Broken Strings: The Mafia Wife's Exit

I was bleeding out in the dark, bound to a chair, when I heard my husband tell another woman he would burn the world down for her.

Dante Moretti didn't know I was on the other side of the paper-thin wall.

He didn't know that ten years ago, I was the girl who saved his life in a frozen cave, not his mistress, Sofia.

Sofia had stolen my story, and now she was stealing my life.

When I tried to leave him, Dante chained me in his dungeon and whipped me until I passed out, claiming he was "disciplining" his wife.

When Sofia used steel cello strings to slice my fingers open, destroying my ability to ever play again, he looked the other way.

He even chose to save her over me when we fell into the freezing ocean, leaving me to drown because "Sofia is my soul."

That night, I finally stopped fighting for a man who didn't exist.

I called my brother, the Don of New York.

"The alliance is over," I whispered into the phone. "Take me home."

It took Dante three months to uncover the truth. To see the medical records proving I was the one who dragged him from that cave.

He burned his own boat to trap us on an island, begging for a second chance.

"I can fix this," he pleaded, tears streaming down his face as he touched my scarred, ruined hands.

I looked at him, then at the man standing behind him with a rifle-the man who actually loved me.

"You can't fix a shattered vase, Dante," I said.

Then I watched my new protector pull the trigger.

Chapter 1

I was bleeding out in the dark, bound to a chair with rough hemp rope biting into the tender skin of my wrists, when I heard my husband tell another woman he would burn the world down for her.

The irony was sharp enough to sever a vein.

Dante Moretti.

The Underboss of the Chicago Outfit. The man they called the Ice Prince because his heart was supposed to be a fortress no living soul could breach.

He was the man I had loved since I was sixteen years old. The man I married three months ago in a cathedral filled with suffocating white roses and armed guards.

And right now, he was on the other side of a paper-thin wall in this godforsaken safe house, pressing his mistress against the plaster.

I heard the heavy thud of a body hitting the wall.

It made the framed picture in my room rattle against the drywall.

"Let me go, Dante," Sofia sobbed. Her voice was high, frantic, and laced with the kind of weaponized innocence that only a sociopath could perfect. "I cannot stay in that house anymore. I cannot watch her play the mistress of the estate while I am nothing."

"You are not nothing," Dante growled.

The sound of his voice vibrated through the floorboards. It was a low, dangerous rumble that usually made my knees weak. Now, it just made my stomach heave.

"You are everything, Sofia."

My breath hitched. The pain in my shoulder, where the kidnapper had struck me with the butt of his rifle before Mia took him out, suddenly vanished. It was replaced by a cold, hollow ache blooming in the center of my chest.

"Then why did you marry her?" Sofia screamed. "Why did you bring that Vitiello princess into our home?"

There was a silence. Heavy. Suffocating.

Then, the sound of fabric rustling. A hand hitting the wall near my head with restrained violence.

"Look at me," Dante commanded. "I married Gianna Vitiello for one reason. The New York alliance gives me the power to keep the Commission off my back. It gives me the soldiers I need to protect you."

Tears blurred my vision, hot and stinging.

"She is a shield, Sofia. Nothing more. A political necessity to ensure that no one ever touches you again."

A shield.

I wasn't his wife. I wasn't the woman he vowed to cherish. I was armor. I was a tool to protect the girl he was obsessed with.

"But you touch her," Sofia whimpered. "You sleep in her bed."

"I do what is required to keep the alliance intact," Dante said, his voice devoid of any emotion. "But every time I look at her, I wish it were you. You are the one who saved me in that cave. You are the one who bound my wounds when I was bleeding out in the snow. I owe you my life."

The air was punched from my lungs.

My head spun. The cave. The snow. The Spring Hunt, ten years ago.

Dante had been shot in an ambush. He had dragged himself into a limestone cave on the edge of Vitiello territory. I was the one who found him. I was fourteen. I tore up my favorite silk dress to bind his chest. I sang to him to keep him awake while the blizzard raged outside.

