All Chapters of The Mafia's Seduction : Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

The mansion was dead quiet at eleven p.m. The kind of heavy, suffocating quiet where every creak in the floorboards sounds like someone calling you out.I was sitting on the edge of our California King bed, his bed, if I’m being honest. I stopped thinking of anything here as mine a long time ago, just staring at my phone.The screen glowed in the dark. Mateo’s contact photo stared back at me. He was smiling in it, from our wedding day three years ago. Back when I still thought maybe he’d care. Back when I still believed an arranged marriage could somehow turn into something real.I should’ve known better.My foster parents had set it all up. Clara and Robert Chen. They’d taken me in as a baby and then spent twenty-three years reminding me I should be grateful. I don’t even know if they got paid for the marriage, though the timing of their sudden “retirement fund” right after the wedding… yeah, that was suspicious as hell. But it doesn’t even matter anymore.What matters is I’m twenty-

The bus ride to the Chen house dragged on forever. Forty-five minutes isn’t that long, but every one felt like an hour. I sat by the grimy window and watched the city shift, clean streets and perfect lawns fading into older blocks with cracked sidewalks and beat-up cars. The kind of neighborhood I’d come from. If you could even call it growing up.When the bus turned onto Maple Street and the house came into view, my stomach knotted. It looked the same. A plain two-story with paint peeling in strips and that chain-link fence they’d put up “just for now” fifteen years ago. The lawn was patchy, the mailbox leaning like it was tired. Everything about it still whispered barely getting by.I’d lived there for twenty-three years before Mateo. Twenty-three years that started out okay and ended… I still don’t know how to explain it.Dragging my suitcase up the cracked sidewalk, memories hit like a flood. Me as a baby in Clara’s arms in the few photos they had, she was actually smiling. Robert

I woke up at five. Body aching, back stiff from the damn storage room floor again. My phone alarm buzzed and I shut it off fast, heart hammering. No way was I letting Clara or Lily catch me up this early. Not today. Not when everything depended on this stupid interview.The interview. Just thinking about it made my stomach twist.I hadn’t really slept. Just kept cycling through questions in my head, practicing answers, then losing track of what I was even saying in my own mind. I grabbed my clothes and crept to the bathroom, locking the door. The shower was barely warm, Clara must’ve fiddled with the heater again. Didn’t matter. I scrubbed hard anyway, washed my hair twice, trying to look like someone who hadn’t just spent the last two nights on a mat.The mirror wasn’t kind. Dark circles. Cheekbones sticking out a little more than I wanted. Eyes dull. I almost didn’t recognize myself.But, there was still something there. My hair, straight and soft. Green eyes sharp against pale ski

Pitch black. That’s what I woke up to, my heart slamming against my ribs. For a second I honestly thought I was back at the Chen house, trapped in that little storage room with its stale air and walls that felt like they were closing in. Then it hit me, the mansion. The job. My new room.I groped for my phone on the nightstand. 3:17 AM. The screen’s glow burned my eyes. I was about to drop it back down when I heard it.A moan. A woman. Loud. Way too loud for these walls, walls that looked like they were built to keep everything private.“Oh god! Yes!”I froze, my breath stuck somewhere in my chest.Another sound. Louder. It didn’t sound real too dramatic, too practiced. Like the kind of moaning meant for show, not for someone actually losing themselves. I knew that sound. I’d heard it through the walls of Mateo’s bedroom. I’d heard it on the phone that night everything shattered.But this wasn’t my husband.This was my boss.“Fuck! Right there! Kai!”She screamed his name like she was