Paid In Full: Escaping The Mafia King

My stepfather skimmed millions from the mafia and traded me to Dante Moretti, New York's most ruthless boss, to pay his blood debt.

But Dante executed him anyway, and instead of letting me go, he locked me in his fortress as his personal property.

I became a prisoner in a gilded cage.

He controlled when I ate and slept, paraded me in heavy diamonds, and brutally murdered anyone who even looked at me.

Even the only guard who showed me kindness eventually betrayed me, selling me to a rival gang to pay off his own debts.

Dante slaughtered an entire warehouse of men just to get me back.

He knelt in a pool of blood, his hands trembling as he touched my bruised face, claiming I was his only weakness.

But his obsession didn't make me feel safe; it chilled me to the bone.

I was never a human being to him. I was just collateral. A pet he wanted to own and lock away.

So, during the chaos of a sudden blackout, I ran into the freezing night and never looked back.

Three years later, I had a new name and a new life in London.

When Dante finally found me, standing in my art gallery with graying hair and begging me to come back to be his Queen, I felt absolutely nothing.

I calmly handed him an envelope containing every cent my stepfather had stolen.

"The blood debt is paid, Dante. I don't want your money, and I definitely don't want you."

Chapter 1

I stared at my stepfather's teeth, like shattered bits of porcelain, lay scattered on the oil-stained concrete. His finger, quivering with the palsy of his terror, rose in my direction; he was offering my body to the most ruthless mafia boss in New York as if it were the only currency he had left to pay his blood debt.

The air in the warehouse was thick, reeking of damp metal and the stagnant memory of rain.

I stood frozen in the corner, the serrated plastic of a zip tie cutting into the flesh of my wrists.

On his knees before us knelt Carlo. A man who had once been a proud Caporegime in the Salvatore Famiglia-a man who had raised me with a heavy hand and a colder heart-was now weeping like a blubbering child. He had skimmed millions from the syndicate, tearing a hole in Omerta, the sacred vow of silence and loyalty.

The man standing over him was a statue against the tide of his tears.

Dante Moretti was the acting Underboss, a name that was a gravestone in itself, commanding fear throughout the city. Just last month, he had orchestrated the execution of an entire rival faction before his morning coffee.

He was a specter of violence dressed in a custom-tailored black suit.

When Dante slowly turned his head to look at me, my lungs forgot their function. His eyes were the color of a churning, winter ocean-dark and completely devoid of human warmth.

He began to move toward me. His measured pace seemed to shrink the space around me, his shadow falling across the floor long before he arrived.

He stopped so close that I could feel the stifling heat of his body, carrying with it the scent of expensive cedarwood and the acrid tang of fresh gunpowder.

Reaching out, he wrapped his large, calloused hand around my jaw. His grip was unyielding, a band of iron. He tilted my head up, forcing me to meet his flat, obsidian gaze.

I tried to pull away, but his fingers only tightened, pressing into my skin until a dull ache spread through the bone. He studied my face with the detached curiosity of a naturalist examining an insect.

"Take her, Dante," Carlo's voice echoed behind him, a frantic and wretched whine. "She is a virgin. She is untouched. You can use her, sell her, do whatever you want. Just let me live."

A layer of cold sweat beaded at my hairline, and the metallic burn of bile rose to the back of my tongue. I was nothing but collateral.

Dante did not spare him a glance, his gaze never wavering from my own. His rough thumb brushed over my quivering lower lip. The touch was not gentle; it was a dispassionate appraisal of texture and worth.

I swallowed hard, forcing the words past the thickening knot in my dry throat. "I am not his to give."

Dante's eyes darkened, and a muscle worked itself in the hard line of his jaw.

He leaned down, his lips hovering a breath's distance from my ear. "You are whatever I say you are."

His voice was a low, gravelly rasp that sent a shudder I could not suppress tracing a path down my spine.

Releasing my face, he finally turned back to Carlo. With a single, economical movement, Dante pulled a pistol of polished silver from the holster tucked beneath his jacket.

He aimed it squarely at Carlo's head without a flicker of an eyelash.

"The debt is settled."

He held the gun steady. I held my breath, waiting for the report, my lungs burning until black spots bloomed at the edge of my vision. But instead of a shot, the gun barrel lowered. As Carlo's forehead met the floorboards with a dull, wet impact, the strength seemed to dissolve from my knees, and a tremor started deep in the bone.

I squeezed my eyes shut, the realization of my new reality a physical weight crashing down on me.

A warm hand touched my shoulder.

The muscles in my back seized, and my shoulders hitched upwards in a stark, involuntary gesture of defense.

It was not Dante. It was another man-younger, with eyes of a warmer, more troubled brown.

Luca.

He was a soldier in the Famiglia, someone I had seen, but never marked, at my stepfather's house over the years.

Giving me a look of unadulterated pity, he stepped closer, his gaze falling to the angry red line the tie had carved into my wrists. His hand made a slight, aborted movement toward his pocket, but he seemed to think better of it, held in place by the sheer weight of Dante's presence in the room.

"I am sorry, Sophia," he whispered so low that the sound was nearly lost in the vastness of the space. "I will figure a way out for you. I promise."

Before my stunned mind could fully process his futile promise, Dante's voice cut through the air, sharp and clean as a shard of glass.

"Get away from her, Luca. You do not touch what is mine."

Luca stepped back instantly, his head dipped in a gesture of swift, unquestioning submission.

Dante erased the distance between us once more. He looked at my red, chafed wrists and then up at my terrified eyes.

He grabbed my arm. He produced a switchblade. With a click and a flash of steel, he severed the plastic tie, only to replace its bite with his own grip, the pressure of his fingers promising bruises by morning.

"You belong to the Famiglia now."

Without another word, he dragged me toward the exit, leaving what was left of my past bleeding out on the cold concrete floor.