Captive Vows

The first time I saw my husband, he was wiping someone else’s blood off his knuckles with a handkerchief that probably cost more than my mother’s wedding dress.

It was a Tuesday. I remember because Tuesdays were when my father let me walk to the market alone, a small mercy he granted me between the hours of ten and noon. The street vendors knew me by name. Old Mrs. Calderon would save me the sweetest oranges, the ones with the thin skins that peeled in one long ribbon. I was holding three of them in a paper bag when the black sedan pulled up to the curb.

The man who stepped out was not handsome. Handsome is for boys who smile at you from church pews, for the sons of bakers who blush when you catch them staring. This man was carved from something harder. His jaw could have been chiseled from stone, his eyes the color of a winter sea that had never known sunlight. He was tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in a charcoal suit that fit him like a second skin.

He didn’t look at me. He looked through me, like I was a window and he was checking the weather on the other side.

“Elena Vasquez,” he said. Not a question.

I nodded. My throat had gone dry. The paper bag crinkled in my grip.

“Get in the car.”

I should have run. I should have screamed. But the way he said it, so calm, so certain, made my feet glue themselves to the cobblestones. This was not a request. This was gravity. You don’t argue with gravity.

I got in.

The back seat smelled of leather and something metallic, copper and salt. I knew that smell from the time I’d helped my mother butcher a chicken. Blood. Fresh blood. I held my oranges in my lap and tried not to think about what had happened to the man whose blood was still wet on my husband’s hands.

He sat beside me. The door closed with a sound like a vault sealing shut.

“I’m Dante,” he said, as if introducing himself at a dinner party. “Dante Moretti. You’re going to be my wife.”

No proposal. No flowers. No kneeling. Just a fact, delivered flat and final as a death sentence.

I didn’t cry. I don’t know why. Maybe because some part of me had always known this was coming. My father owed money. Everyone knew it. The Vasquez family had been bleeding dry for years, selling off land, selling off pride, selling off daughters when nothing else was left.

“My father,” I started.

“Your father is fine,” Dante said. “He’ll stay fine as long as you do what you’re told.”

He didn’t touch me. Didn’t threaten me. He didn’t have to. The weight of his presence was threat enough, a pressure in the air like the moment before a storm breaks.

The car pulled away from the curb. I watched Mrs. Calderon’s fruit stand shrink in the rear window, the oranges and lemons becoming bright smears of color, then nothing. I thought about the three oranges in my lap. I thought about how I’d never eat one of them.

The house was a fortress.

Set back from the road behind iron gates that took thirty seconds to open, it sprawled across a hill like a sleeping beast. White stone, dark windows, a courtyard with a fountain that didn’t work. The water had been drained, leaving a basin of dry leaves and dead wasps.

Dante’s men were everywhere. They didn’t wear uniforms. They didn’t have to. You could spot them by the way they stood, the way they watched, the way their jackets hung just wrong over the guns I knew were there. They called him Don Moretti. They called me nothing.

The wedding was three days later.

I wore white because that’s what brides wear, even brides who are being sold. My mother helped me into the dress, her hands trembling as she buttoned the back. She didn’t say much. What was there to say? We both knew the math. My father’s debt, my hand in marriage, the ledger balanced in blood and silk.

“Be good to him,” she whispered. “He could be worse.”

I wanted to ask how. I wanted to ask what worse looked like. Did worse hit you? Did worse lock you in a room and throw away the key? Did worse make you disappear the way my cousin Lucia had disappeared, the one who’d refused to marry the man her father chose?

But I didn’t ask. I just nodded and let her adjust the veil.

The ceremony was held in Dante’s house, in a room that had been converted into a chapel. A priest I’d never seen before recited the words. Dante stood beside me, his hand warm and dry over mine, his face unreadable. I said my vows. He said his. We kissed, a dry press of lips that meant nothing and everything.

Then it was done.

That night, I sat on the edge of the bed in my wedding dress and waited. The room was enormous. A canopy bed, dark wood furniture, a painting of a woman I didn’t recognize staring down at me from the wall. The sheets were white. The curtains were white. Everything was white, like a hospital, like a morgue.

Dante came in around midnight. He’d taken off his jacket, loosened his tie. He looked tired. He looked human.

He sat in a chair across from the bed and watched me.

“You’re scared,” he said.

I didn’t answer. What was the point? He could see it. I was shaking so hard the bed frame rattled.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Not tonight. Not ever, unless you give me a reason.”

I almost laughed. Unless I gave him a reason. As if I had any power here. As if I could do anything that wouldn’t be a reason.

“Why me?” I asked. The first words I’d spoken to him since the car.

He was quiet for a long time. The clock on the nightstand ticked. Somewhere in the house, a phone rang and was answered.

“Because your father owed me,” he said. “And I needed a wife.”

Not because I was pretty. Not because he loved me. Because I was currency, because I was a transaction, because the Moretti family needed a bride and the Vasquez family had a daughter they could no longer afford to keep.

I should have hated him. Maybe I did. But hate is a luxury for people who have options, and I had none.

He stood. Walked to the door. Paused with his hand on the handle.

“You’ll sleep here,” he said. “I’ll take the room next door. In the morning, Maria will bring you breakfast. She’ll show you the house, explain how things work.”

“And if I try to leave?”

He turned. His eyes were dark, flat, empty as the drained fountain in the courtyard.

“Don’t.”

He left. The door clicked shut. The lock turned.

I sat in my wedding dress until the sun came up, staring at the painting of the woman on the wall. She looked sad. She looked like she knew exactly what I was feeling.

I wondered if she had been a bride too. I wondered if she had sat in this same room, in this same dress, waiting for a man who would never love her.

I wondered if she had ever gotten out.

The oranges were still in my bag on the nightstand. They were starting to bruise.