Page 8 of My Wedding Mafia Style

“Too late,” I tell Lucy.

“For what?”

“For a graceful escape.”

Bianca is already coming toward us, the emerald silk of her dress moving around her legs like water. My sister has never approached anything casually in her life. She arrives. She descends. She makes entrances in rooms she has already been sitting in for an hour.

Her gaze moves over Lucy from head to toe, then to our joined hands, then back to Lucy’s face.

“You must be Luca’s new girlfriend,” Bianca says.

Lucy straightens beside me. “Hi.”

“Hi?” Bianca repeats, delighted. “She says hi. Luca, she says hi.”

“She also has a name.”

“Of course she does. I’m getting there.” Bianca extends both hands toward Lucy as if she is about to welcome a queen or seize evidence. “I’m Bianca.”

Lucy lets go of me to take Bianca’s hands, which I dislike immediately.

Interesting.

“Lucy,” she says.

“Lucy,” Bianca repeats, testing it. “Pretty. Sweet. Entirely too innocent for whatever this is.”

Lucy blinks. “I’m not sure what this is.”

I give my sister a flat look. She smiles at me with deep affection and no fear whatsoever.

Behind her, Isabella pops up from her chair. I see Adriana reach for her arm and miss by an inch. A tragedy.

“Is she the lap girl?” Isabella calls.

Lucy goes very still. I close my eyes for one short second.

Bianca turns her head. “Isabella.”

“What? We were all thinking it.”

“No,” Adriana says, rising now with the controlled patience of a woman who has spent her entire life trying to prevent Isabella from speaking in public. “We were not all thinking it.”

“Yes, we were,” my father says from the table.

My mother elbows him. Lucy makes a choking sound beside me.

I look down at her. “Breathe.”

“I am breathing.”

“You’re making a noise.”

“That is my soul trying to leave my body.”

Bianca laughs. And that is when I know Lucy has made the first dangerous mistake. She amused my sister.

Bianca hooks her arm through Lucy’s before I can stop her. “Come. You have to meet everyone properly.”