My Marriage Was a Trap,So I Burned the Whole Table Down

My name is Elena Valesi Moretti. I'm a Brooklyn mob bride, a pawn in everyone's game. My father Enzo traded me for an alliance. My sister Isabella played the saint while secretly selling our baby sister Sofia to the Bianchi family behind closed doors. And my husband, Dante Moretti—the man with winter in his eyes who whispered “Try to run, I’ll break your legs” on our wedding day—he married me because when I was fifteen years old, I once pointed a gun at him inside a burning building.

The only rule in this marriage was simple: stay out of his way.

I spent three years breaking it. I sat in on council meetings and memorized every traitor's secret. I stood and watched a man's finger be severed to teach my own brother the price of betrayal. I turned myself into a blade.

Then I uncovered the truth—Dante knew everything from the start. He knew my father had planted a mole inside his inner circle. He knew my sister was a trafficker's broker. He knew the woman he married was meant to be disposable from the very beginning.

But there's one thing he never accounted for. He didn't marry a lamb.

He married a wolf who learned how to draw blood.

Now someone is trying to sell my little sister, and I have six weeks to stop it. I'm going to beat this man at every game he ever taught me.

The first time I saw Dante Moretti, I was nineteen and bleeding out on a back-alley operating table in Brooklyn. A rival crew had gut-shot me during a deal gone wrong, and my brother Luca had dragged me to the nearest sawbones who owed our family a favor.

Dante walked in like he owned the place. Black coat. Eyes like winter. He looked at me—filthy, sobbing, clutching my stomach—and said five words.

"Stop crying. You'll live."

I passed out hating him.

Ten years later, I married him.

The alliance between the Moretti family and the Valesi organization needed cementing. My father, Enzo Valesi, had three daughters. Isabella, the eldest. Me, Elena. And Sofia, who was barely sixteen.

Dante chose me.

"Why?" I asked my father the night before the ceremony. We stood in his study, surrounded by mahogany and cigar smoke. "Isabella's older. She's been groomed for this."

Enzo didn't look at me. "Isabella refused. Said she'd rather enter a convent than a Moretti's bed."

"And Sofia?"

"Sofia is a child." He finally met my eyes. "You're the one he asked for, Elena. Said you looked like you'd fight back."

"Was that supposed to flatter me?"

"It's supposed to tell you that Dante Moretti doesn't want a lamb. He wants a wolf."

I laughed. "Then he picked wrong. I'm no wolf."

My father's gaze didn't waver. "Then learn to become one."

The wedding happened on a sweltering August afternoon in the Moretti estate chapel. Three hundred people. Six armed guards at every exit. Dante slid the ring onto my finger,