Chapter 1

The wedding dress was still warm on my skin when my new husband pressed a gun into my hand and told me to kill the woman kneeling at his feet.

Three hours. Three hours ago, I'd been Scarlett Voss, a nobody waitress from the Bronx with a dead mother's rosary in her pocket and a desperate prayer on her lips. Now I was Mrs. Dante Moretti—wife to the most feared mafia don on the Eastern Seaboard—and the woman bleeding on the marble floor of our honeymoon suite was staring at me like I was her executioner.

"Shoot her," Dante said, his voice as calm as if he were ordering wine at dinner. "Consider it your wedding gift to me."

I looked at the gun in my trembling hands, then at the woman—young, terrified, mascara streaking down her face in dark rivers—and then at the man I'd married in a candlelit cathedral two hours ago while four hundred guests whispered about how lucky I was.

Lucky. The word tasted like blood.

"I can't," I whispered.

Dante's jaw tightened, and something shifted behind his dark eyes—not anger exactly, but a cold recalibration, as if I'd just become a different kind of problem to solve.

"Then you'll learn," he said softly, taking the gun back with gloved fingers. "Every Moretti wife learns eventually."

He turned to his lieutenant, Marco, who stood by the door like a shadow carved from stone. A single nod passed between them. Marco stepped forward, grabbed the sobbing woman by the arm, and dragged her from the room. The door closed behind them with a soft click, and then came the silence—the kind of silence that follows a gunshot even when no gun has been fired.

I stood frozen in my cathedral-length veil, surrounded by ten thousand white roses Dante had imported from Ecuador, their sweetness now cloying and suffocating, and realized that the fairy tale I'd been sold was a coffin lined with silk.

Six months earlier, Dante Moretti had walked into the diner where I worked double shifts, sat in my section, and ordered black coffee. He came back every day for three weeks. He never flirted, never pushed, just watched me with those impossibly dark eyes and left hundred-dollar tips that I tried to refuse and he insisted I keep.

"You remind me of someone," he'd said once, the only personal thing he'd offered in weeks of daily visits.

"Who?" I'd asked, refilling his cup.

"Someone worth protecting."

I should have run. Every survival instinct my mother had drilled into me before the cancer took her—trust no one, owe nothing, disappear if you have to—should have sent me sprinting in the opposite direction. But Dante didn't feel dangerous then. He felt like shelter after years of standing in the rain.

He proposed after four months with a ring that cost more than every dollar I'd earned in my entire life combined. The diamond was flawless, colorless, set in platinum so polished it reflected my own stunned face back at me.

"You don't have to say yes," he'd told me, though something in his tone suggested refusal wasn't really an option. "But I promise you'll never go hungry again. Never work until your hands bleed. Never sleep in a room with three locks because you're afraid of what's on the other side."

He knew about the locks. He knew about all of it—the poverty, the eviction notices, the nights I'd gone to bed with nothing but tap water in my stomach. He knew because he'd investigated me. I found that out later. At the time, I thought he was simply perceptive.

Now, standing in our honeymoon suite with the ghost of a woman's screams still echoing off the walls, I understood the difference between perception and surveillance.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. A text from an unknown number:

"You married the man who killed your mother. Ask him about Rose Voss."

The rosary beads in my pocket suddenly felt like they were burning through the silk of my wedding dress, pressing against my thigh like a brand.

My mother's name was Rose.

And she hadn't died of cancer.