practiced. They shook. My heel caught in the grass once and I nearly went down, and the sound of my own stumble was so loud in the silence that I instantly paused completely, certain a light would snap on above me, certain I'd hear my father's voice calling my name like he already knew.

Nothing moved. I made myself breathe and kept going.

The gate groaned when I opened it, a low metal sound I'd forgotten to account for, and I slipped through the gap before it had even finished swinging, my heart slamming so hard against my ribs it hurt. Then I was outside the wall for the first time in eight months without a driver, without a guard, without anyone's permission...just me and a street I hadn't set foot on since before Elena died.

I didn't let myself look back at the house. I was afraid that if I did, some part of me would turn around and go back inside where it was safe, where the worst thing that could happen to me was simply being unhappy for the rest of my life instead of being hunted for it.

So I walked. Fast, at first, my arms wrapped around myself like that might make me smaller, less visible, less like a woman who had just run out on her own wedding. Then I heard an engine turn over somewhere behind the wall...one of the cars, waking up far too early for it to be a coincidence...and walking stopped being an option to me.

Instead of continuing walking I ran.

The city at that hour didn't feel like the city I knew during the day. Every streetlight looked like it was hiding something behind it, and every sound...a dumpster lid, a cat knocking something over in an alley, my own shoes on the pavement - made my whole body flinch like it might be the last sound I ever heard. I kept my head down and my bag closed and told myself that if I reached the train station before sunrise, I could disappear into a life my father's name had never touched.

I made it four blocks before I heard the car for real this time.

The car is not too fast. Or urgent. It is just present, rolling slowly behind me the way men who already know they'll catch you don't bother to hurry. I recognized the shape of it even in the dark. I'd know that car anywhere..... is that same I'd been driven to school in the back seat of it, taught to parallel park behind it in the estate's back lot the summer I turned sixteen...and none of that history was going to matter in about thirty seconds.

I bolted before I'd even finished deciding to. I don't remember choosing to run so much as realizing my legs had already started, cutting into an alley I'd never walked before, my bag banging hard against my hip with every step. Behind me, a door opened. Someone said my name... not shouted, just said, calm, patient, the way you'd call a dog that had slipped its leash and would come back on its own eventually.

I didn't come back. I turned another corner, then another, my lungs burning, my heels, I'd been stupid enough to leave in heels, some part of me still dressed for a wedding. I was actively fleeing from. My hands rubbing raw somewhere around block six. I lost track of which direction the house even was. The alleys opened onto a wider street lined with glass and steel instead of the brownstones near home, and for one dizzy second I thought I might actually make it, that the dark and the distance might be enough.

I didn't hear the second set of footsteps until it was already too late to do anything about them.

I came around the last corner too fast, still glancing back over my shoulder for headlights, and slammed straight into something that didn't move.

A wall, I thought, for half a second...before a hand closed around my arm to keep me from falling, and I understood, with my heart still going wild from the run, that it wasn't a wall at all.