The Mafia King's Wife Must Die

At 11:43 p.m., I learned that my husband had seventeen minutes left to kill me, and that he had already signed for it.

I had only gone into his study to find my phone, which I'd left on the edge of his desk after our anniversary dinner. Dante's private rooms were forbidden to me, a rule so old in our marriage that I had stopped feeling it, the way you stop feeling a ring until someone asks you to take it off. The lamp was still burning. Beneath a stack of confidential files, a single page lay slightly crooked, as if it had been placed there in a hurry, and my own name stared up at me from the top of it in capital letters.

ISABELLA MORETTI.

Under it, three lines in the clean, merciless typeface of a legal document: EXECUTION AUTHORISED. MIDNIGHT DEADLINE. A payment confirmation had been stapled to the corner, along with a sheet of instructions about where I would be and when, mapped out with a precision that made my skin crawl. At the bottom was a signature I knew better than my own, the sharp, slanted D I had watched him use on a thousand documents while I pretended not to admire it.

I read the page again, as if the letters might rearrange themselves into something kinder. They held their ground.

This was the man who had kissed my forehead that morning and promised to be home before midnight. He was the same man who had sent a necklace worth more than the house I grew up in, and whom I had slowly, stupidly, against every warning I'd been given, started to love. Everyone in Italy knew what Dante Moretti was capable of. His enemies vanished, his rivals surrendered, and the men who defied him regretted surviving long enough to do it. I had simply never imagined that the list had a place for me, and perhaps that was the whole problem. Perhaps I had mistaken possession for affection and been too flattered to notice the difference.

A floorboard creaked behind me.

I turned so fast the paper nearly left my fingers. Dante stood in the doorway in a black suit, his tie pulled loose, the collar of his white shirt open, his dark hair disordered in a way it never was in public. His face gave me nothing. His eyes went from my face to the page in my hand, and something moved behind them that I had not expected and could not name until later. It was not guilt, and it was not surprise. It was fear, there and gone inside a second, but I had seen it.

"Where did you find that?"

I held up the page. "Is it true?"

He stepped inside and shut the door with a quiet click that sounded far too final. "Give me the document, Isabella."

"Answer me first."

"I asked you to give it to me."

"And I asked whether you ordered my death!" My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated him for hearing it.

He came toward me slowly, the way you would approach a frightened animal you could not afford to lose. "Whatever you think you're holding, you don't understand it."

I laughed, and it came out ugly. "Of course. I'm your wife when you need a perfect marriage to display, and the moment I ask a question I'm too ignorant for the answer."

"That is not what I said."

"Then say what you meant."

He said nothing. I looked down at the signature again, then back up at him. "Did you sign this?"

"No."

It came too fast, a door slammed before I could see what was behind it. "You're lying."

"Do you really think I would lie to you about this?"

"Would you lie to me about anything?"

The question landed harder than I'd intended, and for the first time that night Dante looked away. That was all the confirmation I needed. I backed up a step and pressed the paper against my chest, and when he reached for me I raised my hand. "Don't touch me."

He stopped. Three feet of carpet lay between us, and it felt like an ocean.

"Someone wants you dead," he said quietly.

"I can read."

"Then you can understand that if you stay in this room arguing with me, you may not live long enough to be sorry."

He drew a gun from beneath his jacket. I looked at the weapon, and then at him, and something in me went very calm and very cold. "You're threatening me now?"

"I am trying," he said through his teeth, "to keep you alive."

A gunshot cracked somewhere outside. I screamed. Dante seized my waist and dragged me behind the desk as a second shot burst through the window and glass rained across the floorboards, and then his body was over mine, one arm cradling my head, the other raising his gun toward the dark. Down the corridor came the sound of running feet, then shouting, then another shot.

"Stay down," he ordered, his forehead against mine. "Whatever happens, you do not leave my side."

I wanted to tell him I hated him. I wanted to tell him I would sooner die than trust him again. Instead I caught myself gripping his jacket with both hands, holding on as if he were the only solid thing left in a collapsing world.

The study door flew open. One of his men stumbled in, blood spreading through his shoulder. "Boss. They're inside. They came through the eastern entrance."

Dante rose, pulling me behind him, his voice terrifyingly even. "Secure the house. Nobody leaves."

The man vanished. Dante turned to me, and his eyes dropped to the page still crushed in my fist. When he spoke, it was almost to himself.

"That document was supposed to be destroyed."

The air left my lungs. "How would you know that?"

He reached for it and I snatched it out of range. "Dante. How do you know it was supposed to be destroyed?"

He glanced at the shattered window, then leaned close until his voice was barely a breath against my ear. "Because I have spent three weeks searching for the original."

"Why?"

The lights went out.

A hand clamped over my mouth. Cold steel settled against my throat, and a stranger's voice slid into my ear, almost tender. "Tell your husband his time is up."

Then I was being dragged backwards into the dark, and I heard Dante roar my name.