Deeply Engaged
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Deeply Engaged's Books and Stories
The Don's Wife Is His Executioner
Mafia My husband swallowed a ten-year prison sentence to save me from my abusive stepfather. When he got out, he built a mafia empire and made me his Queen.
But last night, his encrypted tablet lit up with an ultrasound photo and a text from another woman.
"Our little secret is growing."
The mistress soon called to mock me. She was pregnant, while I had been barren for four years. When I confronted my husband, he didn't apologize. Instead, he assigned heavily armed guards to protect her and burned my divorce papers with his cigar.
"The only exit from this Family is death," he warned.
The nightmare deepened when I uncovered her true identity. The mistress was my half-sister, and her mastermind was the mother who had abandoned me at six. My husband knew. He even whispered our sacred vow to her-"I will shield you from the blood"-the exact words he used when I lost our child on a freezing concrete floor for his syndicate.
I took bullets for him. I waited a decade outside those prison gates. Yet he used my absolute loyalty to lock me in a cage, handing my crown to the family that threw me to the wolves.
He thought I was just a helpless wife, entirely dependent on his mercy.
He didn't know I was Vanguard, the shadow billionaire controlling the very lifelines of his empire.
I calmly picked up my phone and called my head operative.
"Liquidate his supply chains. Let's see whose empire turns to ash first." Finding My Genius Twins And Vengeful Wife
Romance Five years ago, she gave birth in a pool of blood. Her sister smothered her firstborn to death. The doctors declared her dead.
Five years later, she returned to New York's high society as "Spectre", a top-tier designer, and "Nyx", a dark web hacker. By her side stood her gifted young son.
Those who harmed her-she ruined their reputations. Those who stole her child, she bankrupted them. Those who murdered her mother, she drove them to madness and prison.
She thought her revenge was complete, that she had no more weaknesses.
Then a man of unrivaled power showed up at her door. He was her enemy's fiancé-, and the biggest variable in her carefully laid plans.
She turned him down cold. "I'm not interested in my enemy's man."
But the man produced a little boy from behind him. A child with aloof, brooding features, silent and sullen. Yet identical to her own son.
"Would you mind a reunion," he asked, "with your other son, who's been missing for five years?" Too Late For Regret: My Ex-Wife's Empire
Modern A sharp pain pulled me from the darkness. I opened my eyes to see my husband, Graves, smiling as he introduced his new "intern," Alex.
Her cheap handbag couldn't hide the dark hickey on her neck. Looking at them, the cold, sharp memory of my death flooded my mind.
In my previous life, my protégé sold me out, and Graves watched coldly as our company crumbled, leading to my fatal heart attack. Back then, when he brought Alex home, I screamed and threw things, starting my long nightmare of humiliation. I endured her lavish birthday party in my own home, watching him gift her the exact sports car he said was "too extravagant" for me. I even miscarried our child due to the stress of his constant affairs. He held my hand in the hospital, swearing he would change. But he lied, eventually orchestrating a hostile takeover that literally killed me.
I had built his entire empire from the ground up, acting as the brilliant strategist behind the curtain. I couldn't understand how the man I loved could be such a ruthless monster, discarding me for a cheap mistress and stripping away everything I owned.
The date on the nightstand confirmed it: I had traveled back in time to the exact day it all started.
A strange calm washed over me.
"Of course, the poor thing," I said evenly. "We should take care of her."
Then, I pulled out the divorce papers. This time, I won't just walk away. I will become the ghost that tears his kingdom down. He Broke My Spirit, I Soared
Mafia I was the fiancée of the Chicago Outfit’s heir, a bond sealed by blood and eighteen years of history.
But when his mistress pushed me into the freezing pool at our engagement gala, Jax didn’t swim toward me.
He swam past me.
He scooped up the girl who pushed me, cradling her like fragile glass, while I struggled against the weight of my gown in the murky water.
When I finally dragged myself out, shivering and humiliated before the entire underworld, Jax didn’t offer a hand. He offered a scowl.
"You’re making a scene, Eliana. Go home."
