The Lost Crown

I surrendered my mafia inheritance and let my father exile me just to marry Silas.

He was a broken soldier who knelt in the rain, claiming he gave up his territory to save me from a forced marriage.

But when I went to surprise him with my pregnancy ultrasound, I overheard him laughing with the reigning Don I was supposed to marry.

His downfall was a fake, a ploy so his mistress could seamlessly take my place.

When I confronted them, his mistress pushed me onto the wet concrete.

I woke up in the underground clinic, agonizing in pain, as Silas handed me a crushed pill.

He told me the fall caused catastrophic tearing and the baby wouldn't survive, weeping as he claimed he had to abort it to save my life.

But days later, his mistress walked into my room with white lilies.

She smiled and told me Silas deliberately sacrificed our child to keep my blood clean for her rare illness transfusions.

He murdered our baby just to ensure his mistress had no parasitic competition.

Yet, he still held my hand every day, playing the devoted, grieving husband with flawless, sickening perfection.

The full scope of his betrayal didn't bring tears, but a ringing in my ears that awakened the dormant code of Vendetta in my blood.

I picked up the phone to call my ruthless father.

"I will give you absolute supremacy, Papa."

This time, I would swallow their territories whole and ascend the throne alone.

Chapter 1

Sienna POV

The rain, thin and persistent, traced lines of rust down the corrugated face of the syndicate's market door. I held the ultrasound print to my chest, a foolish curve to my lips. I had come to surprise my husband, to offer him this small, pure thing against the backdrop of his supposed ruin. But as my fingers closed over the handle, the coarse grit of oxidized iron bit into my palm, and through the metal, I felt the low vibration of voices.

A frantic pulse beat against my ribs. I pressed my ear to the cold metal. The words that filtered through were muffled, but their meaning was a blade in the gut, and the hope I had carried here curdled into something like bile.

I push the heavy door open.

The damp air that met me was a solid thing, thick with the brine and decay of the market's gutting floor. I moved into the shadows that clung to the walls like damp cloth. Ahead, a single fluorescent tube sputtered, casting a sterile, flickering light over two figures.

One is Silas Romano. My husband. The man who, weeks ago, had knelt in a downpour outside my safehouse, the rain plastering his hair to his skull. He had begged for my sanctuary, claiming he had surrendered all his mafia territories to my father just to save me from a forced marriage. I believed him. I had let my father, Salvatore—the iron-fisted Underboss of the Moretti family—slap me across the face and exile me from the Moretti estate. I had surrendered every claim, every privilege, for the broken soldier who now stood before me.

The other man in the room is Hunter Falcone. My estranged stepbrother. The reigning Don of the Cosa Nostra, a title that meant he controlled the flow of contraband through the city's docks and the fealty of every man who carried a blade in its twelve districts. There was an air of stillness about him, a density that compressed the very space he occupied and made other men forget how to breathe. He was the man I was supposed to marry.

I hold my breath as Hunter speaks, his voice a low rumble that seemed to vibrate not through the air, but through the concrete under my feet.

"Your little act is holding up perfectly, Silas."

Silas chuckles, a sound so steeped in an arrogance I had never heard that a knot of ice formed in my stomach.

"The downfall was a fake, Don Falcone," Silas replies. "I gave up the Romano territory so Lucia could take your name—and so I could secure the Moretti inheritance through Sienna."

"Once the old man dies, his empire splits between his blood. I'll control half. You'll control the rest through Lucia."