I Married The Villain To Destroy You

I stared at the two faint pink lines on the stick, the miracle I had bled for over three years.

I was finally pregnant.

Then, my phone buzzed with a video message from an unknown number.

It was my husband, Marco.

He wasn't at a business meeting. He was at a club, his hand up the skirt of a woman named Sienna.

"She is barren. She is useless," Marco laughed on the screen, promising his mistress the world if she gave him a son.

He was stealing millions from my company to fund her life, while I played the perfect, submissive wife.

But the betrayal didn't stop at infidelity.

At the family gala, his grandmother publicly humiliated me by pinning the family heirloom on Sienna's fake baby bump, crowning her the new matriarch.

When I confronted them at the race track, Sienna pushed me down a flight of concrete stairs.

As I lay on the asphalt, bleeding and losing the very child Marco had desperately prayed for, he didn't help me.

He spat on me.

"You crazy bitch," he snarled, checking on his mistress while his real son died inside me.

He didn't know he had just killed his own heir.

And he didn't know that the man stepping out of the shadows to pick me up wasn't a paramedic.

It was Dante Moretti, the most dangerous Capo in New York and Marco's sworn enemy.

I looked at Marco one last time.

"Our marriage is dead."

I took the enemy's hand. Marco wanted a war? I was about to burn his entire world to the ground.

Chapter 1

I stared down at the two faint pink lines, the fragile promise of a future I had literally and figuratively bled for.

Then, my phone buzzed against the cold marble counter, delivering a video of my husband destroying it all.

For three years, I had endured the invasive needles, the humiliation of cold stirrups, and the pitying, vulture-like stares of the Vitiello family matriarchs.

I had done it all to secure my place as the perfect wife to Marco Vitiello.

I sat on the edge of the marble tub, the plastic stick trembling in my hand.

This was it.

An heir.

The one thing that would finally stop Marco from looking at me with that suffocating mixture of disappointment and resentment.

My phone buzzed again.

I reached for it, expecting a message from my sister-in-law, Chiara.

Instead, an unknown number had sent a video file.

I pressed play.

The sound of thumping bass and clinking glass shattered the silence of my pristine bathroom.

The footage was shaky, evidently filmed from a hidden angle in a VIP booth.

There was Marco.

My husband.

The man who had kissed my forehead this morning and told me he had a late meeting with the Commission.

He wasn't in a meeting.

He was buried in the neck of a woman with cheap blonde extensions, his hand fisting the fabric of her skirt, hiking it up her thigh for everyone in the club to see.

I felt the blood drain from my face, leaving me dizzy.

It wasn't just the infidelity.

In our world, men stepped out.

It was the rule.

But the rule also demanded discretion.

Omerta.

Silence.

Respect for the wife who laundered his money and kept his image clean.

Marco laughed on screen-a sloppy, wet sound that turned my stomach.

He grabbed the woman's face.

"I promise you, Sienna," he slurred, his voice loud enough for the microphone to catch every jagged syllable. "You give me a son, and I will give you the world. She is barren. She is useless."

Useless.

The word echoed around the bathroom, bouncing off the imported tiles I had paid for with the profits from my green energy firm.

I looked down at the pregnancy test in my left hand.

I wasn't barren.

But looking at him, watching him betray fifteen years of loyalty for a promise of fertility from a bottle-blonde stranger, I felt something inside me snap.

It was a quiet sound.

Like a dry twig snapping in a dead, winter forest.

The front door of the penthouse slammed open downstairs.

I heard his heavy, uneven footsteps on the stairs.

He was home.

I dropped the test into the trash can and covered it with a tissue.

He didn't deserve to know.

He didn't deserve this child.

Marco stumbled into the bedroom, the door hitting the wall with a crack.

He reeked of stale whiskey and the cloying sweetness of cheap vanilla perfume.

"Elara," he grunted, loosening his tie.

He looked at me, sitting on the edge of the bed, and scowled.

"Why are you still awake? Nonna expects us at the brunch tomorrow. You look tired. Fix your face before morning."

He didn't even attempt to hide the smear of lipstick on his collar.

He collapsed onto the bed, face down, shoes still on the silk duvet.

He was snoring within seconds.

I stood up.

My legs felt steady.

Steadier than they had in years.

I picked up my phone again.

A new message had appeared below the video.

It wasn't from the unknown number.

It was from a contact I had saved under 'Do Not Answer'.

Dante Moretti.

The Capo of the rival outfit.

The man who controlled half the city's ports and had a reputation for skinning traitors alive.

The most dangerous man in New York.

He was the enemy I was supposed to hate, the monster Marco tried to emulate but failed to understand.

I opened the message.

"He is with my pawn. We need to talk."