Revenge Wedding: I Choose The Reaper

On my wedding day, the wedding planner looked at me with pity in her eyes.

She told me the groom had called with a last-minute request. He wanted the name on the floral arch changed from "Elena" to "Sofia."

Five years of loyalty to Dante Romero, and I found out he was planning a "secret" ceremony with his mistress an hour before ours.

He claimed she was dying of cancer. He said it was her final wish to be a bride, and that as a good mafia wife, I should understand. He swore it was just charity.

But I had seen the texts where he called me "furniture."

I had watched him step over my body when I fell down the stairs at a club, just so he could leave with her.

And this morning, I watched Sofia walk into the hotel lobby wearing *my* custom French lace wedding dress, smirking as she clung to his arm.

Dante thinks I'm crying in the bridal suite.

He thinks I will sit in the front row of his "fake" wedding and wait for my turn like a dutiful puppet.

He is wrong.

I wiped my tears and picked up my phone. I didn't cancel the wedding date. I just changed the location to the ballroom next door.

And I changed the groom.

As Dante says his vows to his mistress, I am walking down the aisle to meet the only man the Romero family fears.

The Reaper.

Chapter 1

The reflection in the tri-fold mirror was a stranger's. I was a Vitiello confection. The caged canary. My dark hair was pinned with a severity that pulled at my scalp, my skin a stark, bloodless white against the silk. I resembled a porcelain doll, the kind whose fine-grained cracks are only visible upon close inspection.

I stood in the center of the bridal suite, hemmed in by layers of imported French lace that felt less like a wedding gown and more like a burial winding-sheet.

Five years.

Five years of alliance with the Romero family. Five years of Dante Romero holding my hand at galas, his whispers spooling promises in my ear, swearing on his mother's grave that I was his only sun. I had believed him. I didn't just do my duty; I had offered him my heart.

I turned to the wedding planner, a nervous woman named Claire who was currently pinning the hem of my train. She wouldn't meet my eyes.

"Is something wrong, Claire?"

She swallowed hard, the click of her throat unnaturally loud in the still air. "Miss Vitiello... Mr. Romero called. He... he requested a change for the archway lettering."

"A change?"

"He wants the name on the floral arch to read 'Sofia'."

The oxygen thinned in the room, becoming sharp and unbreathable.

Sofia.

Xu Wei. The dancer. The outsider. The chaotic variable he swore he had excised years ago.

"He said it was a surprise," Claire whispered, her hands shaking. "For a... a secondary reception."

I