Chapter 3 Giuliana #2
“I don’t know anything!” The frustration explodes out of me. “They could be torturing him right now. They could have killed him the second I left. And I’m just supposed to sit here and wait for some psychopath to call and tell me what to do?”
Katie squeezes my hand, saying nothing.
What is there to say?
We sit like that for a while, my breathing harsh and uneven, her thumb rubbing small circles on the back of my hand like she used to do when we were studying for finals and I was on the verge of a breakdown.
Finally, I force myself to keep talking.
To tell her the rest.
About the ultimatum.
About the marriage demand.
About the forty-eight hours I had.
When I finish, Katie sits in silence for several minutes, staring out at the lake.
She had removed her hand from mine and was loosely grasping the steering wheel.
“Marriage,” she says finally.
“Marriage,” I confirm.
“To someone you’ve never met.”
“To someone who could kill us both without blinking,” I correct her. My ribs throb in emphasis, a constant reminder of how powerless I am.
“Jesus tapdancing Christ, Gigi.” She turns to look at me again, and I can see her trying to process the impossible situation. “What are you going to do?”
The question I’ve been avoiding all morning sits between us. What am I going to do?
I close my eyes and immediately see my father’s face in the warehouse—his eyes finding mine as they dragged him away. The guilt and terror in that look.
I press my hand to my ribs, feeling the tender flesh beneath my shirt.
These bruises will heal in a week or two.
But what are they doing to Dad right now? Is he in more pain than I am? Worse pain?
The not-knowing is its own special torture, and I’m certain Luca planned it that way.
I let myself remember what happened three years ago, the night that led to this moment.
Three Years Ago
The spare key to Dad’s apartment feels cold in my hand as I climb the stairs to his third-floor walkup.
It’s past midnight, and the building is quiet except for the sound of someone’s television bleeding through thin walls.
I’ve been calling him for five days straight, getting nothing but voicemail, and the worried knot in my stomach has finally overridden my respect for his privacy.
I’ve been documenting his gambling behavior for weeks, writing down the times he disappeared, the phone calls that made him flinch, the way he’d started avoiding eye contact when we talked about money.
I was building a case for an intervention, gathering evidence that his addiction was spiraling out of control. But five days of silence feels different.
It feels ominous.
The apartment door is unlocked, which should have been my first clue that something is seriously wrong.
Dad is paranoid about security and has been ever since Mom died and he started attracting the attention of less savory creditors. He never leaves his door unlocked.
Inside, the apartment looks like a tornado tore through it.
The couch is overturned, cushions are scattered across the hardwood floor.
Family photos lay in broken frames, glass crunching under my feet.
Papers are everywhere—bills, bank statements, what looked like betting slips—scattered like confetti.
“Dad?” My voice comes out as a whisper, my heart in my throat as I cautiously move through the apartment. “Dad, are you here?”
I follow a trail of dark droplets across the floor, my heart hammering against my ribs as I realize they’re blood.
They lead from the front door to the bathroom, where I can hear water running and someone crying.
The bathroom door is ajar, and through the gap I see Dad hunched over the sink, still wearing a shirt that was soaked red from collar to hem.
His hands shake as he tries to wash blood from his face, but more keeps flowing from a cut on his forehead that needs stitches.
“Oh my god, Dad!” I push the door open and rush to him, taking in the full extent of the damage.
His left eye is swollen shut, his lip split, bruises blooming across his cheek in purple and yellow. “What happened? Who did this to you?”
He looks at me in the mirror, and the expression on his face is pure terror.
Not just fear.
This is a look of bone-deep knowledge that he’s in more trouble than he knows how to handle.
“Gigi.” His voice is thick through his injured lips. “You shouldn’t be here. They might come back.”
“Who might come back?” I’m shaking like a leaf. “Dad, talk to me. What’s going on?”
He breaks then, crumbling against the bathroom counter as years of accumulated guilt and fear finally overwhelm him.
The story comes out in broken sobs and fractured sentences, and with each detail, my world feels like it’s turning sideways.
The gambling debts are worse than I’d imagined.
Much, much worse.
