Because He Was Rejected by Every Woman, the Mafia Boss Expected His Bride to Leave—But She Refused

The dress was not English wool.

It was silk jersey, the color of crushed blackberries, cut with a fluid, liquid simplicity that clung to Sophia’s hips and fell to the floor in heavy, shimmering folds. Elena had spent two hours personally pinning the hem, her sharp face unusually quiet as she worked around Sophia’s knees with a mouthful of brass pins.

"They will expect you to look like an English schoolmistress," Elena had said, her voice muffled around the pins. "A victim. A little rabbit Arthur Bennett threw into the wolf’s pit to save his own skin."

"And what am I supposed to look like?" Sophia had asked, looking at herself in the three-way gilt mirror.

Elena had spat the pins into a porcelain dish and looked up, her dark eyes fierce. "A Moretti."

Now, standing in the marble anteroom of the Palazzo Visconti in central Milan, Sophia felt less like a Moretti and more like an ornament on a battleship.

The heat in Milan was different from the lake; it was greasy, smelling of wet asphalt, ancient limestone, and expensive tobacco. Outside, the Corso Venezia was blocked by three rows of armored black sedans, their engines idling in a low, collective growl that rattled the leaded glass of the palace windows.

Luca stood beside her.

He was in full formal dress: a black dinner suit cut from heavy English barathea, a white pique waistcoat, and a stiff wing collar that made the scar on his jaw look even more jagged and violent by contrast. Across his chest, pinned to the lapel, was a small iron cross—the historical insignia of the northern guild that his great-grandfather had transformed into a syndicate.

He looked terrifying.

He didn't look like a businessman who happened to be large; he looked like a sovereign prince who had arrived to inspect a conquered province.

"Remember," he muttered, not looking down at her, his amber eyes fixed on the double oak doors at the end of the gallery. "You do not speak unless Don Bellandi addresses you directly. You do not drink the wine. And if I tell you to drop to the floor, you do not ask questions. You drop."

"I am familiar with gravity, Luca," she whispered back, adjusting the small diamond ear-clips Elena had forced into her lobes. "We have an intimate relationship."

"Sophia."