Later, when that same mistress shoved me down the stairs, shattering my knee and my dance career, Jax stepped over my broken body to comfort her.
I overheard him telling his friends, "I’m just breaking her spirit. She needs to learn she’s property, not a partner. Once she’s desperate enough, she’ll be the perfect obedient wife."
He thought I was a dog that would always return to its master. He thought he could starve me of affection until I begged for scraps.
He was wrong.
While he was busy playing protector to his mistress, I wasn't crying in my room.
I was packing his ring into a cardboard box.
I cancelled my transfer to UCLA and enrolled at NYU instead.
By the time Jax realized his "property" was missing, I was already in New York, standing next to a man who looked at me like a queen, not a possession. The Ruthless Heir's Five Million Bride
Romance I dragged a bleeding man out of a flooded alley to get the five million dollars he promised me.
He woke up with severe amnesia, so I hid him in my cramped apartment, desperate to secure the cash for my seven-year-old son's life-saving asthma medication.
But while washing his ruined, custom-tailored suit, I found a heavy gold signet ring hidden inside the seam. It was deeply engraved with a vicious falcon gripping a broadsword.
My blood instantly ran cold.
Ten years ago, the ruthless Wall Street billionaire who dismantled my father's company and drove my parents to suicide wore that exact ring.
I had just saved the monster who destroyed my family, and now he was sleeping in my bed, right down the hall from my little boy.
I stood in the kitchen, gripping a heavy butcher knife until my knuckles turned white. He was completely helpless in the next room, burning with a severe infection.
I could drive the blade into his chest right now and finally end this ten-year nightmare.
But then I looked at the astronomical pharmacy bills and the eviction notices pinned to the fridge. Vengeance wouldn't buy my son's next breath.
"I am not interested in you, I am only interested in your money."
I put the knife down, grabbed the medical supplies, and walked into the bedroom to nurse my sworn enemy back to health.
Revenge could wait, but until I got my five million, the devil was mine to keep. Scars of Betrayal: The Heiress They Tried To Erase
Modern Kelsie's biggest regret in life was getting involved with Judge, the icy Captain. She pursued him for three years, married him for two, thinking she'd warmed a stone, only to be met with nothing. Her mother-in-law disliked her, her husband was indifferent, and a fragile "white moonlight" would occasionally try to get her attention. Until she witnessed Judge and Angelique meeting secretly at a hotel, her heart shattered, and then she discovered she was pregnant. Kelsie sneered, threw down the divorce papers, and decisively ran away, disappearing without a trace. When they met again, she was a successful single mother, surrounded by suitors. In the pouring rain, the once aloof man humbly stopped her car, pleading in a hoarse voice, "Kelsie, come home with me." The car window rolled down, and a little boy, nine-tenths like him, coldly warned in a cute but fierce tone, "Want to date my mommy? Ask me first!" The Wife Who Never Loved
Modern For two years, my husband Hunter flaunted his affair, using his mistress's fake pregnancy to torture me. I endured it all for our daughter, trapped in a gilded cage where he expected me to mistake his strangling for passion.
Then his mistress whispered cruel lies to my six-year-old, telling her that her daddy would abandon her for the new baby. My daughter vanished.
While I searched frantically, Hunter was unreachable, still with her. When he finally appeared, he shielded his mistress from my desperate rage, his wedding ring glinting as he pushed me away.
With our daughter still missing, he pleaded with me.
"Krystal, she's pregnant, don't hurt her!"
The years of suppressed anger finally exploded. After our daughter was found safe, I looked him dead in the eye and told him the truth he'd been desperate to avoid.
"I want a divorce, Hunter. I never loved you. I hate you." His Erased Song, Her Reborn Voice
Romance The roar of the crowd was a physical force, pressing in on me from all sides, a wave of sound that vibrated up into my bones.
I moved my mouth, swayed my body, mimicked the gestures – but it wasn' t my voice pouring from the speakers. It was Scarlett' s, a perfect, studio-polished product of technology and longing. My fiancé, the celebrated producer Liam Stone, had turned me into his ex-pop star.
