To save my husband, the crime lord of this city, I took a bullet to the gut.
As I lay dying, Dante didn't even glance my way.
He was too busy shielding his mistress, Camilla, checking her for scratches.
When I woke in the hospital, I found out that while I was unconscious, my brother had called, screaming for help.
Camilla answered my phone. She told Dante it was just a prank.
The next morning, my brother was found dead in a dumpster.
When I confronted Dante, he defended her innocence, told me not to make a federal case out of it.
He forcibly removed my grandmother's heirloom ring from my finger and slipped it onto hers.
He mocked me for being unable to bear his heir, completely disregarding the fact that I'd lost that ability five years ago, taking shrapnel for him.
Camilla delivered the final cut: our marriage license was never registered.
Ten years. I was never his legal wife.
He thought I was trapped. He thought without the Moretti name, I was nothing.
But I didn't cry. I went to the guest room and packed my knives, not my clothes.
Two years later, I run the only security firm that can rival his.
When a man, his face a ruin, appeared at my brother's grave begging for forgiveness, I felt neither love nor hate.
"I'm free," I said.
Chapter 1
I was still wiping Russian brain matter from my cheek when Dante ushered his mistress into the warehouse.
His hand was on her hip, possessive, while I stood there, the smoking gun that had just saved his life still in my grip.
"Serra, clean yourself up," Dante said, his voice flat, stripped of any warmth. "You look like a butcher."
He didn't look at me.
His focus was entirely on the girl tucked under his arm.
Camilla.
She wore a white dress, the kind of fabric that would stain if you so much as glanced at the grime on the warehouse floor.
I looked down at myself.
Black tactical gear.
Boots caked with mud and half-dried blood.
"She shouldn't be here, Dante," I said. "The Southside cops are still doing a perimeter sweep."
"And that's why you're here," Dante replied, finally deigning to look at me.
It wasn't a look. It was an assessment. A king assessing a tool, not the woman who'd shared his bed for a decade.
"Keep watch. Camilla's not like you. She's sensitive to... this kind of environment."
He guided her toward the VIP lounge, the one clean room in the building.
I watched the heavy steel door click shut behind them.
Ten years.
Ten years I'd spent carving his name into the city's streets with my own knife. I'd fought beside him from street punk to kingpin.
I'd stitched his wounds when we couldn't afford a doctor.
I'd taken the first bullet meant for him when he was just a soldier.
Now he was the king.
And I was just the clean-up crew.
I tightened my grip on the Glock 19.
I walked to the sink in the corner of the warehouse.
The mirror above it was cracked.
It fractured my reflection, splintering my face into a mosaic of a stranger, a woman I didn't recognize.
I wiped the blood from my cheek.
The water swirled pink down the drain.
It reminded me of a promise he'd made five years ago, the night I bled out our child.
He'd said, We're one soul, Serra. Your pain is my pain.
And now, I looked at that closed door.
I could hear the soft murmur of the woman's laughter.
A sound so out of place in this world of gunpowder and steel.
Dante hadn't laughed with me like that in years.
With me, it was all business.
All survival.
I was his anchor in the storm, and he'd grown tired of the sea.
He wanted sunshine.
And I was just the rain.
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