My Dead Husband Returned With Another Woman

Three years after I buried an empty casket for my husband, I found him alive in a grocery store parking lot.

He was rubbing a stranger's pregnant belly, smiling a soft smile I had never seen in our years of marriage.

My husband, the ruthless Don of Chicago, had become "Arthur," a gentle man with no memory of the empire he ruled or the wife he left behind.

To protect his happiness, I swallowed my agony and lied.

"I am his cousin," I told his pregnant fiancée, Mia.

I brought them home to his estate, enduring the torture of watching him give her the tenderness that used to belong to me.

But my mercy was rewarded with cruelty.

Dante looked at me with cold, unfamiliar eyes and slapped divorce papers onto the table.

"Sign them," he demanded, his voice devoid of emotion. "I want to marry Mia before the baby comes. I want a fresh start."

He didn't know I was dying of a heart defect caused by the stress of grieving him.

He didn't know I stalled for two weeks not for money, but because I wanted to be buried with his name.

I died the morning the deadline arrived, taking the secret of my love to the grave.

Ironically, that very night, a bullet grazed his temple during an ambush, unlocking the memories he had lost.

He remembered the peach orchard. He remembered our blood oath. He remembered that I was his soulmate.

He ran to my brother's gates, screaming my name, blood pouring down his face, desperate to beg for forgiveness.

But my brother just stood there, blocking the entrance to the cemetery with a cruel smile.

"She waited for you every single day," he spat.

"And you killed her."

Chapter 1

Elena POV

Three years after I buried an empty casket for the most dangerous man in Chicago, a blurred photo on a burner phone had driven me five hundred miles into the middle of nowhere, only to watch my dead husband rub another woman's pregnant belly.

The engine of the black SUV hummed beneath me, a low vibration that rattled through my bones.

Rocco sat in the driver's seat, his knuckles stark white against the leather steering wheel.

We were parked across the street from a grocery store in a town that didn't even deserve a name on a map.

It was the kind of place where people left their doors unlocked because they had nothing worth stealing.

My heart hammered against my ribs in a frantic, broken rhythm.

My doctor called it Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.

Broken heart syndrome.

It felt like a fist squeezing the life out of me, a constant reminder of the day the Chicago Outfit lost its heir and I lost my soul.

"Principessa," Rocco whispered.

His voice was rough, like gravel grinding on glass.

"Are you sure you want to see this?"

I didn't answer.

I couldn't.

My gaze was glued to the automatic doors of the store.

They slid open, and the air in the car suddenly felt too thin.

A man walked out.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, filling the space around him with an effortless command that I knew better than my own reflection.

Dante Moretti.

The Don who had burned down a warehouse in Bratva territory just because they disrespected me.

The man who had severed heads and placed them on spikes to mark the border of his city.

He was wearing a flannel shirt.

His sleeves were rolled up, revealing the familiar ink on his forearms, but his hands weren't covered in blood.

They were carrying two paper bags filled with groceries.

He turned his head.

Sunlight caught the sharp angle of his jaw, the same jaw I used to trace with my fingertips while he slept.

He wasn't scowling.

He was smiling.

It was a soft, easy smile that I had never seen in the five years I had known him.

Then she walked out behind him.

She was small, with hair the color of wheat and a face that had never seen the inside of an interrogation room.

One of her hands rested on the swell of her stomach.

She said something to him, and Dante laughed.

The sound didn't reach me through the glass, but the sight of it tore through my chest like a bullet.

He shifted the bags to one arm.

He reached out with his free hand and placed it gently on her stomach.

He leaned down and kissed her forehead.

The Dante Moretti I knew broke fingers for looking at me wrong.

This man looked like he was afraid the wind might blow too hard on this stranger.

My vision blurred.

The ghost I had mourned for three years wasn't dead.

He was just happy.

And he wasn't happy with me.

Elena POV

"He's breathing," I whispered.

The words tasted like ash on my tongue.

"That's all that matters. Dio, he's alive."

My hands were shaking in my lap.

I clasped them together, squeezing until my nails bit into the skin, trying to ground myself in the pain so I wouldn't fall apart.

Beside me, Rocco shifted in his seat.

He reached for the door handle, his other hand drifting toward the gun holstered beneath his jacket.

"I should go get him," Rocco growled, his voice vibrating with restrained violence. "I should drag him back to the car. The Outfit has been bleeding without him."

"No."

My voice was sharper than I intended.

"Look at him, Rocco."

We watched Dante open the passenger door of a rusted sedan for the woman.

