A Quiet Kind of Ruin

After a vicious family power struggle, I fled to a small border town in the south. I took on a new identity and found work in a flower shop. Everyone believed I was dead.

Then one day, someone from the family came to the shop to order flowers for the birthday party for Roman Jackson, the head of the Jackson family.

The person who arrived was my former Underboss.

She stared at me in shock and demanded to know why I had not returned to the Jackson family if I was still alive. She told me that Roman had kept watch over my grave for two years and that he had attempted suicide three times in the cemetery, each time stopped by someone else.

Roman was my ex-husband.

He had an adopted sister, Liliana. Fifteen years ago, her parents were gunned down while covering Roman's father's escape from a rival family. After that, Liliana became Roman's most cherished sister.

She tampered with my armored car. The brakes failed, and the vehicle plunged off a cliff. I broke three ribs. Roman mobilized every resource the family had and pulled me back from the brink of death.

She bribed my bodyguard and laced my red wine with a neurotoxin. I lay unconscious in the villa for three days and nights. Roman sealed off the entire city, hunted down everyone involved, and made them pay in blood.

She tried to kill me, and he saved me.

This absurd cycle went on for three years.

Until the last time.

She detonated a bomb at an arms deal I was overseeing, burning seventy percent of my body. As I was lifted onto the ambulance stretcher, I clutched Roman's suit and, with the last of my strength, begged him.

"Kill her, Roman. She sabotaged the deal. Those are the family rules."

He crouched down, his fingers brushing my bloodstained face. His voice was calm, almost cruel.

"Liliana didn't mean to. Let it go. For the sake of what her parents sacrificed for the family."

In that moment, my heart to him died completely.

Two years had passed since I bolted from the chaos that was the Jackson family showdown. I made my escape to a sleepy town on the edge of the south, where I traded my past for a new name and a gig at a local flower shop.

To the world, I was another casualty of Hudson City's most notorious mafia feud, presumed dead in the Jackson family's brutal power struggle.

I had even convinced myself of that lie.

There was an empty grave with my name on it in the family plot, where I would occasionally drop off the freshest white roses, a silent tribute to the 'Eleanor' everyone thought was gone.

However, everything changed the day the flower shop door swung open.

A big-shot client waltzed in, requesting a floral arrangement for the Jackson family patriarch, Roman Jackson's, birthday bash. I kept my head down, lost in the blooms, until a voice,