The mafia king’s substitute husband
Elian Rossi was raised to be invisible. Soft spoken, gently educated, and the least important son of a crumbling noble family, he was never meant to matter. That burden belonged to his older brother Matteo, groomed since birth to marry into the terrifying Moretti crime empire and seal a peace that would save their family from ruin.
Three days before the wedding, Matteo disappears, and Elian's father makes a decision that will haunt them both. Elian will go in his brother's place. No one will notice the switch, his father insists, not until it's far too late to undo it. Not even the groom.
Everyone in the city whispers the same thing about Salvatore Moretti: he does not forgive, does not negotiate, and does not spare the people who cross him. Elian is being handed over like a lamb to a wolf that has never once shown mercy.
He tries to run on the day of the wedding itself, slipping out during the chaos of last minute preparations. He doesn't get far. A car cuts him off, and the men who drag him back aren't wedding guests, they're the same men who chased him days earlier over a bag of stolen cash he had nothing to do with. It's only in his own driveway, when his father greets the car and calls him by name, that the groom realizes the "thief" he just recaptured and the husband he came to collect are the same man.