Chapter 7: Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King: Chapter 7

My lips feel bruised. I stare through my reflection in the window and try not to look in my own face. Ren is taking me to buy my “wedding gown.” We sit on opposite sides of the car, the partition between us and the driver making the back of the car feel like a cage.

I’m still trying to digest it. Still working out the puzzle—the why of it all.

“There are things you’ll be expected to do,” Ren says, as if we’re just carrying on a polite conversation, as if I can’t still taste his rage on my tongue. “and you will do them,” he continues, when I turn the slightest glare of defiance toward him, “because I am sheltering you from Dellucci, and because it’s in your daughter’s best interest.”

“Don’t you dare use her against me,” I whisper, “or they’ll be digging your body out of the trash next.”

Ren’s eyes flick, cold and flinty, like an animal’s.

“I said her best interest, Nadia. I won’t threaten her safety. This is about what you deserve, not her. I won’t make her answer for your sins.”

“You made my mother and my brother answer for what my father did to your family. You’re making me answer for it now. So why not? Why not lump her in with the rest of us?” I demand.

Ren doesn’t answer me. Typical. He probably doesn’t even have an excuse. He can’t face me when I make a decent point. His silence just makes me angrier. He doesn’t look at me again until the car comes to a stop in the Garment District.

“Behave while we’re in public,” he drawls, like I’m some child, before stepping out and slamming the car door. I am led into a dress shop, elegant white gowns on display in the windows. My nerves bunch up inside me, ready to lash out at the slightest provocation.

“You know, the groom isn’t supposed to see the dress before the wedding,” I say through gritted teeth.

“Good thing I’m not one for tradition.”

His hand on my lower back forces me deeper into the shop.

A lovely older woman—her outfit a bold spot of magenta fabric amid the soft creams and whites of the store—comes sweeping up, smiling a perfect, sales-pitch smile.

“Mr. Caruso. Lovely. Please, come in. Such a vision,” she says, as her eyes wander over me. I can’t find it in me to smile in return as I am pulled into the depths of wedding gowns and shawls and veils, the hallmarks of other people’s happiness.

It’s a mockery, taking the dream of every little girl and turning it into a weapon. A farce. I stand rigid, solider-like, as the woman prattles on about my body shape, my color tone, which shades of white will best complement my complexion. And then she stops in front of a few gorgeous, flowy dresses and says, “—but of course, it’s your day and your dress. The only thing that really matters is what does it look like in your head?”

I keep my eyes forward, but I feel Ren’s gaze burrowing into the back of my skull. God, he must be loving this.

I try not to picture it. Try to block it out. The images that I have perfected over the years. I wonder if all girls do that. If they can close their eyes and paint the perfect day in broad, abstract strokes and tiny, crucial little details like I can.

A few things had changed over the years as trends came and went: the kind of dress I thought I wanted and the color scheme, for example. One thing stayed constant, though. It was always him—always Ren—waiting at the altar. Sometimes I think it was him before I ever met him, that he fell out of those dreams and into the world. My eyes sting, but I force the tears back.

“…I…I don’t know. Let’s just try something on,” I say, desperate to get it over with.

I don’t want it to look the way it was supposed to. I don’t want it to be my perfect dress and my favorite shade of eggshell. And it’s not like either of us has many friends or family left to invite. Ren can force me to marry him, can stage a stupid, fake wedding just to hurt me, but he can’t make me give him my real dream.

The woman frowns at my demeanor, but like a true saleswoman who has navigated more awkward moods than ours, she smooths over my awkward stalling with a smile.

“Of course, dear. Nothing is better than seeing the dress in action. Will the groom be staying, or—”

“I will,” Ren says, his voice steel.

The woman checks my face, as if double-checking that I’m alright with this obvious breach in the wedding norms. But I keep my expression empty, a perfect mirror of Ren’s usually stoic demeanor.

“…Well,” she prattles, “I suppose that’s one way to make sure everyone is happy, isn’t it?” she asks, with a big fake smile for two people who are obviously very unhappy.

“We’ll look around,” Ren says. The seamstress agrees. She takes the first chance she gets to escape our thundercloud mood. We’re told, in too cheery a tone, to come and get her when we have an idea of what we’d like to try. I am steered by my elbow through rows of white, and ivory, and cream, and rose pink. I look at the hems, eyes down.

“Well, Nadia,” he mutters coldly, “which one?”

“You’re picking the punishment. You might as well pick the dress, too. Why would I care?”

“I remember what you used to wear—” he says, the mention of the past freezing me in place. His thumb brushes the edge of my hip. “Slits all the way up to here just to tempt me. And you’d yell at me when I’d try to get a handful.”

The memory burns in my chest. Ren’s mouth at the edge of my ear, his hand sliding through the curtain of my dress to curl around my thigh as we sat side by side at a family dinner. What he whispered, when I crossed my legs and glared at him: “If you didn’t want me to come in, you wouldn’t leave the door open.”

