All Chapters of After Leaving the Cheater, the Mafia Princess Found True Love: Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

Tomorrow was supposed to be the day Kane and I left New York for Europe, the day he was set to join my family and start our life together.I thought we were each other's one true thing. I was wrong.Three years together, and it had always been a con. He'd been playing me for my assets from day one, while his heart had never left his childhood sweetheart.The moment I heard the truth, my chest seized.When we first met, Kane was the illegitimate son of the Stafford Family, cast out, hunted by enemies, bleeding out in a dark alley with nowhere left to go.I had just turned eighteen. I couldn't stand there and watch a life drain away in the gutter. So I acted.I activated a private medical team that operated across borders. I took over an entire underground clinic. I threw everything at keeping him alive: experimental treatments, specialist surgeons, three days and nights of round-the-clock care. And it worked.When Kane came around, he scanned the room with wary eyes.I didn't want him t

The door slammed behind them.I stood there staring at the space they'd left: the wine-stained floor, the ruined couture robe crumpled like trash, the cheap perfume still hanging in the air. I thought about the two of them in my bed, and the nausea was overwhelming.This apartment was contaminated. I couldn't breathe in it for one more second.I took out my phone and sent a message to building management: "Put this unit on the market immediately. Everything inside, furniture, clothes, personal items, dispose of it all. I want new ownership confirmed within three days."Thirty minutes later, I was standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows of the presidential suite at the most expensive hotel in New York, with the whole city glittering sixty floors below.I showered, changed into a clean robe, and sat down on the bed, and that's when my phone started going off.Transaction alerts, one after another. A Chanel logo belt. A Gucci all-over monogram suit in clashing red and green. A Hermès bag

Five days passed fast.In those five days, I went completely dark on Kane, and to his credit, he didn't push — because he was too busy destroying himself without any help from me.Without my money moving in the background, he had nothing. And rather than sit still, he borrowed against everything he had: his blocks, his territory, whatever scraps of credit his name could still pull. All of it went toward funding one evening of performance at the Stafford Family gathering. A custom suit he couldn't afford, a rented Rolls-Royce he had no business sitting in, every dollar borrowed at ugly rates and collateralized against the last things he owned.He wasn't scared. In his head, the moment the clock hit five days, my assets would fall into his lap and everything would sort itself out.The night of the gathering, Kane walked in like he'd already won — tailored jacket, chin up, smile on. Alicia was on his arm, dressed up and glowing.They worked the room with their drinks, laughing too loud, t

Coming home to the European operation was everything I'd forgotten it could be.Here, I was undisputed. The Don's daughter, the woman every family deferred to without being asked. Every morning started with a team running on my schedule; I traveled in armored cars and private helicopters; the signature rights to half a dozen cross-border operations sat at my fingertips.Three years in New York, living small to protect Kane's ego — hiding who I was, watching my budget, swallowing my identity so he wouldn't feel overshadowed. Looking back, it seemed almost impossible that I'd let it go that far.Alessandro was rarely more than a few hours away now.We tasted century-old vintages in a private vineyard outside Paris. We stood at the bow of his yacht off Monaco while the wind came in off the sea. He had memorized every preference I had, never asked me to compromise, and always had everything arranged before I thought to ask. The warmth between us moved slowly, deliberately, comfortable and

Alessandro kept his word, and from that day on, nothing dirty reached me.Time passed — enough that the whole New York chapter started feeling like something that had happened to someone else.Then one afternoon, deep in a stack of international tabloid gossip, I came across a mention of Kane.After being sent back from Europe, he'd apparently come apart at every seam. Word was he'd become a fixture on the worst streets in Manhattan — shabby coat, talking to himself, scrounging through alley trash while muttering about hundreds of billions in offshore accounts, about being the heir to the most powerful crime dynasty in Europe, about how Fran had always loved him.And then, one winter night in a dead-end alley, he'd found Alicia, also on the street, also nothing. He'd stabbed her with whatever he had on him, kept laughing while he did it, apparently. Said she'd taken his empire. Said she'd stolen the life that was supposed to be his.He died in prison not long after.I sat in the sunlit