Sold To The Devil: Escaping My Ruthless Husband

I was standing in the center of the gallery, holding a glass of expensive champagne, when the screens behind me flickered and my life ended.

It was supposed to be an art unveiling, but the monitors shifted to fake footage of me handing evidence to the FBI.

My fiancé, Ethan, looked at me like I was a sick dog that needed to be put down.

My father slapped me across the face in front of everyone, disowning me to save his own skin.

That was when Luca Vitti, the city's most dangerous man, stepped in.

He cleared the room and took my hand.

I thought he was saving me.

I didn't realize he was just collecting a new pet.

I was locked in his estate, isolated and terrified.

Then, my healthy mother suddenly "died" of pneumonia in a Vitti clinic.

Days later, I saw Luca's frail stepsister, Clara, breathing easily for the first time in her life.

She had my mother's lungs.

I became nothing more than a breeding vessel.

When I fell pregnant, I overheard Luca and Ethan planning my death.

"Once the kid is cut out, she's a loose end," Luca had said.

They were going to kill me and give my son to the woman who stole my mother's breath.

I couldn't let that happen.

So, I staged a tragedy.

I induced labor in secret, hid my living son, and placed a fake corpse in the crib with a note: The Vitti Legacy.

I escaped while they mourned.

Five years later, Luca finally found the doctor's confession.

He learned that Clara had orchestrated everything.

He opened the velvet box I left behind and realized it was empty.

Now, he knows I didn't kill his son.

I saved him from becoming a monster like his father.

Chapter 1

Alessia POV

I was standing in the center of the gallery, holding a glass of champagne that cost more than my father made in a month, when the screens behind me flickered and my life ended.

It was supposed to be the unveiling of the Vitti family's legitimate art collection, a project I had spent two years curating to wash their blood money clean.

My fiancé, Ethan, stood three feet away, adjusting his tie. He looked handsome in that rugged, soldier way that usually made my knees weak. But when the large monitors mounted on the pristine white walls shifted from a Renaissance Madonna to grainy black-and-white surveillance footage, his expression changed.

The room went silent.

The footage showed a woman with my hair and my coat handing a manila envelope to a man in a windbreaker. The timestamp was yesterday. The location was a known FBI meeting point.

It was a lie. A digital fabrication. I had been in the studio all day yesterday.

Ethan turned to me. The love in his eyes didn't just fade; it evaporated, replaced by the hollow, dead look of a man who knows he has to put down a sick dog.

"Alessia," he said.

It wasn't a question. It was a verdict.

I shook my head, the champagne glass trembling in my hand. "Ethan, no. That isn't me. You know that isn't me."

My father, Dante, stepped out from the crowd. He was a low-level soldier, a man who had spent his entire life scraping for crumbs from the high table. He looked at the screen, then at the disgusted faces of the Capos around us.

He didn't look at me with concern. He looked at me like I was a bad investment.

"You stupid girl," my father hissed.

He raised his hand.

The slap echoed through the silent gallery. I stumbled back, the glass shattering on the polished concrete floor. Shards of crystal sliced into my ankles, but I couldn't feel the pain. I could only feel the weight of a hundred predatory eyes stripping the flesh from my bones.

Ethan didn't move to help me. He took a step back, aligning himself with the family, leaving me alone in the center of the room.

Then the crowd parted.

Luca Vitti walked through.

He was the underboss, the Prince of the city, a man who wore violence like a tailored suit. He was beautiful in the way a tiger is beautiful right before it tears out your throat. He stopped in front of me, his polished shoes crunching on the broken glass.

"Everyone out," Luca said.

His voice was low, smooth, and terrifying.

The room cleared in seconds. Even my father scurried away like a rat. Ethan hesitated, looked at me one last time, and then turned his back.

The door clicked shut.

Luca reached down and took my hand. His grip was firm, warm, and possessive. He pulled me up, not caring that my blood was dripping onto his expensive shoes.

"They will kill you for this, Alessia," he said softly. "They will skin you alive and hang you from the bridge."

"I didn't do it," I whispered. My voice was broken. "Luca, please."

He brought his face close to mine. I could smell his cologne, something sharp and metallic like ozone. His thumb brushed a tear from my cheek.

"I know," he said. "But the truth doesn't matter. Only the perception matters. And right now, you are a liability. You are dead to them."

He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. His eyes were dark voids.

"But I can save you. I can make this go away. But you have to belong to me. No one else touches you. No one else speaks to you. You become mine."

I looked at the door where Ethan had left. I looked at the screen where my reputation was burning. I looked at Luca, the man who I would later learn had orchestrated the entire show.

I nodded.

"Good," Luca said.

Alessia POV

The isolation descended the moment the door clicked shut, but the real blow didn't land until three weeks later.

I was living in a safe house that felt more like a mausoleum, pacing the empty halls and waiting for Luca to fix the mess he had created, when the call came.

My mother, Sarah, had collapsed at the grocery store.

Luca drove me to the Family's private clinic. It was a facility funded by racketeering and high-stakes gambling, a place where bullet wounds were stitched up in silence and without police reports. The air didn't just smell of antiseptic; it reeked of bleach and buried secrets.

My mother lay in the narrow bed, looking small and frighteningly gray. She was a civilian, a gentle woman who had married my father thinking his dangerous edge was romantic, only to spend thirty years terrified of her own doorbell.

