Too Late For Regret: The Mafia Queen

On our third anniversary, I spent hours cooking my husband's favorite meal, waiting for him to come home. Instead of a greeting, I overheard him and his mother in the living room, planning to evict me. He was an A-list actor, and I was his secret wife—a "failed PR investment" they now wanted to erase with a $250,000 NDA. He told me my trailer-park background was a stain dragging his career down. Later, when I suffered a severe allergic reaction to a sleeping pill and nearly died, he didn't care. He stormed into my hospital room, accused me of faking a suicide attempt for attention, and called my late mother a pathetic drunk. Even the arrogant ER doctor treated me like a desperate, hysterical housewife wasting medical resources. I gave up three years of my life to be his unpaid maid and his shadow, only to be thrown away like garbage. But what my husband didn't know was that the mysterious, top-tier creator "Xen" he was desperately trying to sign a life-changing deal with to save his career... was actually me. I ripped the IV out of my arm, bleeding onto the hospital floor, and smiled at him. "I'm going to watch you fall." I hired the most ruthless divorce lawyer in LA to take half his fortune, and quietly canceled his dream contract. This time, I'm going to watch his gilded life burn to the ground.

Idella's mother was dying in the ICU, needing a two-million-dollar deposit within forty-eight hours for a lifesaving surgery. Desperate, she begged her billionaire husband, Fount, for an advance on her own trust fund. Instead, he tossed her a hundred-thousand-dollar check for "funeral expenses," fired her from his company, and seized her life's research. He froze all her bank accounts, leaving her unable to even pay the vet bills after their five-year-old surrogate son nearly drowned her dog. When she tried to stop the boy, Fount threatened to have her dying mother thrown onto the street unless she bowed her head and apologized to the child. Stripped of her dignity and money, Idella dragged herself to Fount's private office, only to overhear a conversation through the cracked door. Inside, Fount was intimately holding his adopted sister, Angelita. "But Austin is our flesh and blood, Fount. He can't keep calling that barren loser 'Mom' in public." Idella's universe shattered. She was nothing but a pathetic shield to cover up their incestuous affair, and her severe infertility diagnosis had been a complete lie orchestrated by Fount's doctor. Three years of a sham marriage crushed her soul, but the absolute despair quickly morphed into a freezing knot of hatred. Just as she hit rock bottom, her phone buzzed with a call from Fount's biggest corporate rival, offering her a five-million-dollar signing bonus. Idella took off her diamond wedding ring, ready to burn the Fitzgerald empire to the ground.

I signed a prenuptial agreement with a cold-blooded Wall Street predator just to unlock my trust fund and fight my greedy stepmother. We were nothing more than legal roommates bound by a strict three-year contract. But to survive the corporate war at my family's company, I skipped my mandatory university finance class and paid a guy to answer the roll call for me. The stand-in was immediately caught and kicked out by the notoriously ruthless new professor. That night at dinner, I complained to my contract husband about the professor. "He's an unreasonable, arrogant dictator who gets off on torturing his students," I complained bitterly. My husband just calmly cut my steak and listened as I bragged about how I was going to fake-cry and manipulate the professor the next morning. I even rushed to the faculty office the next day and performed a desperate, tearful apology to an elderly man I assumed was the tyrant. I thought I had perfectly balanced my corporate war and my academic life. I thought I had fooled everyone. But when I confidently sat in the front row of the massive lecture hall, the heavy wooden doors pushed open. The terrifying new professor walked onto the podium and aggressively wrote his name on the chalkboard: Elliot Dillard. It was my contract husband. He looked down at me with cold, merciless authority, knowing every single lie I had told, and slowly called my name.

Years ago, I threw myself in front of an assassin's bullet to protect my Mafia boss husband, leaving me nearly infertile. He knelt in my blood, swearing I would be his only wife. But tonight, I heard him whisper to his childhood sweetheart in Italian: "My wife is a useless vessel; only you can give the Rossi family an heir." He thought I couldn't understand him, not knowing I used to work as an Italian translator. He also had no idea that an eight-week-old miracle was currently growing in my womb. Julian, you will never see your child. I no longer want your promises. I no longer want you. From now on, we will never cross paths again. Adieu, pour toujours.

Barrett handed me a Montblanc pen and a legal document, his voice as cold as the rain lashing against his Tribeca penthouse. He told me to sign an admission of guilt for an SEC violation I never committed. "Eighteen months in prison, Anaya," he said, adjusting his cufflinks without looking at me. "The trust fund is set up. You'll get twenty million dollars the moment you step out." I was being sold. The man I had loved for ten years, the man whose secrets I had kept, was trading my freedom to save his merger with Adele Townsend. He had scrubbed the digital logs of Adele’s illegal trades and pinned everything on me. When I refused, he didn't see my heartbreak; he only saw a malfunction in a business transaction. "Do not speak her name," he hissed when I mentioned Adele’s fraud. "This merger is bigger than you." He forced the pen into my hand, calling me dramatic while his security guards dragged me to a locked bedroom to "cool down." I spent three days parched and starving, listening to the muffled sound of champagne corks popping down the hall. They were celebrating my destruction. My heart finally gave out in that luxury cage, the darkness swallowing me as I realized I was nothing more than a disposable asset to him. I died in that room, alone and betrayed by the person I trusted most. How could he do this? How could a decade of loyalty be worth less than a stock price? Why did I let him treat me like a sacrificial lamb for so long? GASP. I shot up in bed, my lungs burning, but I wasn't in the penthouse. I was in my old, peeling Brooklyn apartment, and the date on my phone was May 12th—three years ago. My phone buzzed with a text from Barrett: "Where are you? Bring the Townsend files. Now." A cold, cruel smile touched my lips as I typed the reply that would start his nightmare. "I quit."

They told me one of them would be my husband. Seven men, groomed by my father to be part of our music empire. I only ever wanted one: Devon Valenzuela, the band's brilliant, brooding lead singer. But the night I caught him kissing his "sister," Delilah, I learned the devastating truth. The seven of them weren't rivals for my hand; they were a pack, united in a secret pact to protect her. I was just a variable in their game. They orchestrated "accidents" to keep me dependent-a near-miss in the studio, a fall from my horse that left me with a broken leg. Devon played the part of the doting fiancé perfectly, nursing me back to health. Then I overheard him confessing to another band member. "It was the only way to get her attention," he said. "The bone breaking… that was an accident. Not part of the plan." At my 21st birthday party, he humiliated me by broadcasting a video of my most private confessions of love for him to all our guests. But he didn't know I had a video of my own-one that would expose his precious Delilah and tear their entire world apart.