The Don’s Crown Was Built on My Father’s Grave

Adriana's POV

To wed his first love, the man I was promised to broke Omertà and gave up my father as a state agent buried twenty years deep in the Families. They kept him for a full day and a full night. They cut off his legs, they gouged out his eyes, and at the last they threw him into an iron cage and set him alight while his heart was still beating.

I went mad with grief and swore a vendetta against my betrothed. That was when Salvatore Marchetti, the youngest Don in Sicily, came home from across the water with a procession that made whole streets go silent. He used every hand he owned. He put the finest consiglieri in the country to work seeking justice for my father, and he swore to me he would clear the old man's name.

I believed him.

When the burial was done, I severed the pact between myself and Matteo of the Bruno Family, and I married the man who had stood beside me in the darkest hour of my life.

Five years later, I overheard a conversation that shattered my whole world.

"Adriana always looks like she wants to rip me apart every time she sees me," Matteo said, and there was oil in his voice.

"But," Matteo went on, the tone dropping low, "what do you think that foolish woman would do if she found out the man who sold her father to the fire is the same man she lies down next to every night?"

My hand froze on the door handle.

"You're a cold one, Salvatore." Venom dripped off every word. "You truly earned the ring on your finger."

He kept going, that twisted satisfaction thick in his mouth.

"Adriana loved you like blood when you were children. When you grew, she gave you everything a woman can give a man. Do you think she'd ever once suspect that the man she loves, the man in her bed each night, is the same man who handed her father over to be butchered?"

——

My hand trembled on the door handle as Matteo's mocking voice cut through the heavy air. Somewhere behind me, a soldier shifted his weight against the wall and said nothing. On this ground, hearing what I was hearing was itself a death offense.

"You said she rubs the ache out of your shoulders, tends you, worships you. Hell, if she could cut open her chest and hand you her heart, she would. But don't you think she'd skin you alive if she knew what you did to her father?"

"Enough." Salvatore's voice was cold, razor-sharp.

Matteo chuckled. "Oh? So the ruthless Don of Sicily has a heart after all?"

He scoffed. "You put the man who raised you, the man you called Uncle, straight into the ground. All to please Carmela."

The crack of a wine bottle breaking made me flinch. Salvatore's voice came after it, low and dangerous.

"Stay out of it."

The sound of glass smashing against the tabletop made me flinch a second time.

"What I did to Adriana and to Ruggiero is a debt I'll carry into my grave. But it had to be done. It had to be done so Carmela could live. If you so much as lay a finger on her, I'll make your dying take a very long time."

"Oh, the great Don truly loves his Carmela." Matteo's tone was all mockery.

"How touching," Matteo scoffed. "But do you think Carmela gives a damn about you? To her you're nothing but a devil with blood dried under his nails."

"You'd best keep playing the gentle husband with Adriana," Matteo went on. "Because to her, you're her savior. A pity she has no idea you're the nightmare she should have run from."

The sharp sound of glass shattering rang through the air.

My whole body shook with rage as I stumbled toward the bar on the terrace. I could never hold my liquor, but I threw back the entire glass of whiskey in one swallow. It burned my throat, and I choked, and the tears ran hot down my cheeks.

The conversation I had just overheard echoed in my mind.

So the one who betrayed my father was not Matteo.

It was Salvatore. The man who had fought for justice for my father. That charred, ruined thing I had looked upon that day, the body they made of him, was Salvatore's doing.

No wonder he had stood so calm at the burial, looking down at what was left of my father with that cold, still expression. I had been such a fool to think grief and fury had simply hollowed him out. It turned out the man I had shared a bed with for years, the man I trusted with my life, had been the executioner all along.

All those years of warmth, all that tenderness, had been nothing but a front, the same careful front the Family showed the world. A calculated act to ease his own guilt and keep me blind.

I was a fool.

Hatred boiled in my chest. My hand clenched around the crystal glass, and in that moment Salvatore appeared behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and pressing his face into the curve of my neck.

"Sandra, where have you been?" His voice was heavy with drink. "I missed you. Let's go home."

For years, every time the wine took him, he would pull me into his arms and tell me he loved me, over and over.