Discarded By My Mafia Husband (Make Them Pay #2)

CHAPTER 1

LUCIA

By seven o’clock I have already saved this dinner three times, and nobody at the table knows it.

That’s the job. That’s been the job for nine years.

First, Salvatore Greco arrived in a mood because his driver took the long way through the city, and Sal treats traffic like a personal insult from God.

I put him between Father Bernard and old Mr. Castellano, because Sal can’t stay angry in front of a priest and he can’t stay awake next to Castellano, so he picks polite and the table stays peaceful.

Second, the fish course almost went to the wrong seat, the seat belonging to Councilman Wright, whose wife is allergic to shellfish and whose vote Matteo needs before Christmas. I caught Rosa’s eye, she caught the plate, and the disaster died quietly two feet from the councilman’s fork.

Third, Vincent DeLuca got drunk on the good whiskey before the appetizers and started telling a story about a man at the far end of the table, a story that ends with someone’s brother in the Hudson.

I walked Vincent out to the terrace myself, arm through his, smiling the whole way, and told him the fresh air would do him good and the story would do him harm.

He went. They always go. Men like Vincent think they’re agreeing with me when really they’re obeying, and I learned a long time ago to keep the difference invisible.

“Lucia, sit,” Matteo says from the head of the table. “You’re hovering.”

“Hovering is my cardio,” I say, and take my seat at his right hand, where I’ve sat at every dinner we’ve ever hosted, close enough to fix things and far enough that nobody has to notice the fixing.

The dining room looks beautiful. I should know, I spent three days making it look effortless, which is the hardest kind of beautiful there is.

Candles low enough to flatter everyone. Flowers with no scent at all, because scented flowers over food is the mark of a woman who’s never hosted a man with a sensitive stomach and a loaded gun.

Twenty-two guests. Politicians, captains, businessmen who pretend they’re not criminals and criminals who pretend they’re businessmen.

My people, in a way. I know whose marriages are failing, whose sons got into which colleges, who can’t sit next to whom and why.

I carry this family’s whole social map around in my head like other women carry lip gloss.

Across the table, Valentina Russo is watching me.

She’s been watching me all evening, in a polite, unhurried way, a woman checking the paint in a room she plans to buy.

She’s beautiful in the expensive, effortful sense, all smooth hair and red mouth, and she wears it like a credential.

Her father, Marco Russo, sits two seats down from Matteo and laughs a beat too late at everything Matteo says.

Russo money, Russo men, Russo patience. I know Marco’s patience.

It’s a cat at a mouse hole, and it has been at our table four times this month.

“Your wife runs a hell of an evening,” the councilman tells Matteo, raising his glass. “I’ve eaten at the White House. This is better.”

“The White House’s wine cellar is worse,” Matteo says, easy and warm, and the table laughs, and he reaches over and kisses my forehead without looking at me.

An absent kiss. A mantelpiece kiss, given on the way past it. I smile, because smiling is also the job.

Only one man at this table isn’t smiling.

Dante Colt sits near the far end, Matteo’s cousin, the family’s consigliere, the man they send for when a problem needs to stop being a problem.

He’s quiet through most dinners, and people mistake the quiet for distance.

I don’t. Dante misses nothing. Right now his eyes move from Matteo’s kiss to my face to Vincent’s empty chair, and I can see him doing the arithmetic of the evening, counting every disaster that didn’t happen. He’s the only one who ever counts.

He lifts his glass to me, barely an inch, so small nobody else would catch it.

I catch it. I always catch Dante. Nine years of dinners and he’s the one guest who thanks the staff by name.

By midnight the cars are gone, the candles are drowned, and Rosa is directing the cleanup with the exhausted authority of a general after a successful war. I’m pulling pins from my hair in the hallway when Matteo appears at the study door.

“Lucia. Stay a minute.”

There’s nothing in his voice. That’s what frightens me later, that there was nothing in his voice. No strain, no guilt, no rehearsed softening. He asks me to stay with the same flat courtesy he uses to order coffee.

I follow him into the study and let myself feel the small, stupid lift of hope.

We haven’t been alone, really alone, in weeks.

He’s been buried in the Russo situation, whatever the Russo situation is, coming to bed after I’m asleep and leaving before Nico wakes.

I tell myself he’s going to pour two fingers of whiskey and sit me on the couch and finally be my husband for an hour.

He pours one glass. His own.

“Sit down,” he says.

“I’ve been sitting all night. That’s the one thing I did manage to do.” I perch on the edge of the leather chair anyway, because something about the set of his shoulders has turned my stomach cold. “Matteo. What is it?”

He doesn’t sit. He stands behind his desk, which is where he stands when he’s announcing rather than talking. I’ve watched him announce a hundred things from behind that desk. Territory decisions. A captain’s demotion. Once, a man’s death, delivered in the same tone he uses for dinner reservations.

“The Russo alliance is settled,” he says. “Marco and I came to final terms this afternoon.”

“That’s good, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve been working toward.”

“It’s essential. The port contracts alone put us ahead for a decade, and his men close the gaps we’ve had since your father—” He stops. Revises. “Since last spring.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. “So why do you have the face of a man about to tell me someone died?”

“Because there’s a condition.” He sets the glass down without drinking. “Marco wants the alliance sealed in blood. The old way. A marriage between the families.”