He had been delirious with fever. He hadn't seen my face clearly.

When the rescue team arrived, I had been pushed aside by the chaos.

I thought he knew. I thought he remembered.

But he didn't.

He thought it was Sofia.

Sofia, who had been adopted by the Morettis a week later. Sofia, who must have stolen my story, just like she was stealing my husband.

"I belong to you, Sofia," Dante swore. "By blood and by breath. Do not ever try to leave me again."

I heard the wet sound of a kiss. Desperate. Consuming.

I closed my eyes.

The rope burned my skin. The blood dried on my arm. But the real wound was the one gaping open in my heart.

The man I loved didn't exist.

I had married a ghost.

And now, I was going to have to exorcise him.

The heavy metal door to my holding cell crashed against the wall.

It wasn't Dante.

It was Mia. My maid. My bodyguard. The only soul in this godforsaken, frozen city who gave a damn whether I drew breath or suffocated.

She had a serrated combat knife gripped in one hand and a Glock in the other. Her face was streaked with soot, her eyes wide with urgency.

"Principessa," she breathed, rushing to me. With a swift motion, she sliced the ropes binding my wrists. "We have to go. The engine is running out back."

"Dante is in the next room," I whispered. My voice was a rusted scrape against my raw throat.

Mia froze.

She looked at the wall, then back at me. She saw the devastation in my eyes. She didn't ask. She knew.

"Then we leave him here," she said grimly. "He stays."

We didn't get the chance.

We were halfway down the hallway when Dante stepped out of the adjacent room.

He looked infuriatingly impeccable. His black suit was unwrinkled, his dark hair perfectly styled. The only sign of his recent activities was the slight flush on his neck and the wild, frantic energy in his eyes.

He wasn't carrying Sofia. She was walking behind him, looking pale and fragile, clutching his jacket like a lifeline.

Dante's eyes landed on me.

They were cold. Glacial.

He didn't look at the blood on my arm. He didn't look at the bruises blooming on my wrists.

"You," he said. It wasn't a greeting. It was a verdict.

"Me," I replied. I straightened my spine, ignoring the scream of my battered muscles. I was a Vitiello. I would not cower.

He crossed the distance between us in two long strides. He grabbed my upper arm, his grip bruising.

"Did you think I wouldn't find out?" he hissed.

I stared at him. "Find out what?"

"That you arranged for her to be taken," he snarled, jerking his head toward Sofia. "That you paid those men to drag her out of the estate so you could have me to yourself."

My mouth fell open.

Behind him, Sofia buried her face in her hands, sobbing quietly. "I told you, Dante. She hates me. She told me I was a leech."

"I did no such thing," I said, my voice trembling with rage. "I was kidnapped too, Dante! I was rotting in the room next door while you were playing Romeo!"

"Liar," he spat. "My men found you untied. Mia was walking you out."

He looked at Mia. His hand went to his waistband, where his gun sat.

"Don't." I stepped in front of Mia. "She saved me. Which is more than you did."

Dante released me with a shove. I stumbled back.

"Get in the car," he ordered. "We are going home. And then we are going to settle this."

The drive back to the estate was suffocating, silent as a tomb.

I watched the Chicago skyline blur past the tinted windows, gray and indifferent.

When we arrived at the mansion, Dante carried Sofia inside. He ordered the doctor to attend to her immediately.

He left me standing in the cavernous foyer, a ghost in my own home, with dried blood crusting on my sleeve.

I walked up the grand staircase, my legs feeling like lead. I went to my room. I needed to wash the filth of this day off my skin.

But when I opened the door to my suite, I stopped.

Something was wrong.

The room was too empty.

My eyes darted to the corner by the window.

The stand was empty.

My cello.

My mother's 1710 Matteo Goffriller cello. The instrument that was worth more than this entire house. The instrument that held the last remnants of my soul.

It was gone.