This wasn' t a dazzling comeback, though. Not for me. It was a lie on a colossal scale, a holographic projection of Scarlett overlaid on my body, my voice digitally reshaped into hers. For six months, he' d been systematically erasing me, Ava Green, the indie musician known for raw lyrics and a voice that sometimes broke with emotion.
"Keep going," his voice crackled through my in-ear monitor, icy and sharp. "Don't break character. The modulation is perfect."
My own pain and defiance surged, a desperate desire to reclaim my sound. When I pushed past the modulation, letting a raw note escape, the hologram flickered violently, and Scarlett' s synthesized voice cracked into static. The crowd gasped.
Liam' s face twisted into a snarl. "What the hell do you think you're doing, Ava? Stick to the plan."
His anger, cold and calculated, filled me with a sudden, overwhelming nausea – a feeling I' d been ignoring for weeks. The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow: I was pregnant.
Trapped, silenced, and carrying the child of the man actively erasing my identity, I knew one thing: I would not be erased. Beyond Betrayal: A Heart's Escape
Romance Three years. Three years of nights blurring into mornings, building a company from nothing with my wife, Chloe. Tomorrow, all that sacrifice would finally pay off with our IPO, making us billionaires and allowing us to finally reveal our secret marriage.
But tonight, my world stopped. I found Chloe in my office, her personal assistant, Liam, his hands on her waist, his mouth on hers. Their whispered words, "So much better than my husband," poisoned the air.
As she pushed him away, she defended me with a furious hiss, calling him a mere "toy" and me her "foundation." Yet, moments later, she pulled him back, her seductive smile returning. The betrayal was clear, but her fierce, confusing defense left me reeling, adrift between anger and a painful, desperate confusion.
My hands shook as I stumbled back to my desk, the words "husband" and "foundation" twisting into a cruel, empty echo. How could she betray me so utterly, yet defend me with such ferocity? What was this hollow space inside my chest?
There was only one way out. My thumb hovered over a number I hadn' t called in years. "Dr. Peterson," I whispered into the phone, "that mission in the Zercian conflict zone… is there still a spot?" The Price of Her Indifference
Modern "Mommy."
That single word, uttered by my five-year-old daughter, Lily, should have been a moment of pure joy. Instead, it detonated the fragile peace I' d clung to for five years, ever since Lily' s mother, Sophia, abandoned us to chase after her ex.
Sophia froze, her plastered-on smile for her new boyfriend, Mark, faltering. I watched in horror as Mark, red-faced and enraged by Lily's innocent affection, lashed out, knocking over a glass and then contorting in feigned agony over a minor scrape on his knee.
Sophia, utterly consumed by placating him, rushed to his side, showering him with a tenderness she had never once shown our child. Then, with chilling indifference, she turned to her security guards and commanded them to lock a sobbing, asthmatic Lily in an upstairs closet. Three days, she declared, Lily needed to "learn a lesson."
My pleas about Lily' s severe asthma were met with her cynical scoff: "You always make things up to get attention." The metallic click of the lock echoed a horrifying finality. I banged on the door, screaming Lily' s name, but to no avail. The guards, under Sophia' s orders, ensured no one went near.
Sometime after midnight, the crying stopped.
I found my little girl crumpled on the floor, blue, lifeless, and not breathing. While I was attempting to revive our daughter in one hospital room, Sophia was miles away in a luxury car showroom, buying Mark two brand-new cars – a "compensation prize" for his scraped knee, celebrating their twisted reunion at Lily' s expense.
How could a mother be so utterly devoid of humanity? How could the woman I once loved, the woman I foolishly hoped would one day return to us, betray our child so completely? I had to know. I had to understand what monstrous depths she was capable of, and how I could possibly escape her toxic grasp. The Reluctant Gift
Fantasy My entire life was a countdown to my sister Clara' s 30th birthday, the day I was to become a spiritual donor to save her from a wasting illness.
I clung to Liam, the man I loved, as my only hope of escape, only to have that hope shatter when he coldly told me I had to go through with the ritual, dismissing my desperate plea that I was too weak.
