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."

That night, my soul was pulled by an unseen force, inexplicably tethered to Lev.

I materialized in the corner of his penthouse overlooking the Chicago skyline.

City lights poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting fractured shadows across the sterile apartment. It was a world away from the warm, chaotic, garlic-scented kitchen of the Moretti estate where we used to hide.

Katya was waiting for him on a white leather sofa. She was the niece of Sergei Tarasov, the boss of the Russian Bratva, and Lev's new fiancée.

Katya possessed everything I lacked.

She was tall, blonde, and utterly ruthless, raised from the cradle in a blood-soaked mob family. She didn't fear violence; she reveled in it.

When Lev walked in, looking thoroughly exhausted, Katya practically pounced on him.

"Lev, darling," she purred, tracing his jawline. "You look terrible. Did that old Italian give you a headache?"

Lev poured himself a neat whiskey, ignoring her touch. "Vincenzo is stubborn. It's a genetic defect in his bloodline."

Katya rolled her eyes and walked over to the coffee table.

She picked up a velvet jewelry box and handed it to him. "I brought you a gift to celebrate taking over the South Side. A custom platinum money clip. I noticed you always keep that filthy, beat-up Zippo in your breast pocket-it ruins the lines of your suits. It's time for an upgrade."

Lev's expression instantly darkened.

His hand instinctively shot to his chest, his fingers brushing the fabric right over his heart, feeling the hard outline of the silver lighter.

It was the only thing I had ever given him.

Five and a half years ago.

Back then, Leo was just a street soldier working for my father, and I was the untouchable Mafia princess.

We had been seeing each other in secret for months.

On his twenty-first birthday, I pooled together my allowance and bought him a solid silver Zippo.

Too terrified to let a jeweler see my name next to his, I bought a metal engraving kit and did it myself.

I stayed up all night in my bedroom, squinting under the desk lamp, meticulously carving his name into the metal,

right next to a tiny, crooked little star.

By the time I finished, my fingers were blistered and bleeding.

When I snuck into the greenhouse to hand it to him, exhausted and sporting heavy bags under my eyes, he looked at that lighter like it was the Holy Grail.

He pulled me into the shadows, cupping my face with his rough hands, and kissed the dark circles under my eyes.

"Clara, you shouldn't have worn yourself out for me," he whispered, his voice thick with emotion. "I'm a nobody. You don't owe me a damn thing."

"I wanted to," I replied, resting my head against his chest. "I want you to carry a piece of me wherever you go."

Back in the penthouse, Katya tried to reach into Lev's pocket to fish out the lighter.

Lev suddenly seized her wrist with a sudden, terrifying ferocity.

"Don't touch it," Lev warned, his voice dropping to a deadly, glacial whisper.

Katya yanked her hand back, rubbing her wrist, her bruised ego flaring. "Why do you even keep that piece of junk? It's broken, yet you guard it like it's a holy relic."

Lev pulled the lighter from his pocket.

His thumb gently stroked the crooked lettering I had engraved.

Watching him, I realized he was trembling. The impenetrable mask of the ruthless mob boss cracked-if only by a millimeter-revealing the broken boy underneath.

"I keep it because I hate it," Lev stated, his face blank. "I keep it to remind myself of a lesson I had to learn the hard way."

"What lesson?" Katya asked.

"That love is a liability," Lev said softly. "I used to be their dog. And the only person I trusted... the woman who gave this to me... when The Commission came for my head, she called me a beggar and threw me to the wolves."

"She betrayed me. She abandoned me."

He gripped the lighter so hard his knuckles turned stark white.

"I keep it to keep the hate alive. Every time I touch it, I remember how she humiliated me. How she told me I was worth absolutely nothing."

I collapsed onto the Persian rug, clutching my stomach as if I'd been gutted.

"I had to do it, Leo."

I sobbed, knowing full well he couldn't hear me.

"If they knew I loved you, they would have tortured you to get to my father, then made him execute you himself. If I didn't break your heart, you would have stayed and died."

"I had to make you hate me so you would survive."

"Who is she?" Katya snapped, a flash of psychotic jealousy in her eyes. "Give me a name, Lev. I'll send my hitters. We'll skin her alive."

Lev snapped the lighter shut and pressed it back over his heart.

"No. No one touches her but me. I don't want her dead. I want her to suffer. I'm going to bleed her family dry until she has no choice but to crawl out of whatever rat hole she's hiding in."

"And when she begs me to spare their lives... I will utterly destroy her."

The next morning, Lev escalated the war.

He headed down to the basement of a Syndicate-owned warehouse down by the docks. That was where my mother, Rosa Moretti, was being held.

My mother was no fragile trophy wife. Before marrying my father, she had been the daughter of a master counterfeiter in Palermo.

She possessed golden hands that could forge masterpieces. But she was sixty-two now, and her health was failing.

