From Discarded Wife To Scent Queen

My husband, the ruthless Underboss of the Ewing crime family, was terrified of one thing: his dead fiancée’s memory.

Or rather, her living sister, Ivana, who used that memory to turn my life into a living hell.

To "apologize" for humiliating me at a gala, Corbett brought me a peace offering: a green macaron.

"Pistachio," he promised. "Your favorite."

I took one bite, and my throat instantly seized. It felt like barbed wire tightening around my windpipe.

It wasn't pistachio. It was almond paste.

Corbett knew I was deadly allergic. He used to carry my EpiPen on our first dates.

As I collapsed to the floor, wheezing and clawing at my neck, a scream ripped from the guest wing.

"Corbett! Help! They're posting mean comments about me again!"

Ivana.

Corbett looked down at me, his dying wife, and then looked toward the hallway where Ivana was crying over Instagram.

He hesitated for only a second.

Then he pulled his leg away from my grasping hand.

"I'll be right back," he said, turning his back on me. "Just... use your pen."

He ran to comfort a healthy woman while I crawled across the carpet, vision tunneling, forcing the needle into my own thigh to restart my heart.

As I lay there shaking, listening to him soothe her, the last thread of love snapped.

I didn't call an ambulance.

I pulled a burner phone from behind the vanity mirror and texted the one man Corbett feared more than death—his rival, Don Kain Solomon.

"I accept. Get me out."

Chapter 1

Jenna Jarvis POV

I lay in the cold center of a bed that cost more than my father's entire life savings, realizing my marriage wasn't just dying; it was being murdered by a ghost.

The scratching at the door started at 2:00 AM.

It was a sound like rats in the walls, but I knew it was something far more vermin-like than a rodent.

Corbett shifted beside me.

His body went rigid, the muscle in his arm twitching against my shoulder.

He wasn't reaching for the gun on the nightstand-the heavy Glock 19 that signified his rank as the Underboss of the Ewing crime family.

He was reaching for his robe.

"She's here," he whispered, his voice thick with a concern that used to belong to me.

I shut my eyes.

I forced my breathing to slow, feigning sleep because the humiliation of witnessing this ritual for the nine hundred and eighty-sixth time was too heavy to bear with my eyes open.

The door creaked open.

Ivana stood there.

Even through my eyelashes, the silhouette was unmistakable.

She was draped in Elenor's silk robe, the peach one Corbett had bought for his late fiancée a week before the car bomb took her life.

She clutched a pillow to her chest, looking small, fragile, and entirely calculated.

"Corbett," she whimpered. "The nightmares. I see the fire again."

Corbett was out of bed before the sentence ended.

He went to her, his bare feet