He forced Momma' s drugged tea on me, rendering me immobile, then dragged me to the prayer cabin where my parents awaited, my body offered up as Clara-who gave a triumphant smirk-stole my life force, leaving me for dead, unceremoniously dumped in a shallow ditch.
How could the man I' d secretly saved ten years ago, giving him half my life in a forbidden ritual to heal him after his logging accident, betray me so completely, not even remembering my sacrifice while unknowingly feeding on my dwindling vitality?
Yet, after Liam and Clara died in a mysterious crash and I was arrested for their murders, a blood-stained letter from Liam revealed the horrifying truth: he had finally remembered my sacrifice and the family's monstrous conspiracy, driving to atone by attempting a reverse ritual with Clara, freeing me to live the life he ultimately gave back to me. The Bride Who Vanished
Romance My entire world revolved around Liam Vanderbilt, the dazzling heir to a New York dynasty, and the boy I'd loved since childhood.
Despite being his family's housekeeper's daughter, I clung to the hope that our deep connection meant something more than just service.
Then fate delivered a cruel blow: a devastating brain tumor diagnosis, leaving me with less than a year to live.
As my life spiraled, the man I adored saw me only as an inconvenience, a "charity case" to be tolerated while he doted on his socialite fiancée, Chloe.
He shrugged off my pain, letting Chloe steal the very screenplay I'd poured my soul into, turning it into her superficial "passion project."
In front of New York's elite, he cruelly bestowed my deceased mother's precious heirloom locket upon Chloe, a final, public humiliation.
His subsequent "romantic" proposal aboard a yacht, complete with a beautiful antique ring, seemed like a dream.
But it swiftly descended into a nightmare when he presented organ donation papers, coldly suggesting I "be a hero" and give my lungs to Chloe.
The man I loved and dedicated my life to was attempting to harvest my body, not out of care, but monstrous calculation.
My heart shattered, reeling from the ultimate betrayal: how could anyone, let alone him, consider such a vile act?
Then, a blinding flash of truth: an urgent email confirmed a catastrophic medical mix-up.
There was no tumor; I was perfectly healthy.
The heartbroken, dying girl vanished, replaced by a woman consumed by a vengeful clarity.
They thought they had broken me, but they had just awakened the storm within. My Bartender, The Billionaire
Romance My wedding to Ethan Vanderbilt marked the grand merger of two powerful American families.
I hoped for love, but our new life began in a cold, silent townhouse.
On our wedding night, Ethan coldly declared our marriage a business arrangement, stating he had "no desire" for me and his heart belonged to his assistant, Tiffany.
The next morning, I overheard him call me a "prude" to her, shattering any last shred of my dignity.
Heartbroken and seeking comfort, a desperate one-night stand unexpectedly left me pregnant.
When I filed for divorce, he shamelessly attempted to coerce me into raising his mistress's child to secure my family's inheritance, then publicly shoved me to the ground in front of a taxi.
How could the man I once hoped to love stoop to such callous, manipulative cruelty, weaponizing his mistress and an unborn child against me?
My once-sheltered life became a public spectacle of betrayal, leaving me questioning everything.
Fleeing to Paris for a fresh start, the quiet bartender father of my child, Liam, shockingly revealed himself as Alexander Sterling, an elusive tech billionaire.
Now, with unexpected power by my side, I return to confront Ethan and Tiffany' s desperate scheme to ruin my legacy, ready to fight for my child and forge a destiny far beyond what any Vanderbilt could imagine, even as their own twisted drama reaches a deadly climax. The Day My Son Gave Me Poison
Billionaires For six years, I was Ethan, an auto mechanic who found amnesiac Victoria.
We built a life, had our son Liam, and a Texas home.
I believed we were a family, forever.
That illusion shattered in a Manhattan penthouse.
Ice-cold Victoria told me our life was over.
Her wealthy mother, Mrs. Sterling, offered ten million dollars and an NDA: sign it, and vanish from their high-society world.
Emotionless, Victoria announced her engagement to Blake Astor, a match "appropriate" for her old money.
My mind recoiled, not just from pain, but from a chilling sense of déjà vu.
This wasn't new.
