My lover's revenge after my death

Five years after my death, the street punk banished by the Mafia family returned to this soil as a highly respected Godfather.

He didn't come back for turf or business. He came for revenge.

He wanted to make me regret the day I "betrayed" him.

He framed my father as a rat.

He locked my mother in a pitch-black basement until she went blind.

He crippled my brother's right arm, stripping away his gift as a top-tier sniper forever.

To find me and exact his vengeance personally, he had turned himself into a monster.

"She's dead! She's been dead!" my brother roared. "Five years ago! When The Commission sent hitters after you, she took the fall! She burned to ashes so you could live!"

Chapter 1

The sprawling courtyard of the Moretti estate was unrecognizable.

It was raining. My father, Vincenzo Moretti, was forced to his knees.

Once the Consigliere of the Moretti family, he had always exuded an old-world elegance that modern gangsters sorely lacked.

Now, his tailored suit was in tatters, soaked through by the freezing rain and the cheap vodka Lev had poured over his head.

His face was a canvas of purple bruises and jagged lacerations. Yet, his spine remained perfectly straight.

Lev sat in a plush leather chair, completely untouched by the downpour.

He wore a bespoke charcoal suit, the cut accentuating the broad, aggressive shoulders he had built over the last five years.

A heavy, gold Syndicate ring gleamed dangerously on his index finger.

The street punk named "Leo Vance" from five years ago was dead and gone, replaced by the reigning kingpin known as "Lev Tarasov."

I stood inches away from Lev, screaming at him, pounding my translucent fists against his chest.

"Stop! Leo, look at him! That's my father!"

But my fists just phased right through his tailored suit.

I was a ghost. He couldn't see me, nor could he hear my soul being torn apart.

I was trapped in a purgatory of my own making, forced to watch the fallout of my ultimate sacrifice unfold.

Lev's pale blue eyes had turned terrifyingly cold. A cigarette burned between his fingers.

"How does it feel, Vincenzo?" Lev's voice was lethal, cutting right through the sound of the rain. "The great Consigliere. The man who used to own the judges, the cops, and the streets."

"Look at you now. The Commission has disowned you, and your capos have turned their backs on you. You're nothing but a laughingstock, waiting to be butchered in your own front yard."

My father didn't flinch. He slowly raised his head, water dripping from his eyelashes. Even battered and broken, the look he gave Lev held no fear-only a deep, pitying disappointment.

"Tarasov, I have lived my entire life in the shadows," my father rasped. "I have made my peace with my sins. My only true regret... is that my daughter had such terrible taste in men."

Those words hit Lev like a sledgehammer.

I saw a microscopic twitch in his jaw, his hand white-knuckling the armrest. Beneath the ice-cold exterior of this Russian mobster hid a shattered heart.

Lev stood up and flicked his cigarette onto the wet stones. He gave a subtle nod to his enforcer, Yuri. "Keep beating him."

Yuri stepped forward with a lead pipe, swinging it like a baseball bat, and brought it down hard against my father's ribs.

The sickening crunch of snapping bone echoed across the courtyard.

My father collapsed, curling into the mud with a muffled groan catching in his throat.

No! Dad!

I threw myself over my father, desperately trying to shield him, but the pipe simply phased through my back on the next brutal downswing.

Do ghosts feel physical pain? No.

But the psychological torture of absolute powerlessness was a hundred times worse than dying.

Lev walked slowly down the stone steps, his leather dress shoes splashing in the puddles. He crouched beside my father, grabbed Vincenzo by his silver hair, and yanked his head back.

"Tell me where Clara is," Lev whispered, his voice trembling slightly with suppressed rage.

"Tell me where she ran off to. Tell me whose bed she's hiding under. Give her to me, and I'll end this. I'll let you die with your dignity. I'll spare your wife and your son."

My father coughed, blood staining his teeth. He let out a dry, raspy laugh. "You'll never find her, Lev. Neither can we."

The undeniable finality in my father's tone infuriated Lev. He backhanded him across the face. My father slumped sideways onto the stones, out cold.

Lev stood up, wiping my father's blood from his knuckles with a silk pocket square.

He surveyed the courtyard, his gaze drifting up to the pitch-black windows of the manor.

"I remember when this house used to be my sanctuary," Lev muttered to himself, though I heard him perfectly from right beside him. "I remember when I thought you people were gods."

"But now you're nothing. You raised a cold, heartless bitch who sold me to the wolves the first chance she got."

He tossed the blood-soaked silk square onto my father's back.

"Vincenzo, if you won't give her up, then you'll pay her debt. Throw him in the kennels."