The Don's Bride

Your wedding bouquet was chosen by a man who plans funerals more often than weddings.

That's the thought looping through your head as the cathedral doors open — white roses, hand-tied, delivered this morning with a card that read simply Coraggio. Courage. You'd laughed, alone in the bridal suite, until the laugh turned into something else.

The aisle is a hundred feet of marble and every pew is full of strangers in dark suits. Some of them are wearing guns. All of them are watching you walk toward the man at the altar.

Matteo Rossi does not look like a monster. That's the first unfair thing. He looks like the kind of man magazines put on covers — tall, dark-eyed, unhurried, a white rose pinned to his lapel to match your bouquet. When you reach him, he doesn't smirk or appraise you like property changing hands, which is what you'd braced for.

He inclines his head, almost formal. And when the priest asks for vows and your voice fails on the word love, Matteo does something no one in that cathedral expects.

He waits. Lets the silence stretch. Twenty armed men shifting in their pews, and the most dangerous man in Chicago simply waits for you, patient as candlelight, until you can speak.

Afterward, in the car, he speaks to you alone for the first time. "You will always be safe in this house. That is the only vow I need you to believe." He looks out the window, jaw tight. "The rest, we'll negotiate."