The Don's Perfect Forgery

Eight elite stylists knelt around my feet, their faces as white as if they were preparing a corpse for burial.

"Donna, please don't move. Just a little longer. Don personally inspected the last batch of test strands and said they weren't good enough." The head stylist trembled as she begged me. "His orders were absolute. Not even a fraction of an inch of your natural dark brown roots can show before the wedding. Please. We don't want to die."

I stared blankly into the full-length mirror. A beautiful, exquisitely made wax figure stared back, with no soul behind her eyes.

Seven years ago, I had been America's youngest neurosurgical prodigy. Now Victor Moretti, the Don of New York, kept me caged in a Manhattan penthouse.

Victor could not live without me, yet he treated me like a pet stripped of all personal dignity.

Three tiny fragments from an explosion seven years ago remained lodged deep in his brain, pressing against nerves near his brainstem. Whenever a storm rolled in, they triggered migraines and hallucinations.

Last night, drunk and delirious with pain, he had pinned me hard against the floor-to-ceiling window.

He bit the corner of my mouth until it bled. What left his lips was not a declaration of love but this: "Don't leave. You have to wear that wedding gown. I miss you so much, Isabella..."

After the stylists left, I crossed the marble floor barefoot and approached the concealed door at the end of the hall, the one Victor had expressly forbidden me to go near.

That name, Isabella, punctured the illusion I had spent seven years building for myself.

I forced down my hammering heart, clung to one last sliver of hope, and typed my birthday into the keypad.

A tone sounded. The light flashed red. Wrong code.

I tried our anniversary. Wrong again.

That last pathetic sliver of hope drained away, replaced by fear. With trembling fingers, I entered 0917, the date Victor had been attacked and wounded in the head seven years ago.

The door slid open. A heavy wave of Venetian white iris perfume washed over me, followed by a blast of cold air.

The four walls were covered with enormous oil paintings and intimate photographs of the same woman. She was blonde and blue-eyed, with a distinct beauty mark beside her right eye.

Beside every image hung a photograph of me taken in secret sometime during the past seven years.

In one portrait, the woman wore a dark red gown and held a wineglass. Victor had forced me into an identical dress on my birthday last year.

In another, she lay on her side across a bed in a seductive pose. During sex, Victor had forced me into precisely the same position.

As I studied the comparisons, matched down to every fold of fabric, ice flooded my veins. He had been checking how closely his forgery resembled the original.

In the center of the room, a display case held the design sketches for the gown I was supposed to wear at our wedding of the century, just two days away.

They were dated eight years earlier and dedicated: For my one true love, Isabella Cartelli.

A yellowed diary lay beside the sketches. The last page bore a frantic scrawl: Victor, if I die, I want the woman who wears my gown to dye her hair blonde, wear my iris perfume, and marry you in my place.

I braced myself against the wall and retched violently.

Seven years. More than twenty-five hundred days and nights.

With the same hands that wielded a scalpel, I had eased his neurological agony and stitched his wounds after every Mafia shootout.

Every time he gazed lovingly into my eyes, every time he possessed my body in bed, it had served a single purpose.

He had merely been pouring his twisted longing and lust into a living specimen built to resemble a dead woman.

I was no salvation. I was a pathetic substitute.

"Darling."

At that moment, a pistol pressed against the back of my head without warning.

Victor stood in the doorway, rain dripping from his black coat. "Who gave you permission to defile this place with those hands?

"Turn around." Victor's voice was terrifyingly low.

I turned slowly.

The moment his gaze landed on the open diary, his face darkened and twisted.

He did not bother asking a single question. In an instant, he seized me by the throat, lifted me clear off the floor, and slammed me into the display case behind me.

"Isabella... who is she?" I forced out through his grip on my throat. "After seven years... what am I to you?"