Lev had locked her in a damp, windowless cell that reeked of mildew and copper patina.

Under the harsh glare of an industrial desk lamp, my mother squinted through a jeweler's loupe, etching microscopic serial numbers onto steel plates for counterfeit hundred-dollar bills.

The Syndicate demanded a hundred flawless plates a week. It was precision work meant for laser machinery, not an old woman suffering from arthritis.

When Lev entered the room, flanked by two armed guards, my mother didn't even pause her work. The only sound in the room was the scrape of her etching tool against the steel.

"Mrs. Moretti, the quality of the last shipment slipped," Lev said casually, leaning his shoulder against the concrete wall. "My distributors in New York found flaws in the watermarks."

My mother finally set down her tools. She pulled off the loupe and looked at him.

Her once-bright hazel eyes were clouded over. The endless hours under the glaring lights were rapidly blinding her.

"Go to hell, Lev," my mother said. Her voice was as dry as dust, but her tone was unapologetically cold.

Lev chuckled, though there was zero humor in it. "Is that how you speak to a guest? I remember a time when you used to bake bread for me when I was starving. You used to bandage my cuts."

"I used to think you were human," Rosa shot back, tilting her chin up. "Now I see you're just a rabid dog we made the mistake of letting inside the house."

Lev's smile vanished. The psychological warfare wasn't working. He needed the Morettis to break. He needed them to curse my name and beg for mercy to justify his blinding rage.

But they refused to give him the satisfaction.

Lev snapped his fingers. Yuri, the hulking guard, stepped forward. He grabbed my mother's silver hair and slammed her face hard onto the steel table.

"Let her go!" I shrieked, lunging forward to claw at Yuri's eyes, only for my fingers to dissolve into thin air.

I wailed, "Mom! Mom, please, just tell him I'm dead! Please!"

But I knew she wouldn't.

Before driving to the docks that fateful night, I had sworn my family to secrecy.

I told them that if Lev ever found out I died for him, the guilt would utterly destroy him.

He had endured a lifetime of abuse; if he knew his survival was bought with my blood, he would put a bullet in his own head.

Even while being tortured, my mother was honoring my dying wish.

Yuri drew a hunting knife from his belt and forced my mother's left hand flat against the steel plate.

Lev stepped up, towering over her.

"Where is Clara?" he demanded, his voice devoid of emotion, terrifyingly hollow.

"Where is that coward of a daughter of yours? Tell me, or you lose a finger. Every day you refuse, you lose another piece of yourself."

My mother turned her head, resting her bruised cheek against the freezing steel surface.

She looked up at Lev. She didn't cry, and she didn't tremble. She looked at him with the fierce, heartbreaking pity of a mother watching a terminally ill child.

"My daughter is in a place you will never reach," Rosa whispered. "She is untouchable. She is ten times the man you are."

A violent flash of agony crossed Lev's eyes. He gave Yuri a single nod.

The enforcer brought the heavy pommel of the knife down hard, followed by the blade.

The sickening crunch of severing bone and cartilage echoed in the cramped room.

My mother let out a blood-curdling scream. Her body convulsed, but she clamped her jaw shut, refusing to give Lev what he wanted-she wouldn't beg for mercy.

I collapsed beside her, sobbing hysterically, trying vainly to press my ghostly hands over her bleeding stump to stop the hemorrhage. "I'm sorry, Mom. I'm so, so sorry. I didn't want this. I thought I was saving you."

Lev stared at the blood. His chest he heave sharply, a complex storm of emotion flickering across his face before he ruthlessly suppressed it.

He walked over to a small cot in the corner where my mother's few meager belongings were kept.

He picked up her purse and dumped its contents onto the floor.

A delicate pearl rosary spilled out, clattering crisply against the concrete.

My rosary. The one my father had given me for my First Communion.

Lev froze.

He slowly bent down and picked it up.

He remembered it. I used to wrap it tightly around my knuckles whenever I was nervous.

He stared at the strand of pearls, his thumb gently brushing over the silver crucifix.

For a fleeting second, Lev the Syndicate boss disappeared, and I saw the Leo who used to hold my hand in the dark.

But then, the delusion of betrayal poisoned his mind once again. He assumed my mother kept it as a memento of a daughter who was off living a life of luxury in hiding.

"Damn it!" Lev snapped the rosary with a violent flick of his wrist.

The string broke, sending dozens of white pearls scattering across the filthy basement floor, rolling right into my mother's pooling blood.

My mother gasped, tears finally spilling from her clouded eyes. "No... my baby..."

"Unless you tell me where she is," Lev hissed, his voice trembling with unhinged fury.

He stomped hard on a pearl, crushing it under his heel. "The debt doubles. If you won't give up her safehouse by tomorrow morning, I take another finger. Yuri, clean her up."

Lev turned and stormed out of the room, leaving me kneeling in the blood.