I remembered the last time: Victoria’s first "amnesia," my desperate pleas, Blake framing me.
My own son, Liam, blank-faced, delivering the "medication" that ended that life in a sanatorium.
Both amnesias were lies – one to use me, the other to discard me.
The bitter taste of betrayal consumed me.
But this time, I wouldn't beg.
I took their blood money.
My hand steady, I signed the NDA.
"Three days," I told Mrs. Sterling, "arrange my flight to California."
They saw a gold digger.
I saw escape, and the fuel to rebuild my life.
Stanford's Computer Science program awaited. He Proposed Again, I Introduced My Husband.
Romance The flashbulbs were blinding, the “Rising Critic” statuette heavy and cold in my grasp.
Outside the hotel, amidst the swarm of photographers, a familiar figure pushed through and knelt before me.
Jake Brown, my ex-fiancé, held open a velvet box, a diamond winking under the harsh lights.
“Emily,” he rasped, a sound I once knew intimately, “Marry me. Again.”
His family materialized behind him, beaming, a well-rehearsed chorus expecting my tears and a trembling, “Yes, oh, yes!”
But they’d forgotten—or perhaps never knew—the full story of how he’d publicly accused me of sabotaging his signature dish.
How he’d whispered lies to the restaurant owner, implying I pilfered expensive ingredients.
How I was fired on the spot, my name dragged through the mud, my culinary dreams torched.
His mother, Carol, tried to paint him as a suffering hero, claiming he’d spent a fortune clearing my name from the food poisoning incident.
Yet, I remembered the real origins: the cheap, peanut-contaminated oil, the plagiarism he later framed me for.
I remembered being left with a shattered wrist in a dark alley, as he walked away, abandoning me to a mob that *he* had stirred against me.
His grand gesture now felt like the ultimate insult, dripping with manufactured sympathy—and unbearable blame.
Three years had been long enough to heal, to rebuild, to find a love that didn’t demand sacrifice, yet they had the audacity to stage this performance.
How could they stand here, rewriting history, when *he* had ripped everything from me?
My voice was even, devoid of the storm that once raged, as I held up my left hand.
A simple, elegant gold band gleamed beside my engagement ring—Noah’s ring.
“Jake and I ended things three years ago,” I stated, my eyes steady.
“And for your information, I’m already married.”
The collective gasp and intensifying flashbulbs signaled that *my* story, the real one, was just beginning. You might like
The Unwanted Bride Becomes The City's Queen
Breeze I was the spare daughter of the Vitiello crime family, born solely to provide organs for my golden sister, Isabella.
Four years ago, under the codename "Seven," I nursed Dante Moretti, the Don of Chicago, back to health in a safe house. I was the one who held him in the dark.
But Isabella stole my name, my credit, and the man I loved.
Now, Dante looked at me with nothing but cold disgust, believing her lies.
When a neon sign crashed down on the street, Dante used his body to shield Isabella, leaving me to be crushed under twisted steel.
While Isabella sat in a VIP suite crying over a scratch, I lay broken, listening to my parents discuss if my kidneys were still viable for harvest.
The final straw came at their engagement gala. When Dante saw me wearing the lava stone bracelet I had worn in the safe house, he accused me of stealing it from Isabella.
He ordered my father to punish me.
I took fifty lashes to my back while Dante covered Isabella's eyes, protecting her from the ugly truth.
That night, the love in my heart finally died.
On the morning of their wedding, I handed Dante a gift box containing a cassette tape—the only proof that I was Seven.
Then, I signed the papers disowning my family, threw my phone out the car window, and boarded a one-way flight to Sydney.
By the time Dante listens to that tape and realizes he married a monster, I will be thousands of miles away, never to return. From Jilted Bride To Mafia Empress
Xiao Wang For seven years, I was the architect of my fiancé's criminal empire and the strategist behind his every move. I was Dante Gallo’s unofficial Consigliere, his partner in everything but name. Tomorrow, I was finally supposed to marry him and take my place as the queen to his throne.
