The Stand-In’s Stoke Back, Everyone Regretted It

The day someone told me I was legitimate blood of the Mafia family, I went from being the Don's daughter's personal maid to being the Don's daughter myself.

Three days after they brought me home to the family estate, I went looking for Luciano, the man I'd secretly married, and found him in the study, talking to Don Moretti.

"Nina is obedient. She wouldn't dare utter a word even when bullied. She is the perfect person to take the fall for Avery at that bloody party and she won't crack."

"Good, Luciano. You think of everything! She's nobody — a street girl. She walks into that bloodbath and dies, nobody's going to miss her. Let her go. Avery's waiting for you to make underboss first, then we do the wedding proper."

I stumbled back three steps. My heel hit the marble floor and the pain shot straight up my leg, but it was nothing compared to what just exploded in my chest.

I wasn't Don Moretti's real blood. And the man who had sworn his life to me, my own husband, was planning to send me into that slaughterhouse so he could marry the Don's actual daughter.

I'd already heard what happened to the last stand-in at one of those events. Shot to pieces. That news drove into my spine like an ice pick.

But what they didn't know, what I'd only just found out, was this:

My brother, who'd been missing for years, was the highest power in the Cosa Nostra. The one they called the Shadow King.

I ran. Fell twice on the way back.

My fingers had gone white, nails biting into my palms. My knees scraped open on the marble hallway floor and the blood came dripping down.

But the physical pain was nothing. The real wound was the one that had just been torn straight through the middle of my chest.

Four years. Four years I'd been at his side, watching him go from a street nobody to a made man with a crew behind him.

In winter, his hands cracked from the cold, so I tore apart my own leather gloves to wrap them, embroidered handkerchiefs to sell for gun oil and blades.

My hands bled and I never let him know.

In summer, he hated the heat, so I stayed up all night running a fan for him. Come morning I'd be out in the blazing sun hauling freight at the warehouse, negotiating with dock traders, doing whatever needed doing.

The third time he failed to take over a crew, he got blackout drunk and said he didn't want to live anymore. I stayed up watching him all night, and the next morning I smiled and told him, "It's fine. There's always next time."

I even sold myself into servitude at the Don's mansion to scrape together the bribe money he needed to move up. Signed the contract with all ten fingerprints. The broker told me: once you sign, your life isn't your