My Husband's Brother Owns My Secret

Faye Hartman POV

Regret tasted like stale whiskey and impending death.

I woke to the rhythmic thud of a headache behind my eyes and the heavy, unfamiliar weight of Egyptian cotton sheets. This wasn't my room. The air smelled different here—sharp, expensive, like sandalwood and cold rain.

Panic, cold and immediate, seized my chest. I sat up, clutching the duvet to my chest, and the movement drew my gaze to the man sleeping beside me.

He was lying on his stomach, his face buried in the pillow. He was massive, his shoulders broad and sculpted with a lethal kind of strength that my husband, Joshua, had never possessed. But it was his back that made my breath hitch. A jagged, ugly scar tore across his right shoulder blade, a map of violence etched into bronze skin.

What have I done?

Memories of the Charity Gala flashed in disjointed bursts. The suffocating polite conversation. Joshua ignoring me for his phone. The whiskey I shouldn't have touched. The stranger with eyes like storm clouds who had looked at me not as a hostage, not as a Hartman trophy, but as a woman.

I scrambled out of bed, my legs trembling. My silver silk dress was a puddle of shame on the floor. I snatched it up, my hands shaking so hard I could barely pull the zipper.

I needed to leave. Now. Before he woke up. Before Joshua realized I hadn't come home.

I reached for my clutch on the nightstand and froze.

Next to a heavy crystal tumbler sat a notepad. Embossed in the thick, cream paper was a black, gothic ‘C'.

Caldwell.

The blood drained from my face. I hadn't just cheated on my husband; I had slept with a member of his family. The family that had decimated mine, the family that held me captive in a loveless, political marriage. If Joshua found out, I would be punished. If The Don—Anthony Caldwell, the monster who ruled this city—found out I had tainted his bloodline with my infidelity, I would disappear.

I looked at the sleeping man. He wasn't Joshua. He was too big, too scarred. A cousin? An enforcer?

It didn't matter. I had to make sure he never looked for me. I had to make this meaningless. A transaction.

I opened my wallet. Three hundred dollars. It was pathetic, but it was all I had in cash. I pulled a pen from the nightstand—a heavy Montblanc that probably cost more than my life was worth—and tore a page from the notepad.

For the service. Keep the change.

I shoved the bills and the note under the crystal glass. It was an insult. A way to reduce a night of earth-shattering passion into a cheap exchange. If he thought I was just a bored, rich wife paying for a gigolo, maybe his pride would stop him from chasing me.

I grabbed my heels, not daring to put them on yet, and ran. The plush carpet swallowed the sound of