Chapter 1

Two months before our wedding, Luca claimed he had "face blindness."

He begged me to cut my hair, wear only white—the only way he could "keep me safe."

Safe. In the mafia world, that word is nothing but a collar dressed as a promise.

My mother learned that lesson. Papa swore to protect her too. She ended up at the bottom of a staircase—an "accident" arranged by his mistress while he looked the other way.

I was sixteen when I learned what promises cost in this life.

So when Luca started flinching at my touch, taking calls behind locked doors, hesitating before every kiss—I didn't cry. I didn't confront him.

I booked a flight to Paris. Watched him kiss a woman in scarlet on the open street.

Three days later, I heard a recording. The blindness was a lie. The woman was a Lazzari spy. And I was never his bride—just a pawn in a game I didn't know I was playing.

Grief didn't break me. It turned into something cold and sharp. A blade waiting for the right moment.

Then I dialed an encrypted line.

In our world, there's another way to teach a man the price of broken promises.

……

The man who claimed he couldn't recognize my face kissed another woman like he'd been starving for her his whole life.

No hesitation. No confusion. No blindness at all.

The Champs-Élysées glittered with Christmas lights around me. Tourists shuffled past with shopping bags and mulled wine. A choir sang somewhere in the distance.

And there was Luca Moretti, my fiancé, moving through the crowd with the precision of a predator—straight to her.

She wore red. Scarlet, actually—the kind of red that screamed look at me. Dark curls spilling over bare shoulders despite the December chill.

He grabbed her waist and kissed her like he was drowning and she was air.

Not a polite kiss. Not a greeting.

The kind of kiss that said I own you and I need you in the same breath.

The kind of kiss he'd never given me.

My phone slipped from my fingers and shattered against the cobblestones.

The sound drew eyes—but not his.

He was too busy consuming her.

I stumbled backward. My heel caught on a curb, and I crashed into a vendor's cart. Glass ornaments exploded around me. Someone screamed in French. Blood bloomed across my palm where a shard had sliced deep.

I felt nothing.

Then the police came.

Two officers grabbed my arms, shouting words I couldn't process. The vendor was wailing about damages, pointing at me like I'd committed murder.

"Luca!" I screamed across the chaos. "LUCA!"

He turned.

Our eyes met through the chaos.

And I saw it—the flicker of recognition. The brief flash of panic he couldn't quite hide.

He knew exactly who I was.

One of the officers followed my gaze. He approached Luca, gesturing toward me. "Monsieur, do you know this woman?"

Luca straightened his coat. His expression smoothed into polite confusion—the same mask he wore in negotiations, in business meetings.

In lies.

"No." His voice carried across the distance, calm and clear. "I've never seen her before."

Something cracked inside my chest.

"You're lying!" I thrashed against the officers' grip. "Luca Moretti! Look at me! You know exactly who I am!"

He looked. Really looked.

And in his eyes, I saw nothing but cold irritation.

"I don't know this woman," he said again, slower this time, as if I were stupid. "I'm sorry, officer. I can't help you."

The woman in red pressed closer to his side. "He's my boyfriend. We don't know this crazy woman."

Luca's arm tightened around her shoulders. "That's right. She's my girlfriend."

My fiancé, right in front of me, had completely denied my existence—and claimed another woman as his own.

In that moment, my voice died in my throat.

They turned and walked away. His hand rested on the small of her back—possessive, familiar.

The police shoved me toward their car.

He never looked back.

Not once.

……

I spent three days in a French holding cell.

No lawyer. No phone call. No word from the Moretti family.

The walls were gray. The bed was a metal slab. The guards spoke to me like I was trash—just another crazy foreigner who'd ruined someone's Christmas Eve.

I didn't sleep. I didn't cry.

I counted the cracks in the ceiling and replayed every lie Luca had ever told me.

On the third day, the cell door opened.

It wasn't a Moretti soldier.

It was Nico—my brother Sebastián's right hand. A Costa man, through and through.

"Sebastián sent me." His voice was low, careful. "Let's go."

The drive to the airport was silent. I sat in the back seat, still wearing the bloodstained white coat I'd been arrested in. The cut on my palm had scabbed over—ugly and raw.

My phone buzzed. Sebastián.

I answered.

"What did you see?" His voice was calm. Measured. The voice of a man raised in the same darkness I was.

I said nothing.

The silence stretched between us—heavy with everything I couldn't say over an unsecured line.

Finally, he spoke again: "Whatever you decide to do, I stand behind you."

The line went dead.

The plane touched down at JFK as dawn broke over Manhattan.

In the car, I pulled out a small velvet box from my carry-on. Inside lay my mother's earrings—diamond starbursts that caught the light like frozen tears.

She'd worn them the night she died.

Everyone called it an accident. A fall down the stairs. Tragic, they said. So sudden.

We all knew better.

Papa's mistress had arranged it. And Papa had let it happen—because Mama had become inconvenient.

I traced the edge of one earring, the metal cool against my fingertip.

She had loved him until the very end. Even when he paraded other women in front of her. Even when he stopped coming home. Even when she must have known what was coming.

She loved him.

And it killed her.

I closed the box.

"I won't be like you, Mama," I whispered. "I won't die loving a man who never deserved me."

Outside the window, New York rose from the dark—steel and glass and secrets buried deep.

Somewhere in this city, Luca Moretti was waiting for his obedient little bride to come crawling home.

He had no idea what was coming.