The Mafia Fool Buried Them

For twelve years, I trusted my fiancé, the syndicate's ruthless Underboss, and my best friend, Mia.

But on the night of my birthday, I found a dark web forum where Mia was bragging about sleeping with him.

She posted a picture wearing my custom blood-diamond engagement ring, boasting that they had been sharing a bed for six years.

At my grand birthday banquet, they executed their final public humiliation.

Lorenzo dropped to one knee in front of hundreds of Capos, but instead of proposing, his velvet box sprayed cheap, sticky frosting all over my face.

"It's just a harmless hazing prank I lost to Mia in a bet," he chuckled, brushing confetti from his tailored suit.

Looking at his smug face, I remembered the cartel ambush in Palermo.

Lorenzo had shielded Mia with his own body and shoved me away, leaving me to suffer a brutal miscarriage alone in a dirty alley.

In their leaked chat logs, he callously referred to the heir I lost as a weak mistake.

I had protected Mia with my mafia family's name since we were teenagers, and I had loved Lorenzo with all my heart.

Why did the two people I trusted most under the sacred code of Omerta treat me like a disposable pawn?

I calmly wiped the cloying frosting from my eyes and delivered a brutal, full-force slap across Lorenzo's jaw.

Then, I signaled my loyal soldiers to drop the massive projector screen, ready to expose their filthy treason to the entire Family.

Chapter 1

Clara POV

I was staring at the syndicate's encrypted forum when the image resolved itself on my screen: a photograph of the custom blood-diamond engagement ring my fiancé had commissioned.

It had been posted by my best friend.

The caption bragged that the engraved initials were hers. It warned that if the birthday girl did not cancel her mafia wedding by midnight, her Underboss lover would personally execute anyone who tried to show her the sex tape they had just filmed.

The stark luminescence of the phone was the only light in the heavily guarded penthouse.

I had just returned from an intimate pre-birthday gathering hosted by Mia—the girl I had protected with my family's name since we were teenagers.

Darkness had swallowed the living room; I was a shadow recessed in the deep velvet of the sofa, waiting for a message from Lorenzo.

Lorenzo Falcone was the Underboss of our syndicate.

The record of an entire rival cartel, wiped out on the East Coast before his twenty-fifth birthday, had settled into the dark, indelible scars across his knuckles.

And for twelve years, those same hands had been the ones to meticulously smooth the creases from my skirts.

Suddenly, my phone vibrated in my palm.

It was a text from Lorenzo.

"Secure and clear. She was dead drunk, but I got her into her safehouse. Headed back to you now, mi amore."

It was not a feeling, but a physical event: a sudden, violent plunge in temperature, as if a pail of ice water had been dashed over my head, seizing the blood in my veins.

I looked back at the encrypted forum, a hidden network used only by the lowest associates and soldiers in our underworld.

The anonymous poster was currently active.

She was replying to a comment that warned her she was playing a dangerous game by messing with a Made Man's fiancée.

She laughed at the warning.

She boasted that her high-ranking mafia boyfriend would help her exact revenge and publicly humiliate the birthday girl tomorrow night.

She wrote that he always prioritized her safety during cartel hits, diverting the choicest illicit spoils to her before his fiancée ever laid eyes on them.

My fingers trembled as I zoomed in on the photo she had attached.

It was not just the blood-diamond ring resting on a velvet cushion.

In the blurred periphery of the image, resting on a bedside table, was a watch of limited edition.

I had bought that exact watch for Lorenzo three months ago to launder a massive sum of syndicate money.

Beside the watch lay a jade bracelet.

It was the matching half of the sisterhood bracelet I currently wore on my own left wrist.

Mia was not insensible with drink; she was lucid, lying in a bed with the watch I had bought my fiancé, composing posts on a dark web forum about how she had stolen his first kiss and shared his bed on countless occasions.

She bragged that he had delayed his mafia betrothal to me three times just for her.

A scalding nausea clawed its way up my throat.

I scrolled down to her latest comment.

She complained that the birthday girl had only gifted her a designer bag, completely clueless to the fact that during a syndicate operation trip in our sophomore year, she and the Underboss had slept together seven times.

The memory arrived not as thought, but as a dull, concussive force against my ribs.

I remembered that trip in the mountains.

Mia had claimed her legs gave out on the trail.

Lorenzo had handed me his heavy pack and carried Mia up the rocky path while I walked behind them, wiping the sweat from my brow, trusting them both with my life.

The salt of it stung my eyes before the first drop fell, blurring the glass of the screen.

The two people I trusted most under our sacred code of Omerta had been making a fool of me for years.

My fingers tightened around the phone until the edges bit into my palm. Every instinct screamed at me to call my soldiers, to end this now, to leave Lorenzo a message of ice and ash and disappear before dawn. But the Capos would gather tomorrow night. Every Made Man in the syndicate would be in one room, raising their glasses in my name. If I walked away tonight, Lorenzo and Mia would spin their own story before I could tell mine. No. I would let them believe I was still their fool. For one more day. And then I would bury them in front of everyone who mattered. I set the phone down gently, as if it were made of crystal, and let the darkness swallow me whole.