Don't Cry Now, My Heartless Ex-Husband

The smell of leaking gasoline burned my nostrils, but the cold look in my husband's eyes hurt worse.

Trapped in the overturned car, I watched Jacob reach in. He didn't reach for me, his wife. He unbuckled his mistress, Cassandra, shielding her head with a tenderness he never showed me.

He walked away, leaving me to burn.

I survived, but at a brutal cost. My right hand-the hand that played Chopin-was crushed into a useless claw.

Jacob didn't apologize. Instead, he moved Cassandra into our home. He let her wear my diamonds, mock my injuries, and burn my sheet music.

When I tried to expose her embezzlement, he called me unstable. To punish me for "betraying the family," he dug up my mother's grave and threw her ashes into the sea.

That was the moment the wife died, and something else was born. He thought he had buried me under the weight of his cruelty. He didn't realize he had planted a seed.

I staged my death and vanished into the snowy streets of Vienna.

Five years later, I am a world-renowned composer, and Jacob is a ruined man in a wheelchair, begging for a forgiveness I no longer have the energy to give.

Chapter 1

Alexia POV

The world was inverted, and the smell of leaking gasoline burned my nostrils as my husband looked me in the eye and chose to save his mistress, leaving me to burn.

They say pain is loud, a screaming thing demanding attention. But right now, it was silent. The only sound was the rhythmic dripping of fuel and the ragged breathing of the woman in the passenger seat next to me.

Cassandra.

She was whimpering, a high-pitched sound that grated against the groaning metal encasing us.

My right arm was pinned. I couldn't feel my fingers. I couldn't feel the hand that had played Chopin just hours ago at Jacob's command.

"Jacob!" Cassandra screamed.

The door on her side was wrenched open.

Jacob stood there. The Don of the Cummings Syndicate. My husband.

He looked impeccable, even in the chaos of the ambush. His suit was dark, his eyes darker. He didn't look at me. Not once. He reached in, his hands gentle-so incredibly, sickeningly gentle-as he unbuckled Cassandra.

"I've got you," he murmured. His voice was low, a rumble that used to make my stomach flip. Now, it just made me cold.

"My arm," I whispered. It took everything I had to force the air from my lungs. "Jacob, my arm is stuck."

He paused. For a second, his eyes met mine. They were blue ice. There was no panic in them. No fear for his wife. Just cold calculation.

"Get Cassandra to the second car," he ordered his son, Anton, who was standing behind him.

Anton looked at me. He was my son, too. Not by blood, but I had raised him since he was four. I had bandaged his knees. I had taught him to tie his shoes.

Anton looked at me, trapped in the wreckage, and then he looked away. Shame flickered across his face before he reached for Cassandra.

"Strategic value," Jacob said. He wasn't talking to me. He was talking to his men. "Secure the asset."

He pulled Cassandra free.

The metal groaned again. Sparks flew from a severed wire near my head.

"Jacob!" I screamed this time. The silence of the pain shattered.

"I can't move!"

He stopped. He held Cassandra against his chest, shielding her from the dust. He looked back at the overturned car.

"Wait for the fire crew," he said.

Then he turned his back.

He walked away.

He walked away with her in his arms, leaving me in a metal coffin that smelled like death.

I watched them go through the shattered windshield. I watched the way he smoothed her hair. I watched Anton open the door for them.

Something inside me snapped. It wasn't my bone. That had already happened. It was something deeper.

The fire started a moment later.

I didn't scream. I just watched the flames lick the hood of the car, and I realized that the Alexia who played piano for them, the Alexia who tried to be the perfect mafia wife, was burning with it.

I closed my eyes and waited for the end, clutching the only thing I had left-my mother's brooch, digging into my palm.

But death didn't come. Only the darkness did.