The Capo Who Forgot His Beloved Wife

Five years ago, Dante Moretti was the Capo who promised to burn the world for me.

Today, he is a monster with amnesia who treats me like a servant while parading his mistress, Carla, in front of me.

When Carla cut her own baby's lip to frame me, Dante didn't ask for proof.

He dragged me into the hotel lobby, claiming I was a monster who hurt children.

He looked at me with cold, dead eyes and said, "You use your voice to lie. You don't deserve a voice."

He ordered his guards to hold me down.

Then, he took a silver needle and thick black thread.

Right there in front of the staff and guests, he sewed my mouth shut.

Three stitches.

One for silence.

One for obedience.

One for the Family.

He thought he had broken me.

He didn't know that while I bled, the walls blocking his memory were already crumbling.

Months later, after I had escaped and built a new life, he found me.

He knelt in the snow outside my gate, weeping, begging to fix what he broke.

"I remember everything, Elena. I love you."

I touched the white scars on my lips and looked down at him.

"You can't fix this, Dante."

"Unless you can give me the last five years back."

Chapter 1

Elena Vitiello POV

I stood before the man who once promised to burn the world for me, clutching the paperwork that would reduce his empire to ash, while he allowed another woman to sit on his lap.

Five years ago, Dante Moretti was the Capo of the New York Famiglia, a man whose shadow alone could freeze a room, and I was his beloved wife.

Today, he is Dante the Reaper, a monster with a hole in his memory where my name used to be. And I am nothing more than the discarded collateral damage of a truce between warring gangs.

The lobby of The Gilded Lily was suffocating.

Gold leaf peeled from the crown molding like dead skin, and the scent of stale cigar smoke clung to the heavy velvet curtains. This hotel was a front for the Moretti money laundering operation, and for the last five years, I had been its glorified housekeeper.

Dante sat on the plush leather sofa in the center of the lobby.

He looked every inch the king he was born to be. His suit was tailored to hide the holsters at his ribs, his dark hair was slicked back, and his eyes were cold shards of obsidian.

Carla Russo was perched on his thigh.

She was a Jersey girl with too much ambition and not enough sense, tracing the line of his jaw with a manicured nail. It was a public display of disrespect that would have gotten a man killed in the old days.

A Made Man does not parade his mistress in front of his wife.

But Dante did not remember I was his wife.

To him, I was Elena Vitiello,