The Jilted Ex-Wife Is A Mafia Boss

Violetta POV

I closed my eyes and remembered the day everything splintered.

Serena, the adopted daughter of the Rossi family, had threatened to slit her wrists for the fiftieth time. She wanted my mother's place within the syndicate's hierarchy. She wanted my father in her bed.

My mother, Elena, was worn to a sliver. She drank the poisoned abortifacient to kill the child in her womb, a final capitulation to the madness that had seeped into the very walls of our home.

Gabriel had walked in with the veins in his eyes standing out like red thread. He had promised my mother that Serena was no more to him than a sister. He swore it would be the last time Serena interfered with our lives.

My mother had only smiled, a faint, bloodless motion of the lips. She had nodded, silently handing Gabriel over to the snake he so blindly protected.

Stung by her placid disinterest, Gabriel had wrenched their framed mafia marriage contract off the wall and smashed it against the hardwood floor until the glass was nothing but glittering dust.

He never returned to the safehouse after that day, casting us into a permanent exile.

In the first year of this abandonment, Gabriel officially moved Serena into the main Romano estate. He bought out billboards across the city to celebrate her new status as the presiding lady of the house. He sent a formal invitation to my mother, an embossed card nestled in a velvet-lined box. I watched my mother tear it to shreds and throw it in the trash without the slightest tremor in her hand.

When Gabriel heard about the torn invitation, he offered a slow, dismissive smirk. That night, he stood at the docks and lit the sky with my mother's favorite fireworks, publicly declaring Serena as his true queen for all the underworld to witness.

In the second year, Gabriel brought Bianca into the estate. He registered Serena's illegitimate daughter in the Family ledger as my older sister, an indelible mark of disgrace upon my bloodline. That night, a sound like a wounded animal echoed from the safehouse.

The estate soldiers whispered that my mother had at last gone mad.

Gabriel executed the guards who gossiped, but he stayed glued to Serena's side and officially claimed Bianca as his own flesh and blood.

Now, it was the fifth year. And Gabriel needed a sacrifice.

But before I could dwell further, a rough hand seized my arm.