Panic, cold and sharp, sliced through my veins.

I ran to the closet. Empty.

I ran to the hallway.

"Mia!" I screamed.

I stormed into the drawing room where Dante's aunt, the formidable Matriarch of the Moretti family, was sipping tea from delicate porcelain.

"Where is it?" I demanded.

She looked up, her expression one of bored indifference.

"Lower your voice, Gianna. You are being hysterical."

"My cello," I said, my hands shaking at my sides. "It's missing from my room. Who took it?"

"Perhaps the maids moved it for cleaning," she said dismissively, returning her attention to her cup.

"No one touches that instrument but me," I snapped. "Where is Dante?"

"He is with Sofia," she said. "She is very shaken."

Of course he was.

I turned on my heel and marched down the hall to the East Wing. Sofia's domain.

The guards at the door stepped forward to stop me.

"Move," I ordered, channeling every ounce of authority my father, the Don of New York, had instilled in me. "Or I will have my brother burn this hallway down with you in it."

They exchanged a nervous glance, hesitating just enough.

I pushed past them and threw open the double doors.

Sofia was in bed, propped up against a mountain of pillows. She looked like a tragic heroine from a bad opera, pale and fragile.

But Dante wasn't sitting in the chair by the bed.

He was coming out of the ensuite bathroom, buttoning his cuffs. His hair was wet, darker than usual against his skin.

He had showered here. In her room.

The implication hit me like a physical blow.

"What are you doing here?" Dante asked, his voice weary and edged with irritation.

"My cello is gone," I said, my voice trembling. "And I think she has it."

I pointed a shaking finger at Sofia.

Sofia's eyes went wide, feigning innocence. "I don't know what you're talking about, Gianna. Why would I want your cello? I don't even play."

"You take everything else that belongs to me," I said, venom coating my words. "Why stop there?"

"Enough," Dante snapped. "You are being paranoid."

"Am I?"

I walked over to the large walk-in closet in the corner of the room.

"Gianna, stop," Dante warned, stepping forward.

I threw the closet doors open.

Rows of designer dresses. Shoes. Bags. The scent of expensive perfume wafted out.

And there, shoved in the back behind a stack of hat boxes, was the case.

My case.

I gasped and pulled it out. It was heavy. I unlatched it with trembling fingers.

When I lifted the lid, a scream tore from my throat.

The rich, dark wood of the cello was gouged. Deep, ugly scratches marred the varnish. The bridge was snapped clean in two.

It looked like someone had taken a key and carved hate into the wood.

"You bitch," I whispered.

I turned around. Sofia was watching me, a tiny, triumphant smirk playing on her lips that only I could see.

I didn't think. I didn't calculate.

I crossed the room and slapped her.

The sound was like a gunshot in the silence.

Sofia's head snapped to the side. She let out a piercing shriek.

Dante moved faster than I could track.

He grabbed my wrist, twisting it painfully behind my back. He shoved me away from the bed with brutal force.

"Don't you ever touch her," he roared. His eyes were black pits of fury.

"She destroyed it!" I screamed, pointing at the cello. "Look at it, Dante! That was my mother's!"

Dante glanced at the ruined instrument. He looked back at Sofia, who was holding her cheek, tears streaming down her face.

"It's just wood, Gianna," he said coldly. "It's trash. You can buy another one."

I stared at him.

Just wood.

"It is not just wood," I said, my voice breaking. "It is my voice. And she broke it."

"She didn't do it," Dante said, his denial absolute. "She has been in bed all day."

"She is lying!"

"I will order an internal investigation," Dante said, his tone final. "Now get out. Before I forget that you are a Vitiello and treat you like the soldier you are acting like."

He turned his back on me. He sat on the edge of the bed and gently touched Sofia's red cheek.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to her.

He was apologizing to the monster.

I grabbed the handle of my broken cello case and dragged it out of the room.

The wheels clicked on the marble floor.

Click. Click. Click.

Like the countdown of a bomb.