The Mafia Don's Regret: She Is Gone Forever

“I carried the first word I had spoken in ten years like a sacred offering, ready to surprise the man who had saved my life. But through the crack in the study door, I heard Josiah tell his Underboss that I was nothing but a noose around his neck. "Grace is a burden," he said, his voice cold. "I can't become Don while babysitting a mute ghost. Lexi brings power. Grace brings nothing but silence." He chose to marry the Mafia Princess for her father's trade routes, dismissing me as wreckage. But the true betrayal didn't happen in that office. It happened in the woods during an ambush. With bullets flying and the mud sliding beneath us into a ravine, Josiah had to make a choice. I was injured, trapped at the bottom. Lexi was screaming on the ridge. He looked at me, mouthed "I'm sorry," and turned his back. He hauled Lexi to safety to secure his alliance. He left me to die alone in the freezing mud. I lay there in the dark, realizing the man who swore a blood oath to protect me had traded my life for a political seat. He thought the silence would finally swallow me whole. He was wrong. I crawled out of that grave and vanished from his world completely. Three years later, I returned to the city, not as his broken ward, but as a world-renowned artist. When Josiah showed up at my gallery, looking shattered and begging for forgiveness, I didn't sign. I looked him dead in the eye and spoke. "The girl who loved you died in that ravine, Josiah."”