Chapter 1

My father always said, "There's no love in the Mafia."

I believed our marriage would prove him wrong.

Turns out, I was wrong.

...

[You should see who your man's fucking on the livestream.]

It was late. I was going over the quarterly numbers for my three money-laundering casinos when the anonymous message popped up.

I stared at the words. My fingers froze in mid-air.

In the eighteen months I'd been married to Marcello, I’d ignored dozens of messages like this.

Some from "allies" pretending to care. Some from the jealous daughters of drug lords. Others from low-level guys who just wanted to see a train wreck.

I knew they were all waiting. Dying to tear down my "perfect Donna" facade.

I threw them all in the trash.

Because I was running a test.

I wanted to see, if this man I'd chosen didn't know I controlled a vast, dark empire, would he stay loyal?

I had to know. Was my father's rule—"There's no love in the Mafia"—truly unbreakable?

But this message was different.

It was too direct. Too smug. Too specific.

Below the text was a self-destructing link with a skull icon.

I clicked it.

The page loaded. A livestream titled "Donna’s Home. Fucking Another Woman’s More Thrilling" exploded onto my screen.

Viewers: 200,000. And the number was climbing at a terrifying rate.

The background was the master bedroom of our hillside mansion.

And in the center of the frame, my husband, Marcello, was slamming a woman down onto the mattress.

He was wearing the Brioni trousers I’d had custom-made for him, flown in from Milan.

Now, those expensive pants were bunched around his ankles. Next to them, tossed aside, was the crucifix necklace I’d gotten blessed for him by our priest.

The woman writhing and screaming under him was Chloe. A drug lord's daughter with 2.3 million followers on the underground networks.

"Tell the camera how it feels," Marcello grunted, his voice pure arrogance as he gripped her waist.

"Marcello... you're a beast..." Chloe purred, pulling the camera closer. "Your wife is just downstairs. Should we be doing this... oh!"

"Why bring up that buzzkill?" Marcello sneered, picking up the pace. "Her? She’s just some frigid nun who thinks she's better than everyone. She belongs in a church praying, not in a man's bed."

The air left my lungs.

My stomach twisted. My hands started to shake violently.

I stared at the screen. Despair and humiliation wrapped around my throat like a snake.

The stream lasted for three hours.

For three hours, I watched the man I had hoped would prove my father wrong systematically destroy every tender moment we had ever shared.

Then came the "pillow talk" segment.

Marcello leaned against the headboard and lit a cigar. He casually flicked the ash onto the pillow embroidered with my family's crest.

"She actually thought I married her for love," Marcello said, blowing out a smoke ring, his eyes full of mockery. "Can you believe that? I married her because she's beautiful, obedient, and most importantly, she had no power left after her father died. For a man like me, she's the perfect trophy."

Chloe giggled, her red nails tracing patterns on his chest.

"What if she finds out about tonight?"

"What's she gonna do? Cry? Run to confession?" Marcello's laugh was sharp, dismissive. "Seraphina is exactly what she looks like. A pretty, useless little wife who depends on me for everything. She'd never dare to leave. And even if she did, she'd be executed. I made sure of that in our pre-nup blood oath. A wife who betrays her husband gets stuffed in a drum and dumped in the East River."

The chat exploded with laughing emojis.

【The Don is a legend!】

【The so-called Donna is right downstairs? Fucking wild!】

【That Seraphina bitch probably doesn't even know how to fire a gun. She'll just piss her pants.】

The viewer count broke 250,000.

Clips of the filthy broadcast were being cut and shared across every dark web forum in real time.

I watched him turn the private details of our bed into a punchline. He mocked the romantic things I tried to do for him.

He even used the night I sobbed in his arms—after a nightmare about my father's assassination—as a goddamn party story.

At 3 a.m., the stream finally ended.

The screen went black.

I leaned back in my chair, ice-cold.

The naive Seraphina who thought love and loyalty could be earned was dead. Murdered by a three-hour public execution.

I stood up. I didn't shed a single tear.

I walked to the safe, entered the code, and took out the antique Sicilian stiletto my father had given me for my sixteenth birthday.

Gripping the hilt and the tip, I slammed it against the marble floor with all my strength.

The blade snapped, slicing my palm open.

Blood welled up, dripping onto the pure white floor.

The sharp pain shot straight to my brain.

Good. Only blood can make a Mafia daughter see clearly.

It burned away the weak, hopeless feeling, leaving me terrifyingly sober.

I grabbed a tissue and wiped the blood off the floor, my face a blank mask.

I turned, ripped a landscape painting from the wall, and pressed a hidden switch.

The wall rotated, revealing a military-grade encrypted computer.

Retinal scan. Top-level clearance unlocked.

The moment the screen lit up, my fingers flew across the keyboard. Lines of code poured out.

I hacked into the dark web's base server, traced the livestream's IP, and locked onto the holding company for the drug cartel's data center.

"Export." I hit enter.

A progress bar appeared.

In minutes, I had categorized all 250,000 IDs that had watched the stream and posted a comment. I generated a file.

A death list, complete with their real-world addresses.

The sun began to rise, the first rays of light cutting through the studio's gloom.

After a long night, my eyes were still clear, dry, and painfully awake.

Marcello thought he'd just humiliated a helpless doll.

He had no idea. He had just declared war on the deadliest woman he'd never bothered to know.