Apartment 46

I married Luca Falcone, the most dangerous Mafia Don in New York, believing our arranged union had blossomed into true love.

But exactly five minutes after our vows, he smashed my father's face into the glass wedding table in front of three hundred guests.

"Giovanni Rossi is accused of embezzling forty-six million dollars from this Family!"

With those words, he sentenced my father to a brutal blood tribunal.

I was dragged into a freezing underground cell in my ruined silk wedding dress.

His Head of Intelligence threw a surveillance dossier at me, revealing that Luca's twenty months of romance was just a cold, calculated investigation to destroy my family.

My mother was left dry-heaving on the marble floor in terror, and my father's heart gave out as he was dragged to the infirmary.

I stared at the photos of our dates, the agonizing realization suffocating me.

Every morning coffee, every gentle touch, and every whispered promise in the dark was an elaborate lie.

He had tracked my every move for nearly two years but never trusted me enough to just ask about the money, choosing the word of a jealous operative over his own wife.

So, I wiped my tears and stopped playing the docile bride.

I calmly summoned my corporate lawyer and dropped the federal tax records proving I was a secret billionaire CEO.

The forty-six million was my own legal money, saved to treat my father's terminal cancer.

Ignoring the ruthless Don as he finally dropped to his knees in tears, I left my wedding ring on the divorce papers and walked out.

Chapter 1

Sienna Rossi POV

It was five minutes, precisely, after I had promised my life to the most dangerous man in New York, that he produced a set of thick-gauge plastic ties from the silk lining of his tuxedo and drove my father's face into the wedding table.

The act was not one of passion, but of cold, unhurried design, a piece of theater staged to force my confession to a forty-six-million-dollar crime.

High above us, the crystal pendants of the Falcone Estate chandeliers threw a warm, fractured light over the ballroom's gilded cornices.

Three hundred made men and their associates were raising their champagne glasses to celebrate our union.

To the five boroughs, Luca Falcone was the final word of the Cosa Nostra.

He was a man who commanded an army of killers and governed the city's underbelly with a quiet efficiency that made grown men tremble.

But to me, he was the man who had spent the last year bringing me coffee in bed, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw before he left for work.

I had allowed myself to believe our arranged union had, by some miracle, taken root.

I was wrong.

Luca rose from the head table before the first course was served.

The warmth he had feigned at the altar had been stripped from his face, leaving behind the hard, impassive lines of a stranger.

He moved not with grace, but with a predator's baleful economy of motion.

Before anyone could register the shift, he had my father by the nape of the neck.

My father was a sixty-three-year-old Capo who kept low-level books—a modest man who wore scuffed shoes and lived in quiet dread of the Syndicate's violent inner circle.

Without ceremony, Luca brought his head down against the thick, beveled glass of the dining table.

The sound was not a crack, but a low, resonant thud that seemed to deaden all other noise in the cavernous room.

Porcelain dinner plates vibrated and then split, and a dark bloom of red wine seeped into the white linen.

From the surrounding tables, twelve of his soldiers rose in a single, fluid motion.

They secured every exit to the ballroom.

Two enforcers, their shoulders straining the fabric of their jackets, took my arms and pinned me to the unforgiving oak of my chair.

My mother collapsed to the marble floor.

Her mouth opened, but no sound came out; she clutched the fabric over her heart as the guests near her shuffled back, unwilling to draw the Don's attention.

Luca dug a large hand into my father's inner breast pocket.

He pulled out a black offshore bank card and held it aloft for the room to see.

His voice, when it came, was a physical weight in the sudden stillness of the ballroom.