Chapter 1

"Happy Anniversary," my husband said, sliding the separation agreement across the mahogany desk.

It was the eighteenth time in five years I had signed these papers.

Matteo De Luca, the most ruthless Capo in New York, checked his Rolex with cold impatience.

"Sign it, Sera. Bianca is on the ledge again. She needs to see we're over, or she jumps."

Bianca. The ward. The broken bird. The woman whose fragile psyche dictated every moment of my marriage.

I signed my name, and he left me alone on our anniversary to save her. Again.

But saving her wasn't enough.

When Bianca pushed me down a flight of marble stairs in a fit of jealous rage, shattering my spine and leaving me paralyzed, I thought Matteo would finally choose me.

I was wrong.

I woke up in the hospital to find him holding her hand, not mine.

"The security footage has been wiped," he told me, his voice void of emotion. "We cannot have a scandal. You fell, Sera. That is the story."

He erased the truth. He erased my pain.

He protected the woman who crippled me over his own wife.

Two months later, he wheeled me into a gala, playing the doting husband while I sat in the chair that was my prison.

He didn't know I had a burner phone hidden in my velvet dress.

He didn't know that tonight, the obedient wife was going to die on the pavement, and a ghost would rise in her place.

I looked at him one last time and dropped the phone in his lap.

"I hope she's worth it."

Chapter 1

Sera POV:

I regarded the Montblanc pen where it hovered, a black dart of ink and gold, over the eighteenth separation agreement laid out on the mahogany desk. My knuckles were white ridges on the pen's barrel, the tips of my fingers a bruised violet from the force of a grip meant to suppress a tremor that originated not in fear, but in an exhaustion so profound it felt like it was grinding my marrow to dust.

My husband, Matteo De Luca, the most ruthless Capo in the New York Outfit, checked his Rolex with an impatience that made a thin, slicing sound in the air between us.

"Sign it, Sera," he said, his voice a flat, metallic thing, stripped of the timber that once caused a pleasant disturbance deep in my belly.

"Bianca is on the ledge again," he continued, adjusting his silk tie with the detached air of a man discussing a fluctuation in the stock market rather than the methodical demolition of our marriage.

"If I don't show her the signed papers by noon, she jumps, and the blood debt on my head doubles."

Happy fifth anniversary to me.

I looked up at him.

He possessed the stark, functional beauty of a well-oiled firearm; all sharp angles, dark finishes, and the implicit promise of lethality.

"Do you remember what today is, Matteo?" I asked, my voice a thread of sound in the heavy air.

He did not so much as blink.

"I know what day it is, Principessa," he said, the old endearment, once a coronation, now feeling like a brand. It was a tell, a crack in his armor. He only used it when some part of him knew he was hurting me.

"That is why I booked the table at Le Bernardin for eight," he added. "But right now, I need to save a life."

A life.

Always her life.

Never mine.

I picked up the pen.

The ink bled onto the crisp linen paper, a dark wound that spelled out my signature for the eighteenth time in five years.

These weren't real divorces.

They were legal fictions, annulment proceedings or public separations, rituals mandated by the Family lawyers to insulate Matteo's assets whenever Bianca Rossi's delicate psyche decided to splinter.

She was the ward of the family.

The broken bird.

The woman whose father took a bullet for Matteo's father.

And on our wedding day, a day meant to solidify the alliance between my family and his, she had been kidnapped because Matteo ignored a call to say "I do" to me.

That guilt was the third, hulking presence in our bed every single night.

I slid the paper across the desk.

"Go," I said, the word tasting of ash. "Save her."

Matteo snatched the paper, a flicker of something, not quite softness, perhaps a dull ache of regret, passing through his eyes for a fraction of a second.

"It's just paper, Sera," he said, leaning in to kiss my forehead, but I recoiled, a sharp, involuntary contraction of every muscle in my neck.

"It means nothing," he insisted, his tone trying to convince himself as much as me. "I'll see you at dinner."

He turned and strode out of the study, his phone already pressed to his ear.

I watched him go.

He thought he was protecting me.

He thought that by legally severing us every time she spiraled, he was keeping her toxicity away from his assets, from me.

But he didn't understand.

A paper cut is still a wound, Matteo.

And after seventeen, the eighteenth threatens to drain you entirely.