Healed By Another: Rejecting The Ruthless Don

I spent a year in a Swiss asylum, swallowing pills to cure a madness that didn’t exist.

It turned out the medication was just sugar.

My insanity was a script written by Jaxon Francis, the Don of New York, just so he could marry a Cartel princess without his ward getting in the way.

When I finally escaped and tried to leave him, his new wife staged her own kidnapping and framed me.

Jaxon didn’t ask for proof. He didn’t look at the evidence.

Instead, he tied a rope around my ankles and dragged me behind a helicopter across the jagged rocks of the Wastelands.

He held his wife close and watched as my skin was flayed and my bones shattered, believing he was executing a traitor.

He left me for dead in the dirt, convinced he had cleansed his empire.

I took the hush money his mother threw at me and vanished, letting Alina Phillips die in that field.

Three years later, I returned to New York as "Echo," the elusive artist the world was obsessing over.

At a charity auction, Jaxon bid one hundred million dollars for a painting of a woman’s scarred back, desperate to buy redemption for the ghost he thought he killed.

He chased me into the rain, begging for a second chance, swearing he had destroyed his wife for me.

I looked at the man who once held my heart and simply smiled.

Then I turned to the man standing beside me.

"Jaxon, meet Darwin," I said, linking my arm through his.

"My husband."

Chapter 1

Alina Phillips POV

I stood at the wrought-iron gates of the Swiss asylum, my fingers turning white as I clutched the discharge papers.

I had been ready to fly home. I had been ready to surprise the Don who had promised to protect me.

Instead, the bitter alpine wind slapped my face with the truth: the medication I had swallowed dutifully for a year was nothing but sugar.

My insanity had been a script. And the author was the man I worshipped.

The receptionist had looked at me with a professional sort of pity before slipping the real medical file into my hand.

"You've been sane since the day you arrived, Miss," she had whispered, as if fearing the walls were listening.

My hands trembled as I boarded the plane to New York.

I wasn't shaking from the cold.

I was shaking because the man who swore on my father's fresh grave to keep me safe had locked me away to steal a year of my existence.

Jaxon Francis.

The Don of the Francis Crime Family.

The King of New York.

He was the man who had held me while my father bled out on Italian marble, taking a bullet meant for the King. He was the man who had wiped the splatter from my cheeks and told me I was his responsibility now.

God help me, I had believed him.

I landed at JFK and went straight