All Chapters of ACCIDENTALLY MARRIED TO THE MAFIA BOSS: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

VITTORIA'S POVFor exactly three seconds, I did not move.I sat in that chair with my hands empty where the book had been and stared at Rosa's face while my brain tried to process what she had just said, and my body refused to accept any part of it.Diego Alcazar was at the service entrance of the Giordano building.Diego Alcazar, the man who had cheated on me with my cousin on the eve of our engagement. Diego Alcazar, who had looked at me across his living room without a single trace of guilt in his eyes while Abby scrambled to cover herself. Diego Alcazar, who, according to the story outline, my life had apparently decided to follow, was not just a cheating ex-fiancé but an undercover FBI agent who had been hunting Marcello Giordano for ye

VITTORIA'S POVThe study was not what I expected.I do not know what I had imagined behind that locked door. Something cold and deliberately intimidating, maps on walls, weapons on display, the kind of room that announces itself as dangerous before you have taken a second step inside it.What I found instead was a room full of books.Floor to ceiling on three walls, dark shelves packed tightly, the spines worn in the way that meant they had been read and not just collected. A wide desk sat at the centre with two screens and a leather chair behind it, and to the left, a smaller seating area with two armchairs angled towards each other and a low table between them.It smelled of old paper and something faintly woody. Cedar maybe.

VITTORIA'S POVI did not sit down.I stood in front of that photograph with my back to Marcello and my hands hanging at my sides and I made a decision in the space of three heartbeats. Not a calm decision. Not a strategic one. The kind of decision that gets made when every other option has been removed from the table and what remains is the single most terrifying thing on it.I was going to tell him the truth.Not because Ric had told me to. Not because Detective Marcus Reid was somewhere in this city watching. Not even because the photograph on that table had made lying feel suddenly pointless in the way that only complete exposure can.Because Marcello had put that file on that table and opened it and brought me into this room himself. And a man who wanted to destroy you did not give you the walk down the corridor first.I turned around.He was standing near the door with his arms at his sides, watching me with an expression that was stripped of everything performative. No controlle

VITTORIA'S POVThe rest of that day passed like a held breath.The penthouse felt different in the afternoon. Tighter. The men moving through the corridors had changed somehow, same faces but carrying a different weight on their shoulders, the kind that comes when something has been confirmed that everyone was hoping would stay uncertain a little longer.I stayed in the sitting room with Carmela, who sat across from me with her book open and her eyes moving across the page at a pace that told me she was not reading either. We had developed a wordless understanding over the past few days, Carmela and I. She did not ask questions she already knew the answers to, and I did not perform a calm I did not feel, and somehow that mutual honesty without any actual words attached to it had become the most restful relationship

VITTORIA'S POVI stayed.Not because he had told me to. He had said it quietly enough that it could have been refused without consequence, and we both understood that. I stayed because the word had come from somewhere unguarded in him, somewhere that did not usually send words out into rooms, and walking away from it would have felt like closing a door on something that had taken considerable effort to open.I took the chair across from the desk, the same chair that had heard more truth in the last twenty-four hours than most chairs heard in a lifetime, and I wrapped both hands around my coffee cup and said nothing.Marcello looked at the map for a moment longer, then pushed it to one side and picked up his own cup.We sat li