The Underboss's Secret: A Mafia Bride's Escape

For three years, I was Dante Moretti's secret. I was the Underboss's property, the cure for a violent curse that plagued him. He promised that if he wasn't married by his twenty-fifth birthday, I would be his bride.

But on the eve of that birthday, he ended our arrangement. He brought home another woman, Sienna, and introduced me as "the help."

Sienna, with feigned innocence, knocked a precious memento from my hand, shattering it. When I confronted her, Dante slapped me twice in public, the humiliation searing my soul.

Later, I discovered Sienna had framed me for kidnapping her, a lie Dante readily believed. To force a confession, he had my mother tied in a sack and thrown into the freezing lake to drown. He left her there to die.

That was the moment the girl who loved him died, too. I saved my mother, and we fled the country, seeking refuge with my childhood friend, Julian.

I thought I had escaped. But then Dante appeared in Australia, begging for forgiveness. I rejected him, choosing a future with Julian. I thought it was over.

Until a car, driven by a vengeful Sienna, barreled towards us. The last thing I saw was Dante throwing himself in front of me, taking the full impact.

Chapter 1

Elara POV:

The night Dante Moretti ended our arrangement, he gave me a choice: erase myself from his life, or he'd erase me from the world. What he didn't know was that I'd already found my escape.

He came home to the penthouse smelling of blood and victory. The scent clung to his leather jacket-a metallic tang laced with the expensive cologne I'd bought him for his birthday. He was the Underboss of the Moretti crime family, a man carved from violence and power, and tonight, a turf war had been won. He was every inch the king returning to his castle.

He didn't speak. He never did, not at first. His eyes, the color of storm clouds, found me where I stood waiting by the floor-to-ceiling windows. He shed his jacket, letting it drop to the floor. His white shirt was stained, a geography of another man's defeat.

His hands were on my waist, pulling me against him. His mouth was hard, tasting of whiskey and something wilder. This was his ritual. He would take the violence of his world and wash it away inside me. For three years, I had been the silent, willing shore for his brutal tides.

It was a devil's bargain, struck when I was eighteen. After a rival family's assassination attempt left him drugged and drowning in a violent, uncontrollable rage, his father, the Don, had come to me. I was the daughter of a loyal Soldier who had died for them. I had loved Dante with a secret, stupid, girlish heart since we were kids. They knew it. So they made me his cure. His pressure valve. His proprietà.

A promise he'd made echoed in my memory, the ghost