The Mafia's Forgotten Daughter is Back

I served seven years in a black-site prison for a crime my sister committed. Today, my betrothed—the man who chose her over me—finally came to collect his property.

But he didn't come to save me. He came to collect me like a debt, watching with cold eyes as I was shoved into a filthy shed, a disgrace to be kept out of sight.

Minutes later, his phone rang. It was my sister. Without a word, he left me standing in the dirt to rush to her side.

Abandoned. Again.

Through the thin walls of my new prison, I heard my own mother's voice. She was arranging to have me sent to a remote convent, to be buried for good this time.

They hadn't just locked me away to protect their perfect, adopted daughter. They planned to erase me completely.

But as I sat in the dark, a cheap burner phone buzzed in my pocket. A single message glowed on the screen.

"Northern Syndicate. We can get you out. You have ten days."

Chapter 1

Aria POV:

I served seven years in a black-site prison for a crime my sister committed. Today, my betrothed—the man who chose her over me—finally came to collect his property.

The heavy iron door groaned open, slashing a rectangle of blinding light onto the damp stone floor. I flinched, shielding my eyes. The silhouette standing there was bigger than I remembered. Broader. Harder.

Dante Volkov. The Don of the Volkov Family. My promised husband.

He didn't come to save me. He came to collect me, like a debt.

I pushed myself up from the thin mattress, my leg screaming in protest. The bones had fused together wrong, a permanent, throbbing reminder of a beating I'd received in my third year here. Pain was an old friend. A cold, familiar companion.

"Get up, Elara," Dante's voice was a low rumble, stripped of all warmth. He still used my old name, the name of the girl they threw away.

He didn't offer a hand. He just watched, his dark eyes sweeping over my tattered prison clothes and gaunt frame with the detached assessment of a butcher inspecting a piece of meat.

I was the lost daughter, you see. The original. Snatched from a park at age five, I was a ghost story, a cautionary tale whispered to other mafia children. My parents grieved, then they did what the powerful do: they replaced me. They adopted Serafina, a girl with the same dark hair, and poured all their love into the substitute.

When I was found thirteen years later, a teenager with no memory of them, I didn't come home to a celebration. I came home to a disruption. My parents looked at me, their true-born daughter, and saw a stranger threatening the perfect family they had built with my replacement. Serafina, the perfect daughter, saw a threat.

She spent years poisoning them against me with whispered lies and crocodile tears, framing me as unstable, ungrateful, wild. I was