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

We returned to Blackwood Hall at three in the morning in a convoy of armored Suburbans that Vance had summoned from the White Plains garage.

Vance had been taken straight to the clinic in the village to set his radius; his arm was cast in fiberglass, but he refused to take the morphine until he had personally checked the guard rotations at the gate.

Cassian refused the clinic entirely.

He sat on the edge of the mahogany table in the center of the kitchen, his velvet coat shredded and tossed into the hearth, his white shirt sliced open from collar to ribs to reveal a four-inch gash along his left latissimus. The bullet had grazed him—a clean, shallow furrow that had bled through his clothes but missed the muscle wall.

I stood between his knees with a bottle of antiseptic and a curved suture needle.

My hands were steady now.

When you spend eight years caring for an invalid whose skin tears like wet tissue paper, you learn how to handle thread and flesh without flinching.

“This will sting,” I said.

“Do it,” Cassian replied, his eyes fixed on my face.

I poured the iodine over the wound. He didn't even grunt. His jaw clenched once, the muscles in his neck tightening into cords of wire, his hands resting on the edges of the table beside my hips.

I pushed the needle through the skin, pulling the black silk tight, tying the first knot with a clean flick of my wrists.

“You’re good at this,” he noted.

“My mother’s shins used to split when the edema got bad,” I said, focusing entirely on the needle. “The district nurse showed me how to close them so we wouldn't have to pay fifty dollars for an emergency room visit.”

“Arthur Aldridge has three yachts,” Cassian said quietly. “One is named *The Margaret*. One is named *The Evelyn*. The third is called *The Dividend*. He spent eighty thousand dollars last year on cigars from Havana.”

“I know,” I said, tying the third knot. “I used to empty the humidor ash into the compost.”

“He won't have the yachts by Monday,” Cassian said. “The bank in Zurich is foreclosing on the paper Vance filed yesterday. His accounts are frozen. The Aldridge name is dead.”

I snipped the thread with a pair of surgical scissors and laid a clean gauze pad over the stitches, securing it with medical tape.

“And Evelyn?” I asked.

Cassian looked at me through the shadows of the kitchen.

The grandfather clock in the hall struck four.

“Evelyn chose the Wards,” he said. “When the Council strips Hector of his seats tomorrow, Julian will run for the border. He won't take her with him. Julian doesn't carry baggage when the ship is sinking.”

“She doesn't know how to survive out there,” I said, looking down at my hands. “She doesn't know how to do anything. She has never scrubbed a floor. She has never balanced an electric bill.”

Cassian reached out and caught my hand, pulling me half a step closer until my stomach brushed his knee.

“Are you feeling sorry for her?”

“No,” I said, looking up into his amber eyes. “I’m remembering what it felt like to be her servant. She used to drop her silk blouses on the floor when she walked into her dressing room, without even looking behind her, because she knew someone else would pick them up.”

I paused.

“I don't feel sorry for her. But I know what it looks like when a world ends. It’s loud, and then it’s very, very quiet.”

Cassian pulled me down slightly until I was sitting on the edge of the table beside him.

He didn't speak for a long time.

His large, scarred hand held mine, his thumb tracing the calluses across my palm—the calluses that had given me away in the chapel four days ago.

“You asked me why the other six left,” he said softly.

I looked at him. The kitchen was warm, smelling of eucalyptus, tea, and the faint, coppery scent of his blood on the gauze.

“Julianna—the sixth,” Cassian said, his voice flat and reflective. “Her father was on the board of the Longshoremen’s trust. He sold the security codes for our compound to an Albanian crew. They breached the north gate at three in the morning while Julianna was in the bath.”

His grip on my fingers tightened.

“I killed four men in that hallway outside your bedroom, Lydia. One of them died against the door of the guest suite. Julianna came out and saw the blood on the floor. She saw me standing there with an axe in my hand.”

He looked away, out toward the dark window where the sleet had turned into heavy, wet flakes of snow.