But on the eve of our wedding, a single text message sent by mistake detonated my life. It was a photo from Dante, showing a platinum wedding band on his hand. The message read: “Married this morning. She’s safe now.”
My gaze fell to the engagement ring on my own finger. It was the identical band, just smaller. The engraved initials ‘D.I.’ didn’t stand for Dante and I. They stood for Dante and Isabella—his childhood sweetheart. My entire relationship was a lie; I was just a shield to protect his one true love.
He dismissed my discovery as a "tantrum." Then, his new bride began taunting me, sending a picture of them tangled in bedsheets with the caption: "Loser." They expected me to break. They thought I would shatter.
They were about to find out just how wrong they were. I forwarded the picture to Isabella’s fiancé, a man far more dangerous than Dante. "Your fiancée is in Suite 8808 at the Grand Hyatt," I told him. "I'll meet you downstairs. We're going to crash their party." The Underboss's Obsession: Stealing The Bride
Diversion Three days before the wedding.
I was hiding in the dressing room, watching my fiancé caress the swollen belly of another woman.
Luca, the man who had saved my life five years ago, was smiling at his mistress, Sofia. But the real knife to the heart wasn't the affair—it was the dress.
The custom wedding gown he had "lovingly" ordered for me featured intricate silver embroidery along the hem.
It didn't spell Elena.
It read Sofia.
He was planning to make me walk down the aisle wearing his mistress's name.
Later that night, I found a video of him mocking me to his crew, calling me a "dead fish" and admitting he only wanted my family's Capo status. He planned to keep his "true love" on the side while I played the role of the oblivious, ornamental wife.
He thought I was just a sheltered princess. He forgot that my bloodline was built on vengeance.
I didn't cry. I didn't confront him. Instead, I scrubbed his scent off my skin and dialed a number everyone in Chicago feared.
"The pact with the Cavallaro family," I asked my father, my voice cold as stone. "Is it still valid?"
"Dante is the Underboss now," my father warned. "He is a butcher. He breaks men for sport."
"Good," I replied. "I am done playing with boys."
I secretly booked the Gold Ballroom across the hall from my original venue. Luca thought he was walking into a marriage on Saturday.
He didn't know I was bringing a monster to the altar instead. My Mafia Husband's Betrayal, My Fury
Kinship My husband, Don Lorenzo Bianchi, the man who once took ninety-nine lashes for me, had just locked me in a guest room. I was four months pregnant with our child, the heir to his mafia empire.
My crime was throwing a glass of wine on his mistress, a woman he had moved into our home.
She cornered me in the garden, gloating that once the baby was born, he would give it to her to raise as her own. Later, she shoved me down the grand staircase, then threw herself down after me, screaming to my husband that I had tried to kill her.
As I lay in a pool of my own blood, Lorenzo rushed past me, scooping her into his arms and carrying her away without a single backward glance.
To force me to apologize, he had my parents brought to my hospital room and brutally whipped until they collapsed at his feet.
He was no longer the man who had 999 crystals sewn into my wedding dress. He was a monster who believed every lie she told and punished me for her crimes. How could the man who swore to love me forever become this cruel stranger?
But he didn't know the truth. Days before the fall, I had secretly terminated the pregnancy. I took the urn containing our child's ashes, filed for divorce, and disappeared from his world forever. Contract With The Devil: Love In Shackles
Dorine Koestler I watched my husband sign the papers that would end our marriage while he was busy texting the woman he actually loved.
He didn't even glance at the header. He just scribbled the sharp, jagged signature that had signed death warrants for half of New York, tossed the file onto the passenger seat, and tapped his screen again.
"Done," he said, his voice devoid of emotion.
That was Dante Moretti. The Underboss. A man who could smell a lie from a mile away but couldn't see that his wife had just handed him an annulment decree disguised beneath a stack of mundane logistics reports.
For three years, I scrubbed his blood out of his shirts. I saved his family's alliance when his ex, Sofia, ran off with a civilian.
In return, he treated me like furniture.
He left me in the rain to save Sofia from a broken nail. He left me alone on my birthday to drink champagne on a yacht with her. He even handed me a glass of whiskey—her favorite drink—forgetting that I despised the taste.
