Page 26 of Mafia Bride
“I am not going to fuck you.” His voice slaps against me.
Good. I won’t be forced to bite his dick off.
Except, then why do I feel so strangely disappointed?
“Don’t misunderstand. You will have duties to fulfill and you will be punished for not fulfilling them.”
Wait. What? The implication wakes me from a haze.
“Duties?” The word squashes any feeling other than repulsion. “I’ll be punished? This isn’t just archaic, it’s inhumane.”
He stares down at me. Perhaps a threat. Perhaps a challenge. Who the fuck knows what’s flying around that head of his, because I haven’t understood a single thing he’s done from the moment he walked into Zio’s house.
Zio’s house.
If my parents hadn’t been shot in the street, this wouldn’t be happening. My father would never, ever allow something like this. He was a powerful man and he loved me. He made me safe.
“Why?” I feel like a petulant child playing dress-up, wearing a wedding gown, throwing a tantrum. The heels were a little too big. Whoever prepared for me got that wrong. It only added to the vision, which infuriated me. “Why are you doing this? Why are you treating me this way? I’ve done nothing.”
“If you want to know what’s expected of you, you’ll be downstairs for dinner at six. There are clothes in the closet for you.”
Terrible clothes. Horrible clothes. Expensive clothes a monkey wouldn’t wear.
“Brush your hair. Wash your face. Just don’t look like—” He gestures at me. “This.”
Like this? Like a child in a fucking wedding dress? “Like I’ve been kidnapped?”
“You were not kidnapped. You were sold.”
Because that’s a one million times better way to view it. No big deal, Violetta, just a little forced marriage to close out your adolesence.
King Moody walks to the wall of windows where—the night before—I’d left handprints on the pane as I tried to block him out. He touches one of the prints, aligns my tiny fingers with his massive ones.
It stirs something else in me, the way he’s almost touching me by touching where I watched him. It’s intimate in a weird way, and I’m again split between pleasure and fury.
I hate him, I decide. I hate him a lot.
“You cannot sell a person. That’s. Not. A. Thing.”
“Traded, then.” He’s still studying my handprints. “Call it whatever you like. You’re no less mine.”
“For what, then? What was I traded for?”
His quiet pause is screaming loud. I can hear the lies stacking up slowly, as he sorts through which bullshit to tell me. What garbage he’s going to feed me as an excuse for stealing me and my livelihood after threatening to kill the only family I have left. Even if they couldn’t protect me the way my father could have, they were all I had.
“Love makes a man weak,” he says. “And a weak man cannot keep what he owns.”
“Being cryptic doesn’t make you mysterious. It makes you a coward.”
The last word comes out of my mouth before I can think better of it. I should be more afraid. He might be waiting until he’s pissed off enough to rip my wedding dress away.
But he puts his hands in his pockets and looks down at the pool.
“I am a coward.”
“Then set me free.”
He turns to me, and though his power is still in every fiber of his being, it’s now laced with sorrow and maybe...just maybe a little compassion.
