His Unwanted Wife, The Rival Don's Queen

The gunman pressed a Glock to my temple and gave my husband a choice.

"One walks out. One stays. Choose, Mr. Underboss."

I wasn't worried. I was Haven. I was his wife of ten years, his Consigliere, the woman who built his empire.

Beside me sobbed Gemma, a fragile twenty-two-year-old he had known for six months.

"Take Gemma! Leave Haven!" Connor screamed, his honor twisting into something unrecognizable.

He walked out of the warehouse with another woman in his arms, leaving me to be butchered.

I didn't wait for the bullet. I threw myself through a glass window into the freezing canal.

I survived the fall, but the life inside me didn't.

After five years of failed IVF, the miracle baby I hadn't even told Connor about was gone.

While I lay in a cold hospital room, bleeding out the remains of our child, my husband was buying diamond earrings for the woman who had set me up to die.

When the doctor tried to sedate me for the surgery, I grabbed his wrist.

"No anesthesia," I commanded.

"But the pain..."

"I want to feel it," I said, staring at the ceiling. "I want to feel every scrap of him leaving my body."

I burned that pain into my soul. Then, I went home, poured gasoline over our wedding bed, and lit a match.

Two years later, I returned to the city.

Connor thought I was dead.

But when he saw me on the arm of his mortal enemy, wearing the crown of a rival Queen, he realized his mistake.

He didn't just lose a wife. He started a war.

Chapter 1

Haven POV

It wasn't the cold steel of a Glock 19 pressed against my temple that killed me.

It was the name that left my husband's lips when the gunman gave him a choice between his wife and the other woman.

Ten years of marriage.

Ten years of building the Apex Crew from a scrappy street gang into a shipping empire that controlled the entire eastern seaboard.

I stood there, my wrists zip-tied behind my back, the acrid smell of rusted iron and stagnant canal water filling the abandoned warehouse.

Beside me, Gemma sobbed.

She was twenty-two, porcelain-fragile, with big doe eyes that seemed to constantly beg for protection.

She was the daughter of a soldier who died taking a bullet for Connor three years ago.

That was the debt.

The blood debt that hung over my marriage like a guillotine.

Connor was on his knees across from us.

His suit was torn, and blood trickled from a cut on his brow, but his eyes were frantic.

Not for me.

The masked man behind me cocked the hammer of the gun.

Time seemed to slow down, the dust motes dancing in the singular beam of light cutting through the gloom.

"Choose, Mr. Underboss," the gunman rasped, his voice distorted by a modulator. "One walks out. One stays. You have five seconds before I paint the walls with both