He owes money to people who don’t accept payment plans or negotiate terms.
They’d approached him two weeks earlier with a proposition: fifty thousand dollars to clear his debts completely.
All they wanted in exchange was information about some businessman’s schedule.
Nothing that would hurt anyone, they’d promised. Just intelligence about routes and timing that they needed for their own purposes.
“They said he was a bad man,” Dad whispers, water from the faucet still running as he grips the sink.
“They said he dealt in illegal things, and they just needed to know when he’d be vulnerable so they could, I don’t know, arrest him or something.
They made it sound like I’d be helping catch a criminal. ”
“What kind of information did they want?” My voice sounds strange in my own ears, like it’s coming from very far away.
“His shipment schedules. When he transported certain goods, what routes he took, how many men would be with him.” Dad looks at me from the mirror. “They had photos, Gigi. Pictures of him with weapons, with drugs. They made it seem like he was some kind of kingpin and I’d be doing a public service.”
My stomach drops as pieces begin falling into place. “What was his name, Dad?”
Dad lets out a noisy sob. “Marchetti. Marco Marchetti.”
The name doesn’t mean anything to me, but the way Dad’s face crumples when he says it tells me everything I need to know about how the story ended.
“They killed him,” Dad continues, his voice barely audible above the running water. “Used my information to set up an ambush. B-but something went wrong. They said he wasn’t supposed to die—they were after someone else, someone bigger. But he fought back, and they had to…”
His voice cuts off, unable to finish the sentence.
But he doesn’t need to.
I understand, and it makes my stomach clench.
My father sold information that led to someone’s murder, and now the people who used him were angry that their plan went sideways.
“They came back tonight.” He touches the cut on his forehead with shaking fingers and winces at the sting.
“Said it was my fault their operation failed. Said I gave them bad intelligence, that I was responsible for what happened. They beat me and trashed the apartment as punishment, b-but they said next time they’d do worse. ”
I turn off the faucet and grab a clean towel, carefully cleaning the blood from his face while my mind races.
This isn’t just about gambling debts anymore.
This is about murder, conspiracy, organized crime—things so far outside my world I don’t even know where to begin processing them.
“We have to call the police,” I say, though even as I speak the words, I know it isn’t that simple.
“No!” Dad grabs my wrist with surprising strength, his non-bruised eye wild with fear. “Gigi, these aren’t the kind of people you call the police about. They have connections, influence. If I try to testify against them, we’ll both end up dead.”
“Then what do we do?” I ask, feeling like the walls are closing in on us.
“Nothing. We do nothing,” Dad says firmly. “We keep quiet and hope they forget about me.” He meets my eyes again, and I see the broken man he’s become. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone about this. Promise me you’ll let it die here.”
I should have argue with him.
I should have insist we go to the FBI or witness protection or something.
Instead, I find myself nodding, agreeing to carry this terrible secret because I’m twenty-nine years old and have no idea how to handle something this dangerous.
This is something out of a mafia movie—not real life.
I help him out of his bloody clothes and into the shower, then gather the stained garments and burn them in the building’s courtyard incinerator while he cleans his wounds.
By the time I leave his apartment the next morning, there is no physical evidence of what happened except the cuts and bruises that will heal in a few weeks.
But I kept my phone’s voice memo app running during the entire drive over, a habit I developed to record my thoughts about Dad’s behavior for the intervention I was planning.
It captured everything—his breakdown, his confession, and the phone call he had afterward that frightened my father so badly he soiled his pants.
I bury the recording so deep in my cloud storage that maybe I’ll forget about it.
Present Day
“Gigi?” Katie’s voice pulls me back to the present. I open my eyes to see her waving her hand in front of my face. “You okay? You looked like you were a million miles away.”
“Just thinking.” I look at the woman who’s been my closest friend since we bonded over terrible cafeteria food and organic chemistry exams. “Katie, if I agree to this marriage thing, I need you to promise me you’ll stay away.
Don’t try to contact me, don’t try to help me, just… live your life and forget about me.”
She stares at me as if I’ve suddenly grown two heads. “That’s not happening,” she says firmly.
“Katie—”