CHAPTER ONE – THE PRICE OF PEACE
471 Words
The dining room as always smelled of hostility and greed. As Always her father only smiled at her brother Luca.
Elena Bellini, Don Giovanni Bellini’s first daughter sat quietly at the edge of the mahogany dining table, her hands folded neatly in her lap as she had been taught from a young age. Her father’s voice echoed around her breaking the silence in the room.
“Elena, prepare your self, you'll be getting married.”
Not a request. Not even a command. A conclusion.
She blinked, she could hear her heart thudding painfully in her chest. “ to who?”
“Leonardo Gold.”
The name rang in her ears like a warning bell. The Don of the Gold family. Ruthless. Feared. Untouched by sentiment.
The silence that followed her father's announcement was thick and cold. She looked at her mother Isabella, but the woman only stirred her tea. At Luca, her older brother, whose smirk said everything—You’re useful now. At her sister Violet and all she could see was pity.
“Why me?” Her voice barely rose above a whisper.
Her father didn’t look at her. “Because Violet is too young. And you’re… quiet.”
So that was it. Her silence, her meekness had made her exposable, expendable even—finally useful for something.
A marriage. A deal. A truce.
“You’ll leave for Verona in three days,” her father continued, flipping through papers like he hadn’t just traded away her life. “The wedding will be private. By the end of the week, you'll no longer bear Bellini as a surname but Gold.
Her hands trembled in her lap because of fear. Three days.
Three days to prepare to become the wife of a man she didn’t know.
A man whom she’d only heard rumors about—dangerous, powerful, cold.
“But father, I—I don’t know how to be a wife.”
“You’ll learn,” her mother said flatly. “Keep your head down. Don’t embarrass me. I know I've taight you well and you'll make an excellent wife”
That was the first thing her mother had said since they sat down at the table.
Tears threatened to fall from the corners of her eyes, but she couldn't let them fall. She knew better than to cry.
Crying wouldn’t change anything.
Crying never had.
She rose slowly, her legs stiff. “May I be excused?”
Her father didn’t answer. He was already onto the next topic—shipping routes and profits and who owed him favors.
She walked silently out of the room like a ghost. Unnoticed. Unmissed.
But as she climbed the stairs to her room, there was only one thought across her heart like a moving train.
What if, just what if he was worse than them?
- Writer