I wait. Somewhere down the hall a door closes, Rosa sending the last of the catering staff home, and the sound is so ordinary, so exactly the same as every night of my life, that it takes me a moment to understand that nothing else about this night is ordinary at all.

“A marriage,” I repeat. “Marco’s not married. Is he marrying one of the—”

“Not Marco.” Matteo looks at me then, full on, and his face does something I’ve never seen it do. It goes smooth. Deliberately smooth, a man wiping a counter before company. “Valentina. I’m going to marry Valentina.”

The room doesn’t spin. I want it recorded that the room does not spin. It just gets very quiet and very precise, every object suddenly itself: the glass, the desk, my husband’s wedding band, which I notice he’s already taken off.

“You’re going to marry Valentina?” I say. My voice comes out flat and reasonable, which is either shock or nine years of training. “Matteo. You’re married. To me. There’s a wedding photo in the hall. I was there. I wore white.”

“The church blessed the union,” he says. “Our families witnessed it.”

“Yes. That’s generally how weddings work.”

“But the civil paperwork was never filed.”

He delivers it in the same tone he used for the delayed fish course, a logistical detail, a problem already handled by someone else. I stare at him and I wait for the part where this becomes a joke or a mistake or a language problem, and no such part arrives.

“What do you mean, never filed?”

“I mean there is no civil record of a marriage between us. There never has been.” He finally drinks, one swallow, and sets the glass down centered on its coaster, precise.

“It was a choice, Lucia. Your father needed the alliance, my father needed peace, and nobody needed the state of New York involved. It was cleaner.”

“Cleaner?” I say.

“Simpler.”

“I’ve signed nine years of—” I stop, because my mind is doing something horrible, it’s reaching back through nine years of documents and tax filings and hospital forms and finding, now that I look, a careful little gap where my married name should be.

His accountants handled everything. His lawyers.

His people. I never once handled the paperwork of my own marriage.

Why would I? I was busy handling everything else.

“Nine years. You’ve known for nine years? ”

“I’ve always known.”

“And I was never going to know.”

“There was no reason for you to know.” He says it gently. That’s the worst part, the gentleness. “It didn’t affect your life. It still doesn’t. Nothing about your life has to change.”

“You just told me you’re marrying another woman.”

“A legal formality that seals an alliance. You’ll stay here, obviously.

Nico stays in his home, in his school, with his routine.

You run this house better than anyone alive, and that continues.

Valentina understands the situation. She’s not looking to—” He pauses, choosing the lie, and I watch him choose it.

“She’s not looking to disrupt anything.”

“Valentina,” I say. “Valentina, who watched me across my own dinner table for four hours tonight, a buyer deciding which furniture to keep.”

“She was nervous. Tonight was difficult for everyone.”

I stand up. My legs do it without consulting me, and I’m glad, because if I stay seated I think I might fold into this chair and become part of the study, one more object in his collection of useful things.

“I need you to hear the actual words,” I say.

“Not the announcement version. You stood at an altar with me. You put a ring on my hand. I gave you a son in a hospital where I signed forms as your wife, and the whole time, the whole nine years, you knew the state of New York thinks I’m a single woman who keeps house for you? ”

“That’s a dramatic framing.”

“It’s the accurate framing.”

“It’s the same framing,” he says, and there’s the first flicker of impatience, the captain’s son surfacing, the man who has never once been told no by anyone he pays.

“Lucia. Listen to me. In every way that matters, you are my wife. You have my name in every room that matters. You have my son. You have this house, this life, my family’s respect.

A filing in a courthouse downtown doesn’t change any of that. ”

“Then why didn’t you file it?”

Silence. The first true silence of the conversation, and in it I hear everything he’ll never say out loud.

Because an unfiled marriage is a marriage with an exit.

Because a wife on paper is a wife with rights.

Because nine years ago, standing at that altar, Matteo Colt made sure the door behind him stayed unlocked, and he let me walk in and make a home and raise a child and pour out every year of my thirties, and he never once told me the door was there.

“What am I, then?” I ask. My voice is quiet now, and some part of me notes the quiet with the idiot pride of good posture at a hanging. “If I’m not your wife, what exactly am I?”

He comes around the desk at that, and takes my hands, and his hands are warm and sure and I hate that they’re familiar.

“You’re Nico’s mother,” he says. “You’re the heart of this house. You’ll always have a place here, Lucia. That will never change. I give you my word.”

His word. Nine years of his word, filed nowhere.

I look at our joined hands and I understand, with a clarity that arrives cold and total, straight down my back, that he means every word of it.

He truly believes he’s being generous. He’s standing in his study offering me a place in my own home, my own child, my own life, and he believes it’s a gift, because in his world everything I have is something he permits.

A place. He’ll always give me a place.

I spent nine years believing I built a marriage. Turns out I was renting a room in it, and the landlord just said the new tenant’s coming.

“You’re tired,” Matteo says, and kisses my forehead again, absent as ever. “We’ll talk more in the morning. You’ll see. It will all be fine.”

He leaves me standing in the study with the candles dead and the whiskey sweating on its coaster, and I stand there for a long time, doing the thing I’ve trained myself never to do.

I’m asking what happens to a woman whose whole life turns out to be a place she’s permitted to occupy.

And I’m starting, for the first time, to count the doors.