The shameful way I had unparted my legs, just a little.

I step away from his touch, pretending it has no effect on me. I feign interest in one of the dresses on display instead.

“Do you want me to wear something like that again?” I ask, pointedly, trying to get this over with as fast as possible.

“It’s not exactly wedding material.”

“Well, I’m not exactly wedding material,” I remind him. I wait for some kind of answer, some cruel agreement, for him to finally enlighten me to all the ways I did not measure up to be his wife the first time. But he simply looks at me. He prowls around me, his eyes sweeping the dresses on display.

“That’s the sort of thing you used to wear,” he finally says, nodding toward a mannequin wearing a long, sleek wedding dress. It’s pearl silk wool, with a plunging neckline and an implied slit under a sheer curtain of transparent lace. The mannequin doesn’t have the thighs to pull it off, but I do. I feel nothing as I look at it.

“Do you want to know what I pictured you in?” he asks.

It makes my stomach drop to the floor.

The thought that Ren had ever given any thought to what I would look like in a wedding dress—why? Why would he bother? I have no way to stop hearing it, short of plugging my ears like a child and trying to ‘ la-la-la’ my way out of it, so I stand there rooted as Ren draws my attention through the options and settles, finally, on a very bridal dress, all sheer lace floral accents on top and a wide, gorgeous skirt. It takes my breath away.

It’s like he robbed it straight out of my head.

“Something like this. It would have suited a princess, don’t you think?” he asks.

“I didn’t know you liked wedding dresses so much, Ren,” I snap at him. “Maybe you missed your calling. How about I wear the tux, and you can pick out whichever one you want—”

His finger comes up, very softly, and presses on my lips.

It’s so gentle, and yet with the expression in his eyes, he might as well have leveled a gun at me. I glare at him through the condescending little gesture as he leans in, pleased with himself.

“I think we have our answer.”

He motions for the woman to come over, and soon, I am corralled into a dressing room and face to face with a version of the dress in something close-enough to my fit. I glare into the mirror, then press my head against the cool glass.

Why is he doing this?

Just past the closed door, Ren and the seamstress are caught up in small talk. She asks him about our wedding. How we met. How long we’ve dated. Ren answers softly, probably feeding her sweet, innocent lies—some storybook version of everything that could have been. The way it was supposed to be. I can’t hear him over the surge of my emotions. I want to scream at them both.

Finally, I strip down, trembling as I force the wedding gown on.

Don’t look , I tell myself, keeping the full-length mirror at my back.

But as I stand there, I can’t help it; I have to see it. I have to know what it’s like. I turn around, my heart lurching as I see myself framed in the mirror. It’s a dream. A fairy-tale dress.

My dress.

My heart rips right out of my chest.

I bite hard on my reaction, refusing to give Ren any more satisfaction about how much this hurts. I should be grateful to be alive . Grateful that he’s giving me some chance, no matter how hellish it might seem now.

I think about how excited Harper would be to see me in this. That makes it easier to bear.

I leave the dressing room. The saleswoman sweeps in, cooing over how the dress suits me. She steers me in front of the large mirrors in the waiting room, zipping up the back of the dress with a sharp tug. It takes what little air I had left right out of my lungs. She explains all the fitting modifications she will make so that the dress will fit me perfectly, let out at the bust and taken in at the waist and on and on. I don’t hear her. My eyes are locked on Ren behind me, and his stormy expression. He steps up behind me.

I stare into the image reflected back at us—Ren in his dark suit contrasted against me in my white wedding dress. The whole world fades into the background, shrinks down to just the two of us.

Ren tells the lady to leave us alone to discuss it.

She must know who he is, or have some sense of his authority, because she obeys without question. Her smile is tight and offended as she is repeatedly shooed away from her job, as if she is just an annoying pest getting in his way, but she never argues. She takes her trained smile to some other part of the store to wait once again.

This time, I wish she wasn’t gone.

Ren slides his hand across my middle, pulls me back against him until I am pressed flush against his body. I sway on unsteady feet, suspended against his commanding touch. His body heat seeps into me, the rigid tension of his muscles outlined through the suit.

“Open your eyes, Nadia,” he commands firmly. “ Look .”

He makes me look, makes me stare into the image of us there reflected back. What could have been.

“This is the one,” he says, hand sliding down the sheer, almost transparent lace of the bodice. Heat follows his hand, stopping low in my belly, where it coils tighter. Wanting . It catches me off guard. My heart is broken, but my body is still trained to respond to him. Like it never forgot what it was like to be touched by him.

“…Why are you doing this?” I ask. “What do you get out of it?”

Ren’s grip tightens around my middle, his voice a growl against my ear as I watch myself be tugged closer, watch him lean in and whisper those words against my ear without ever having to break eye contact in the mirror,

“I get what I’ve always wanted— you .”