Chapter 20 - The Wedding and the Second Shadow
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Three months later, October returned to Massachusetts in a blaze of crimson maple leaves and crisp golden sunlight—almost a year to the week since the rainy November night when Tessa’s world had first fallen apart.
Today, there were no shadows on the lawn of the Chestnut Hill estate.
Beneath a towering archway of white peonies and autumn roses overlooking the sparkling blue water of the private lake, two hundred guests sat in white velvet chairs while a harpist played softly on the terrace.
At the front of the aisle stood Dante Castellano.
Dressed in a bespoke three-piece black tuxedo with a white peony pinned to his lapel, he looked every inch the undisputed king of the East Coast—yet as he watched Tessa walk down the white silk runner toward him on the arm of Dr. Aris, while Clara Jean from the Virginia bakery beamed from the front row holding a plump, giggling five-month-old Leo in a tiny miniature tuxedo, Dante’s dark eyes held only unconditional devotion.
Tessa wore an off-the-shoulder ivory lace gown that trailed across the grass like fallen snow. When she reached the altar and Dante took her hands in his, his warm thumb brushed over the pulse at her wrist—steady, calm, and home at last.
"I told you in that hospital room," Dante whispered for her ears alone as the priest raised his hand to bless the rings, sliding a flawless four-carat diamond band onto her finger, "that the only way you ever leave my side again is if I'm in a coffin. Even then, Tessa, I'll come back from hell to find you."
"You won't have to," Tessa smiled through happy tears, rising up to kiss her husband as the entire estate erupted into applause. "Because I’m never letting you go."
An hour later, while the wedding reception filled the sunlit ballroom downstairs with laughter, clinking champagne flutes, and dancing—and while Nico and Clara Jean argued good-naturedly over whose turn it was to bounce baby Leo on their knee—Tessa slipped quietly upstairs to the master study to touch up her lipstick and retrieve the vintage family Bible to sign their marriage license.
The afternoon sun slanted through the leaded-glass windows of the study, illuminating the private wall safe behind Dante’s mahogany desk.
Dante had left the safe door standing open an inch after retrieving his grandfather’s wedding rings that morning. Inside, resting beside the velvet ring box, was a newly delivered iron lockbox stamped with the seal of the Suffolk County Probate Court.
A yellow sticky note in Nico’s handwriting was attached to the lid: Boss—The bank finally unsealed the last private safety deposit box belonging to your late Uncle Corrado from 2014. Putting it in your safe until after the honeymoon.
Curious, and looking for the leather family register book underneath, Tessa lifted the unlatched lid of Corrado’s old box to move it aside.
Her hand froze mid-air.
Sitting right on top of the yellowed documents inside the dead traitor’s lockbox was not a shipping ledger or a bank bond.
It was a faded Massachusetts State Police accident report dated October 14, 2014—twelve years ago—alongside a familiar driver’s license with a cracked plastic corner.
Tessa’s heart stopped beating. Slowly, with trembling ivory-gloved fingers, she picked up the driver’s license.
Staring back at her from the laminated card was the smiling face of her own father, Arthur Collins, who had died alongside her mother when the brakes on their station wagon failed on the icy curve of the Mystic River Bridge when Tessa was sixteen years old.
Beneath the license was an original, wax-sealed contract on heavy cream parchment dated three days before her parents’ fatal crash.
Hands shaking violently, Tessa unfolded the parchment and read the single typed paragraph at the center of the page:
In exchange for clearing the three-million-dollar gambling debt of Arthur Collins at the Charlestown Docks, Arthur Collins hereby signs over full guardianship and future marriage rights of his daughter, Tessa Marie Collins, upon her twenty-fourth birthday, to the Castellano Family. If Arthur Collins attempts to flee the state of Massachusetts with the girl prior to fulfillment, the debt shall be collected in blood.
And at the bottom of the page, beside a dark crimson thumbprint of blood, were two signatures.
The first belonged to her father.
And the second—signed eight months before the day Dante had "accidentally" bumped into her at her elementary school charity auction and helped her stack chairs—was written in the bold, unmistakable fountain-pen script of Dante Castellano.
May you like
Behind her, the heavy mahogany door of the study clicked softly shut, and Dante’s shadow fell across the sunny carpet right over her wedding train.
"I told Nico to lock that safe before the ceremony, tesoro," Dante’s deep, velvety voice murmured from right behind her bare shoulder. "You were never supposed to find out that meeting you at that school wasn't an accident."
