She Was Forced to Marry the Mafia Boss’s Seventh Wife—Then He Asked Who Threatened Her

Six months later, the roses on the terrace were red.

Not the pale, sickly pink that Margaret Aldridge had forced into the soil with chemical fertilizers, but a deep, velvety crimson that smelled of sweet earth and summer rain.

The chapel overlooking the Hudson River was different this time.

The stained-glass windows were open to the June breeze, letting in the scent of clover and the soft, rhythmic hum of honeybees from the garden below.

There were no armed men standing along the limestone walls.

There were no black SUVs idling with their engines running outside the doors.

In the front row, sitting in a wheelchair draped with a cream cashmere shawl, sat my mother.

Helen Carter’s cheeks were pink. Her eyes were bright behind her silver-rimmed spectacles, her hands resting in her lap without the tremor that had haunted them for a decade. Beside her stood Mrs. Gable, holding a small linen handkerchief, her white hair pinned back with a tortoiseshell comb that Cassian had bought for her in Paris.

Music drifted through the vault of the chapel—not a funeral march, but a soft, joyous melody played on a cello by a student from Juilliard.

I walked down the aisle alone.

I didn't need anyone to give me away. I had given myself to this life with my eyes wide open, my boots planted firmly on the stone.

The dress was white.

Not Evelyn’s discarded satin with the pinned sleeves and the tight shoes.

It was made of layered silk chiffon that floated around my ankles like seafoam, cut by an old Italian woman in Brooklyn who had spent four weeks measuring every inch of my body until the fabric felt like a second skin.

Around my neck sat the Vale Serpent, its emerald eyes catching the noon sunlight and throwing emerald sparks across the white limestone.

Cassian stood at the altar.

His shoulder had healed, leaving only a silver seam against his skin that matched the scar across his eyebrow. He wore charcoal linen, cut broad across the chest, without a single weapon hidden under his lapels.

His amber eyes watched me come down the aisle.

They were not cold anymore.

They held the deep, fierce warmth of a man who had built a fortress not to keep the world out, but to keep the one thing that mattered safe inside.

I stopped in front of him.

He didn't wait for the priest to finish his introductory prayer.

He reached out with both hands—large, strong, and completely steady—and took mine. His thumbs brushed the calluses on my palms, the scars that had become our signature, the proof that we were both survivors of a world that tried to crush people who worked with their hands.

“You’re late,” he murmured, his voice a low rumble that only I could hear.

“The car had a flat tire,” I whispered back, my eyes sparkling. “Vance changed it in ninety seconds.”

“I’ll give him a bonus,” Cassian said.

The priest cleared his throat, smiling gently at the two of us.

“Do you, Cassian Vale, take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?”

Cassian didn't look at the priest. His gaze remained locked on mine, burning with a promise that had been signed in blood on a mountain road and sealed in the dirt of a flooded cellar.

“I took her six months ago,” Cassian said, his voice ringing clear through the open windows of the chapel, carrying out over the blue expanse of the river. “And I will keep her until the river runs dry.”

The priest turned to me.

“And do you, Lydia Carter, take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?”

I looked past his shoulder, through the lancet window, to where Blackwood Hall stood on its granite promontory, no longer a tomb, no longer a fortress under siege, but a home that belonged to us both.

“I do,” I said.

Cassian slid the ring onto my finger.

It was not a diamond. It was an antique band of raw Welsh gold, thick and unadorned, the same gold his great-grandmother had brought across the sea from Cardiff a hundred years ago.

He pulled me toward him.

His hands were in my hair, his mouth finding mine with a tenderness that made the entire world outside the chapel dissolve into light.

My mother wept softly in the front row. Mrs. Gable dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her apron.

When he finally let me go, Cassian turned me toward the open doors.

The sun was high.

The Hudson River rolled below us, vast, deep, and unyielding, carrying the ships out toward the sea.

Cassian offered me his arm, his fingers covering mine as they rested on his sleeve.

“Mrs. Vale,” he said, the title tasting sweet on his lips.

“Mr. Vale,” I replied, stepping out into the sunlight beside him.

Behind us, the sixth ghost had finally vanished into the summer air.