He helped her in with a reverence that made my stomach churn.

"That isn't the Underboss of Chicago," I said, bitterness coating my throat. "That is a man named Arthur. Or whatever she calls him."

Rocco hesitated.

"Elena, he is your husband."

Husband.

The word echoed in the suffocating silence of the car.

I closed my eyes, and the image of our wedding day flashed behind my lids.

It had been a strategic alliance.

The Vitiello crime family of New York and the Moretti Outfit of Chicago.

We were the royalty of the underworld.

I had worn white lace that cost more than this entire town.

He had worn a black suit and a look of lethal boredom.

But that boredom had turned into obsession.

He had claimed me.

He had marked every inch of my skin with his touch, possessing me completely until the day he was deployed to handle a dispute with the Russians.

They told me it was a car bomb.

They said there was nothing left to bury.

I had collapsed when the Consigliere brought me his bloodied jacket.

I had spent three years lighting candles in the family chapel.

I refused to take off my ring.

I refused to let anyone else sit in his chair at the head of the table.

Now, looking at him, I realized the cruelest joke of all.

I was dying from a heart that refused to beat without him.

And he was living a life where I didn't even exist.

A tear slipped down my cheek.

I wiped it away angrily.

"He looks... peaceful," Rocco said, his voice low.

"He looks domesticated," I corrected, spitting the word like a curse.

Dante walked around to the driver's side of the sedan.

He paused.

Suddenly, his head snapped up.

His eyes locked onto our black SUV.

Even from this distance, through the tinted glass, I felt the impact.

His gaze wasn't soft anymore.

It was cold.

Calculating.

It was the look of a predator spotting a potential threat.

For a second, hope flared in my chest, hot and agonizing.

Maybe he remembered.

Maybe he felt the pull of the bond we shared, the blood oath we took.

But then he looked away, dismissing us as passing traffic, and slid into the car with the woman who carried his child.

Elena POV

We trailed them.

It wasn't difficult.

They drove slowly, carefully, respecting speed limits that my world ignored.

They pulled up to a small, white house with a peeling picket fence. It was the kind of house a child draws in kindergarten-simple, innocent, and utterly ordinary.

I signaled Rocco to stop.

We stepped out of the vehicle. The air here smelled like cut grass and gasoline, a sharp contrast to the expensive cologne and gunpowder that perfumed our home.

Mia-that was the name on the intel report-was getting out of the car.

She saw us standing on the sidewalk. She didn't look afraid; she looked curious.

"Can we help you?" she called out.

Her voice was sweet.

Too sweet.

Dante was at her side in a blink.

The speed was familiar. The lethal grace was unmistakable.

He stepped in front of her, shielding her body with his own. His hands were empty, but I knew the violence coiled inside him. I knew he could kill a man with a pencil if the mood struck him.

He stared at me.

I stopped breathing.

I waited for the recognition.

I waited for his eyes to widen in shock.

I waited for him to growl, "Principessa," and storm over to demand why I was so far from the safety of the compound.

I waited for the fire.

But there was only ice.

He looked at my face, my hair, my lips. His gaze dropped to the scar on my collarbone-the one he had kissed a thousand times in the dark.

And he saw nothing.

Nothing but a stranger.

"Are you lost?" he asked.

His voice was deeper than I remembered. Rougher.

But the tone was polite. It was the detached politeness of a man who just wants to be left alone.

My knees nearly buckled.

Rocco stepped up behind me, his hand hovering near my elbow, ready to catch me if I fell.

"No," I managed to say.

My voice trembled, betraying me.

I cleared my throat and forced the steel back into my spine. I was a Vitiello. I was a Mafia wife. I did not crumble.

"We are looking for... Arthur," I said.

The name tasted like poison on my tongue.

Dante's eyes narrowed.

"I'm Arthur," he said.

He didn't flinch. He didn't question it. He simply accepted it.

The intel was right. Severe traumatic brain injury. Retrograde amnesia. The Consigliere had suspected it when the rumors started, but he had hidden the extent of it from me.

He had wanted to protect me.

But you can't protect someone from a nuclear bomb.

Dante Moretti was gone.

The man standing in front of me was a ghost wearing his skin. And this ghost was in love with someone else.

"Who are you?" Dante asked.

His hand drifted back to touch Mia's arm, a subconscious check to make sure she was safe.

It was a gesture he used to do to me.

Always checking. Always possessing.

Now, I was the threat he was protecting her from.

I felt my heart crack, a physical fissure running down the center of my chest.

"We're family," I whispered.