Broken Strings: The Mafia Wife’s Exit

I was bleeding out in the dark, bound to a chair, when I heard my husband tell another woman he would burn the world down for her.

Dante Moretti didn't know I was on the other side of the paper-thin wall.

He didn't know that ten years ago, I was the girl who saved his life in a frozen cave, not his mistress, Sofia.

Sofia had stolen my story, and now she was stealing my life.

When I tried to leave him, Dante chained me in his dungeon and whipped me until I passed out, claiming he was "disciplining" his wife.

When Sofia used steel cello strings to slice my fingers open, destroying my ability to ever play again, he looked the other way.

He even chose to save her over me when we fell into the freezing ocean, leaving me to drown because "Sofia is my soul."

That night, I finally stopped fighting for a man who didn't exist.

I called my brother, the Don of New York.

"The alliance is over," I whispered into the phone. "Take me home."

It took Dante three months to uncover the truth. To see the medical records proving I was the one who dragged him from that cave.

He burned his own boat to trap us on an island, begging for a second chance.

"I can fix this," he pleaded, tears streaming down his face as he touched my scarred, ruined hands.

I looked at him, then at the man standing behind him with a rifle—the man who actually loved me.

"You can't fix a shattered vase, Dante," I said.

Then I watched my new protector pull the trigger.

Chapter 1

I was bleeding out in the dark, bound to a chair with rough hemp rope biting into the tender skin of my wrists, when I heard my husband tell another woman he would burn the world down for her.

The irony was sharp enough to sever a vein.

Dante Moretti.

The Underboss of the Chicago Outfit. The man they called the Ice Prince because his heart was supposed to be a fortress no living soul could breach.

He was the man I had loved since I was sixteen years old. The man I married three months ago in a cathedral filled with suffocating white roses and armed guards.

And right now, he was on the other side of a paper-thin wall in this godforsaken safe house, pressing his mistress against the plaster.

I heard the heavy thud of a body hitting the wall.

It made the framed picture in my room rattle against the drywall.

"Let me go, Dante," Sofia sobbed. Her voice was high, frantic, and laced with the kind of weaponized innocence that only a sociopath could perfect. "I cannot stay in that house anymore. I cannot watch her play the mistress of the estate while I am nothing."

"You are not nothing," Dante growled.

The sound of his voice vibrated through the floorboards. It was a low, dangerous