I was merely a placeholder. A ghost in my own home.
So, I stopped waiting. I burned our wedding portrait in the fireplace, left my platinum ring in the ashes, and boarded a one-way flight to San Francisco.
I thought I was finally free. I thought I had escaped the cage.
But I underestimated Dante.
When he finally opened that file weeks later and realized he had signed away his wife without looking, the Reaper didn't accept defeat.
He burned down the world to find me, obsessed with reclaiming the woman he had already thrown away. Too Late, Mr. Mafia: The Surgeon He Discarded
Winnie Suchoff I was the wife of Dante Cavalli, the most ruthless mafia Don in the country.
But today, his Underboss slid mandatory annulment papers across my hospital bed, ordering me to dissolve our marriage.
In my past life, I dropped to my knees and begged them not to abandon me.
I spent the next thirty years locked in Dante's massive penthouse, waiting for a man who bathed the streets in blood but never gave me a single drop of warmth.
My aristocratic mother-in-law stripped me of every cent, leaving me completely isolated.
I foolishly threw away a brilliant surgical career to be a submissive, obedient mafia wife.
In the end, Dante never came to see me, and I died entirely alone in that massive, empty bed.
Until my last breath, my chest was suffocated by a lifetime of regrets.
I couldn't understand why I had sacrificed my freedom and my scalpels for a man who would only feel a twisted guilt decades after I was already a cold corpse.
Opening my eyes again, Fate had dragged me back to the exact day my nightmare truly began.
Matteo stood at the foot of my bed, clearly expecting my usual pathetic tears.
"Take your time to think about it."
This time, I didn't cry or beg for my life.
I just picked up the fountain pen, signed my name, and walked out to reclaim the scalpel I had abandoned. Abandoned Heiress, Now His Mafia Bride
Priority I was tracing the gold paint on my own tombstone when a hand tapped me on the shoulder.
It was Clayton.
The same man who, five years ago, had left me bleeding out in a ditch because he didn't want to be late for my sister's engagement party.
"Die quietly, Ivy," he had said over the phone before hanging up.
Now, standing over my grave, he dropped his cheap plastic flowers in shock.
"Ivy? You're... we buried you."
They hadn't buried me.
They had buried an empty box to save face, mourning a "troubled" daughter they had actually discarded like broken trash the moment I became a liability.
Clayton's shock quickly turned to that familiar, arrogant anger.
He accused me of faking my death for attention.
He told me I was sick for putting the family through such pain.
He even reached out to grab my arm, intending to drag me back to my father to apologize.
"You're coming with me," he spat. "You owe us an explanation."
But he made a fatal mistake.
He thought he was talking to Ivy Dillard, the soft girl who cried when she skinned her knees.
He didn't notice the town car waiting at the curb, or the man stepping out of it.
Before Clayton's fingers could graze my coat, a hand made of steel caught his wrist.
Collin Richardson, the most feared Capo in Chicago, stepped between us.
"Touch my wife again," Collin whispered, his voice promising violence. "And you lose the hand."
I smiled at the terror draining the color from Clayton's face.
I didn't come back from the dead to explain myself.
I came back to bury them. Rejected by the Son, I Chose the Don
Rabbit On my wedding day, my father sold me to the Chicago Outfit to pay his debts. I was supposed to marry Alex Moreno, the heir to the city's most powerful crime family. But he couldn't even be bothered to show up.
As I stood alone at the altar, humiliated, my best friend delivered the final blow. Alex hadn't just stood me up; he had run off to California with his mistress.
The whispers in the cathedral turned me into a joke. I was damaged goods, the rejected bride. His family knew the whole time and let me take the public fall, offering me his cousins as pathetic replacements-a brute who hated me or a coward who couldn't protect me.
The humiliation burned away my fear, leaving only cold rage. My life was already over, so I decided to set the whole game on fire myself. The marriage pact only said a Carlson had to marry a Moreno; it never said which one.
With nothing left to lose, I looked past the pathetic boys they offered.
I chose the one man they never expected.
I chose his father, the Don himself.
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