She squeezed my hand. Her skin felt like dry, brittle paper.

"Alessia," she wheezed, the sound wet and painful. "Her breath rattled deep in her chest. "It hurts."

I looked up at the doctor. He was a man on Luca's payroll, a disgraced surgeon whose medical license had been revoked in two other states for gross negligence.

"What is it?" I asked, my voice rising in panic. "She was fine yesterday."

"Pneumonia," the doctor said, studiously adjusting an IV drip and not meeting my eyes. "Complications. Her lungs are failing."

It didn't make sense. It was impossible. My mother had the lungs of an opera singer. She never smoked. She walked five miles a day, rain or shine.

Luca stood in the corner of the room, watching. He wasn't looking at my mother, or at me. He was looking at his phone, his thumbs moving rapidly as he typed a message.

"Do something," I begged the doctor, gripping the bedrail until my knuckles turned white. "Put her on a ventilator. Fix this."

"We are doing everything we can," the doctor said flatly, reciting a script.

I spent the night in the stiff vinyl chair beside her bed. I watched the monitors beep in a steady, hypnotic rhythm. I watched the life drain out of the only person in the world who loved me unconditionally.

Around 3:00 AM, Luca came back in. He put a hand on my shoulder. It felt heavy, like a yoke locking me into place.

"You should go get some coffee, Ava," he said, his voice low. "I'll sit with her."

I didn't want to leave, but I was blind with exhaustion. I walked down the hall to the vending machine, my footsteps echoing on the linoleum. The hallway was empty.

I heard voices coming from the nurses' station around the corner.

"Is the transport ready?" It was the doctor's voice, hushed and urgent.

"Yes," a nurse whispered back. "The recipient is prepped in Wing B. We need the harvest within the hour or the tissue won't be viable."

I frowned, pausing with my hand on the coin slot. I didn't know what they were talking about, but a cold shiver ran down my spine. Pushing the unease away, I bought a black coffee and walked back.

When I got to the room, the door was closed. The blinds were drawn.

I burst in.

The monitor was screaming a single, high-pitched tone. A flat line.

My mother was gone.

Luca was standing by the bed, his head bowed. He looked up at me, his face a mask of practiced sorrow.

"She's gone, Ava," he said. "Her heart gave out."

I screamed. The sound tore from my throat, raw and animalistic.

I threw the coffee against the wall, watching the dark liquid splash like ink. I rushed to the bed and shook her shoulders, but she was already cooling. It felt too fast. It felt wrong.

Luca pulled me into his chest. He held me tight, trapping my arms so I couldn't thrash.

"Shh," he soothed, stroking my hair. "I'm here. I'm the only family you have left now."

I sobbed into his expensive suit jacket, clinging to him for support, not realizing I was crying on the chest of the man who had just authorized the theft of my mother's lungs for his stepsister.

Alessia POV

The wedding wasn't a celebration; it was a sentencing hearing.

We were married in the chapel on the Vitti estate, a fortress of cold stone and iron patrolled by a perimeter of armed guards.

There were no flowers to soften the gray. There was no music to fill the silence. My white dress didn't feel like a bridal gown; it felt like a shroud.

My father, Dante, walked me down the aisle. He refused to look at me.

He was too busy beaming at the Capos in the front row, desperate for a scrap of their approval. He had sold his only daughter to the Underboss to prove his loyalty after the "leak."

He had crushed my hand to teach me a lesson, and now, he was handing over the rest of me to seal the deal.

Ethan was there, standing guard by the heavy oak doors. He wouldn't meet my gaze.

But Clara was looking.

Clara Vitti, Luca's stepsister. She sat in the front row, wrapped in a cashmere shawl, looking frail and tragically beautiful.

She had always been sick, always teetering on the verge of death, using her illness as a weapon to manipulate the men around her.

But today, she looked flush. She looked more vibrant than I had ever seen her.

She caught my eye and smiled. It was a small, tight curvature of her lips that promised nothing but misery.

She touched her chest, right over her lungs, and took a deep, easy breath-inhaling my despair like it was oxygen.

I looked away.

Luca took my hand at the altar. His palm was dry, his grip firm.

He said the vows with the same detached, commanding tone he used to order a hit. He promised to protect me. He promised to keep me.

"I do," I whispered.

I didn't have a choice. Outside these walls, I was a rat. Inside, I was property. But property is kept safe.

That night, in the master bedroom, Luca stripped off his jacket and tossed it onto the velvet chair. The room was cold.

"You are beautiful, Alessia," he said.

He didn't touch me gently. He didn't ask. He claimed.

He pressed me onto the bed and took what he believed he had rightfully purchased.

There was no passion, only possession. He wanted to imprint himself onto my skin, to erase whatever was left of the girl who used to paint, the girl who used to laugh.

When he was finished, he rolled over and lit a cigarette.

"You're safe now," he said, exhaling a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. "You're a Vitti."

I lay in the dark, staring at the canopy of the bed. I felt hollowed out.

I felt like a house that had been gutted by fire, leaving only the charred, unstable frame standing.

I thought about my mother. I thought about the painting hand my father had crushed. I thought about Ethan turning his back.

I realized then that safety was just another word for a cage.