“She looked at me and she didn't see a husband. She didn't even see a man. She saw a butcher. She ran into the snow because she thought the men outside were less dangerous than the man inside.”

“And the others?” I asked.

“The first was paid two million by Hector Ward to put arsenic in my morning water,” Cassian said. “Vance caught her maid with the vial. The second was too fragile—she couldn't handle the guards, the perimeter sweeps, the fact that we can never sit near a window in a restaurant. She took thirty sleeping pills; we pumped her stomach in time to put her on a flight to Zurich.”

He turned his head back to me.

“Every woman who has ever lived in this house was either trying to kill me, or was slowly being killed by the life I lead.”

“And you think I’m different?”

“You shot a man on a mountain road to keep him from putting a bullet in my head,” Cassian said, his voice dropping into that deep, vibrating register that made my chest ache. “And then you came home and stitched my skin back together without asking how much the silk thread cost.”

He reached up, his fingers brushing the nape of my neck, tilting my face toward his.

“You’re not wife number seven, Lydia. You’re the only wife who ever saw the monster and decided to hand him the ammunition.”

A knock sounded on the pantry door.

Vance stepped in, his right arm bound in white plaster, his left hand holding a manila folder with the red seal of the New York State Department of Corrections.

“Boss,” Vance said, his face grayer than usual.

Cassian didn't release my hand. “What is it?”

“We pulled the phone records from Thomas’s quarters—the groundskeeper,” Vance said, stepping toward the table. “He wasn't talking to Hector Ward.”

Cassian’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Who was he talking to?”

Vance looked at me, then back at Cassian.

“Arthur Aldridge didn't act alone when he set up the wedding swap,” Vance said. “The Aldridge estate has an offshore holding company registered in Grand Cayman called *The Blackwood Trust*.”

Cassian went completely still.

The air in the room dropped ten degrees.

“My father created that trust in nineteen-ninety-one,” Cassian said, his voice dropping to a whisper that sounded like dry leaves scraping over concrete.

“Yes,” Vance said. “And Arthur Aldridge was named the secondary executor thirty years ago. Arthur didn't want the wedding to clear his debts, Cassian. He wanted the wedding to trigger the survivorship clause. If you died within forty-eight hours of marrying an Aldridge, the entire Vale estate—the docks, the shipping, Blackwood Hall itself—reverts to the Blackwood Trust. To Arthur.”

I looked from Vance to Cassian.

The pieces fell together with sickening, mathematical precision.

“The wedding wasn't an escape,” I whispered, the realization hitting me like a fist to the solar plexus. “It was an execution. Arthur was never going to bring Evelyn back. He let her run so he could put *me* in that dress. If I married you under the Aldridge name, and Thomas poisoned your whiskey that night…”

“I would be dead,” Cassian finished the thought, his eyes black with a rage so profound it had passed beyond shouting into something cold, vast, and subterranean. “And Lydia Carter—a penniless girl with no family, no lawyers, and an invalid mother—would have been found dead of a broken heart in the master bedroom six hours later.”

“Arthur would have taken everything,” Vance said. “The whole empire. Clean. Sealed by probate.”

Cassian stood up.

He didn't look injured anymore. The four-inch gash on his side might as well have been a scratch on an iron hull.

He walked to the window, looking out into the swirling white snow that was beginning to cover the rose terrace.

“Where is Arthur now?” Cassian asked.

“He left the Plaza at midnight,” Vance said. “He’s at the north manor. He has six private security contractors with him. Hector Ward cut off his calls an hour ago. Arthur knows the trap failed. He’s packing the safe.”

Cassian turned around.

The scar across his eyebrow was pale white against his flushed skin.

“Vance.”

“Sir.”

“Wake the house,” Cassian commanded. “Get forty men in the yard. Bring the heavy transport from the docks.”

He looked at me.

“And Lydia?”

I stood up from the table, my fingers resting on the surgical scissors.

“Yes, Cassian?”