Marriage Before Love Ten Years of Secret Admiration

I spent my life working the syndicate sweatshops just to keep my family afloat.

But my mother and brother still treated me like a disposable asset.

To pay off my brother's gang debt, my mother tried to force me into an arranged marriage with a violent, widowed Capo.

"If you don't do this, your brother is a dead man. You owe us this."

When I refused, she slapped me across the face and leased my bedroom to a syndicate associate, leaving me completely homeless in the pouring rain.

With nowhere to go, my thoughts drifted to Dante, the ruthless future Don who saved me from a fire ten years ago.

I had loved him in secret for a decade, but I chose a vow of silence because my childhood best friend, Elena, claimed him as hers.

I had watched her cling to his side through a decade of bloodshed, stepping into the shadows so they could rule.

I thought I was nothing but a worthless pawn, abandoned by my blood and invisible to the only man I ever loved.

So I packed my battered duffel bag, accepted a dangerous transfer to a hostile casino territory, and vowed to never return to New York.

I chose to build my own empire and live for myself.

But what I didn't know was that the moment I disappeared, the cold-blooded Underboss went completely feral.

He kicked down my old apartment door, left my toxic family cowering in the hallway, and mobilized an entire death squad just to bring me back.

Chapter 1

Serena POV:

I was seated at a small table in the syndicate café, the bitter scent of espresso heavy in the air. Across from me, a matchmaker was negotiating the terms of my sale to a Capo of some repute when the VIP doors were thrown open with a percussive crack.

The man whose memory I had spent ten years attempting to bury stepped across the threshold. The café's VIP room was his unofficial office—neutral ground where business and blood could mix without staining either.

He laid a roll of blueprints on the table with a quiet finality and spoke to the room at large. "You have three seconds to vacate my private room."

I drew a sharp breath of the stale, coffee-scented air, and a swallow caught halfway down my throat, lodging there like a knot of coarse sand.

I stared at the man standing in the doorway.

Dante.

He was dressed in a suit of black wool so finely tailored it seemed to absorb the light around it.

A thin, silvered scar rested near his left eye, a line of pale silk stitched into the hard geography of his face.

He was the Underboss of the New York Syndicate.

He was the future Don.

He was also the boy who had pulled me from a warehouse fire a decade ago—an act of salvation I had since learned to treat as a debt.

The matchmaker rose with a clumsy scrape of her chair, the blood draining from her features until her skin was the color of old parchment.

She inclined her head, the words of apology for trespassing in his private room a choked murmur of his formal title.

Her fingers dug into my arm, her whisper a venomous hiss against my ear. "Stand. Show the man respect."

My muscles refused the command, locking me to the chair.

I had consented to this meeting only to appease my mother, to forestall the inevitable blow that followed my defiance.