Chapter 1 - The Encounter at Bellarosa
“Will you marry me, Miss Aurora?” A six-year-old boy asked me to marry him while I was hiding in a Brooklyn restaurant from men who had come to collect me like property. I laughed, hooked my pinky around his, and said yes, never imagining that seconds later his father would walk through the door and reveal I had just promised myself to the son of the most feared mafia boss on the East Coast.
My back was pressed against a freezing metal shelf inside Bellarosa, a tiny Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. I gripped a dented frying pan with both hands while my stepmother Regina’s voice cut through the door.
“You can hide all night, Aurora! Tony’s men are outside, and I’m not losing fifty thousand dollars because you suddenly found a backbone.”
Fifty thousand dollars.
Apparently, that was what my life was worth.
Regina had gambled away everything she owned, then decided her dead husband’s daughter was the last valuable thing she could trade to settle her debt. For months, I’d run from Brooklyn to Queens and then the Bronx, sleeping in cheap motels and taking jobs where nobody asked questions.
Somehow, she always found me.
A rustling sound suddenly came from behind several flour sacks. I raised the frying pan, expecting one of Tony’s men, but a little boy stepped out wearing an expensive wool coat over superhero pajamas.
“Please don’t hit me,” he whispered. “I’m not one of the bad guys.”
His name was Zach, and he was six. When I asked why he was hiding, he frowned seriously and explained that he’d run away from his father because he was supposed to see a doctor the next morning.
Despite everything, I almost laughed. “Then we’re both hiding. I’m hiding from bad people too.”
Regina suddenly pounded on the door.
“Aurora! Come out before I let Tony’s men drag you out by your hair!”
I flinched.
Zach noticed the bruises around my wrist, and something changed in his little face. He looked at the door, then back at me with a determination far too serious for a child.
“In fairy tales, when a princess gets chased by a witch, a knight saves her.”
A broken laugh escaped me. “I don’t see many knights around Brooklyn.”
“Me,” he announced, puffing out his chest.
Then Zach explained that his father had lots of money, lots of men, and that everybody was afraid of him. By his flawless six-year-old logic, if I married him, Regina wouldn’t be allowed to hurt me anymore.
“Will you marry me, Miss Aurora?”
Something inside me cracked.
I knelt and gently brushed his dark hair away from his forehead. “If I marry you, can you really protect me from the witch?”
“One hundred percent.”
He held out his smallest finger.
“Pinky promise.”
I hooked mine around his.
“Then yes. I’ll marry you.”
His entire face lit up.
The storage-room door exploded open.
I jumped in front of Zach and raised the frying pan, but the man standing there wasn’t Tony. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in a perfectly tailored black suit, with two intimidating men behind him.
Then I recognized him.
Michael Moretti.
The name criminals across New York whispered instead of spoke.
His cold gray eyes moved from the blood on my lip to the bruises around my wrist, then settled on the little boy hiding behind me.
“Zach,” he said quietly. “What did I tell you about running away?”
Before I could process what was happening, Zach grabbed my hand and stepped proudly beside me.
“Dad, this is Aurora.”
Michael’s eyes shifted to our joined hands.
Zach grinned.
“She just agreed to marry me.”
Michael Moretti looked at Zach, then at me, then once more at the pinkies still linked between us as if he were trying to understand a language no one had warned him he would need that evening.
For three long seconds, nobody spoke.
May you like
Then Zach broke the silence.
“She said yes.”
