Rescued And Claimed By The Underworld Boss

For six years, I guarded my fiancé's empty grave through blizzards and thunderstorms, surviving multiple suicide attempts because the guilt of his fatal car crash was eating me alive.

Until an anonymous message led me to a luxury penthouse, where I found him perfectly healthy, his arms wrapped around his former secretary's pregnant belly.

He had faked his own death to escape his mafia blood oath, keep the dirty money, and dump me.

When I confronted him, he violently shoved me into a stone fireplace, leaving me bleeding out on the marble floor.

"If anything happens to my new family, I will enact a Vendetta on you that will make the last six years look like a joke."

To protect his pristine facade, he threatened to cancel my dying adoptive mother's heart transplant unless I publicly confessed to being a delusional stalker.

I complied, but his mistress still snuck into the ICU, verbally abused my mother, and bribed the organ broker to back out.

My mother flatlined right in front of me.

I didn't understand how the man I had mourned for over two thousand days could watch me freeze in the snow for a box of dirt, only to coldly orchestrate the murder of my only family.

Holding my mother's ashes, I scheduled a video exposing his dirty money, and jumped off the cross-river bridge.

But I didn't die.

When I opened my eyes, the city's most lethal Mafia Don was standing by my bed, offering me a gun and a throne built from their ashes.

Chapter 1

Aria POV

I had just departed from a forced mafia blind date with the city's most lethal Don, my intention to proceed to my dead fiancé's grave to say a final goodbye.

A vibration in my coat pocket followed. An anonymous message, containing nothing but a hidden cloud drive link. I tapped it, and my screen was filled with a photograph: my supposedly murdered fiancé kissing his former secretary, her distended, pregnant belly pressed intimately against him. The file's metadata bore a live location tag for a penthouse not ten minutes away. A cold certainty settled in me that if I didn't get there right now to uncover the truth, I would spend the rest of my life chained to a ghost-a shade who had it now seemed orchestrated his own assassination just to get rid of me.

The plastic seam of the phone's casing dug into my palm. My thumb hovered two millimeters above the screen, the muscle spasming from the strain of holding it rigid, refusing to press down on the address.

A mere half-hour ago, I had been sitting across from Dante Russo.

He was the Don of the ruling Family-a man who operated behind a flawless billionaire facade, but was known for slaughtering the entire Russian syndicate in a single, bloody night.

The elders of my fringe family had offered me to him like a sacrificial lamb.

Dante had looked at me with eyes like black ice. His massive frame gave off a dangerous, wild charm that made the air in the room thicken until each breath was a conscious effort.

He had not so much as brushed his fingers against mine, yet his gaze felt like a brand of ownership.

I had told him I needed to visit the cemetery first-to properly bury my past before I could ever belong to a man like him.

He had simply nodded, the gesture a silent promise of absolute authority.

Now, staring at the illuminated screen, the same past I was supposed to bury was staring back at me-alive, breathing, and smiling.

The engine of my rusted sedan turned over with a groan, and I drove like a madwoman through the choked arteries of the city.

The address belonged to a high-security building funded by laundered money, a granite-faced fortress I only knew from old Family whispers.

I bypassed the front desk by slipping through the loading dock, taking the service elevator up to the top floor.

When the steel doors parted, I saw two men standing outside the penthouse suite, smoking cigars with a studied nonchalance.

Paulie and Enzo.

They were Silas's former mafia Associates-the very men who had carried his empty casket six years ago.

I drew back behind the corner. A stale taste of iron rose from the back of my throat, and the sound of their footsteps on the sound-dampening carpet was magnified tenfold in my ears. Each inhalation felt like swallowing shards of glass.

"Can you believe the boss is having a kid?" Paulie laughed, blowing a plume of greasy smoke at the ceiling.

Enzo snorted. "Faking that car crash was the smartest thing Silas ever did. Escaped his blood oath, kept the dirty money, and dumped that weeping orphan Aria, all in one night."

The words, spoken so casually, landed like a fist in my stomach.

Six years of agony.

I had guarded an empty patch of dirt through blizzards and thunderstorms, surviving multiple suicide attempts because the weight of the guilt of his death had been eating me alive.

I stepped out from the angle of the wall.

The two men stopped laughing the instant they saw me, their cigars dropping from their mouths to the pile of the carpet.

"Aria," Paulie stammered, moving to plant his feet in front of the door and block my path. "You shouldn't be here."

"Get out of my way," I said, my voice sounding foreign and completely hollow.

I didn't wait for them to react.

I shoved past Paulie's heavy shoulder, my adrenal surge overpowering his shock, and slammed my hand against the double doors.

They were unlocked.

The door panel striking the wall was a percussive blast that drowned out all reason. By the time I came to my senses, the heel of my shoe had sunk into a priceless Persian rug, and the cloying, sweet perfume of fresh lilies filled my nostrils.

Right in the center of the room stood Silas.

He looked exactly the same-perfectly healthy, wearing a crisp linen shirt, his arms wrapped around Petra with a practiced tenderness.

Petra. His former secretary, the woman who had always looked at me with quiet disdain.

They both jerked their heads toward the sound of the door striking the wall.

Silas dropped his arms, the color draining from his polished face.

"Aria," he breathed out, taking an unconscious step back.

My eyes darted around the sterile, opulent room, coming to rest on a massive, framed wedding photo propped on the mantelpiece.

It was them, laughing in Iceland, dressed in white.

Six years of a legitimate, safe life, built entirely on the bedrock of my absolute destruction.

I walked directly over to the fireplace, grabbed the heavy silver frame, and flung it onto the marble floor with all of my strength. As the frame left my hands, my eyes caught a stack of recent bank statements bearing Petra's name, carelessly left on the marble ledge. Acting on pure, vengeful instinct, I snatched the documents and shoved them deep into my coat pocket.

The glass disintegrated into a thousand pieces, the sharp sound echoing through the massive penthouse.

Petra let out a piercing screech and scuttled behind Silas, clutching at the his shirt.

"She is mentally unstable!" Petra screamed, pointing a manicured finger that quivered with manufactured fear at me. "I told you she was crazy, Silas! Get her out of here!"

Silas's shock curdled into cold, hard anger.

He stepped forward, shielding Petra with his body.

"You have no right to barge in here and torture me with your presence, Aria," he snapped, his voice dripping with a disgust so pure it was unmistakable.

I walked right up to him and slapped him across the face so hard that my palm went numb with the impact.

"You coward," I whispered, staring into the eyes of the man I had mourned for over two thousand days.

Petra suddenly dropped to her knees, sobbing loudly and clutching her swollen stomach with theatrical flair.

"I can't take this!" Petra wailed, looking up at Silas with wide, terrified eyes. "I'll go to the clinic right now! I'll abort the baby and divorce you so she leaves us alone!"

Silas's face lit up with a frantic, protective desperation, his hands reaching down to grab Petra's shoulders.