The mafia queen

When I was eight, Dante Moretti pulled me from the fire that killed my family. For ten years, the powerful crime boss was my protector and my god.

Then, he announced his engagement to another woman to unite two criminal empires.

He brought her home and named her the future mistress of the Moretti family.

In front of everyone, his fiancée forced a cheap metal collar around my neck, calling me their pet.

Dante knew I was allergic. He just watched, his eyes cold, and ordered me to take it.

That night, I listened through the walls as he took her to his bed.

I finally understood the promise he’d made me as a child was a lie. I wasn't his family. I was his property.

After a decade of devotion, my love for him finally turned to ash.

So on his birthday, the day he celebrated his new future, I walked out of his gilded cage for good.

A private jet was waiting to take me to my real father—his greatest enemy.

Chapter 1

Seraphina POV:

I learned my life was over the day Dante Moretti announced his engagement to another woman.

It wasn't a whisper in the grand, empty halls of the Moretti estate. It wasn't a quiet confession in the dead of night. It was a headline, stark and black on the screen of my phone, a news alert that buzzed on the marble countertop like a dying insect.

*Dante Moretti, Don of New York's Most Powerful Family, to Wed Isabella Vescovi, Uniting Two Criminal Empires.*

The words blurred. My world narrowed to the phone in my hand, the cold weight of it a sudden, shocking anchor in a sea of disbelief. This had to be a mistake. A power play. A lie designed to smoke out an enemy. It couldn't be real.

Because Dante was mine.

He had been mine since I was eight years old. I remember the fire, the acrid smell of smoke and fear that filled my lungs. The Rossi family, my family, was being torn apart, and I was just a piece of collateral damage left behind. Then he appeared through the flames, a boy of sixteen with eyes as dark and unforgiving as the world he commanded. He threw his own body over mine, shielding me from the heat and the blood that splattered the walls.

He had whispered against my hair, his voice rough but steady. "You're safe. You're a Moretti now."

For ten years, that promise had been my religion. In this gilded cage of marble floors and silent, watchful bodyguards, Dante was my god. He was the one who bought me a nightlight when I was ten because the nightmares wouldn't stop, a small ceramic cat that cast a soft, unwavering glow. "It will keep the monsters away," he'd said, his large hand gentle as he plugged it in.

He was the monster, of course. I knew that. The world knew that. But he was my monster, and he kept all the others at bay.

Then, on my seventeenth birthday, I did the stupidest thing a girl in my position could do. I wrote him a letter. A confession, poured out in clumsy, heartfelt sentences, stained with a drop of my own blood for dramatic, teenage effect. I told him I loved him.

I found the letter ripped into a thousand tiny pieces in the trash can outside his study. He cornered me in the library that night, his body caging me against a shelf of leather-bound books. His eyes were blazing with a fury I had never seen directed at me.