All Chapters of The Mafia Lord's Forgotten Wife: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Chapter 1ELENAThe light was the first thing — white and too bright, humming somewhere behind my skull like it lived there. My head throbbed with every beat of my heart. I blinked hard, trying to place the ceiling, the smell of antiseptic, the stiff sheets against my skin. Nothing fit. Nothing felt like mine.I tried to sit up and the room tilted. A woman in scrubs appeared at my side, pressing a gentle hand to my shoulder."Easy. You've had a bad concussion. Just breathe.""Where am I?" My voice came out cracked, unfamiliar even to my own ears."Sacred Heart. You were in an accident." She checked something on a monitor without quite meeting my eyes. "Do you know what year it is?"I opened my mouth to answer and found nothing there. A blank space where the answer should have been. I reached for the last thing I remembered — a rainy afternoon, a coffee shop, an argument with someone about nothing — and came up empty past that point. Like a photograph album with the last third of the p

Chapter 3 ELENABy morning I had a plan, small and stubborn: I would ask everyone who came through that door a straight question, and I would keep asking until someone slipped.The first to come through was a new nurse, older than the one from the night before, with silver hair pulled back tight and the brisk, unbothered energy of someone who had worked too many years to be rattled by anything. I liked her immediately, mostly because she looked like she might actually answer me."What's his name?" I asked, before she'd even finished checking my blood pressure cuff. "My husband. Just his name. That's all I want."Her hands didn't stop moving, but something in her shoulders went rigid. "I'm not really the person to ask that.""You keep saying things like that. Everyone keeps saying things like that. Who is the person to ask?""The case manager will be by later today." She unwrapped the cuff, avoiding my eyes with the practiced ease of someone who'd clearly been briefed. Briefed — that

Chapter 5 ELENAThe morning of my discharge, everyone on the floor moved differently.I noticed it before I understood it. The guards outside my door stood straighter. Even the air in the room seemed to have changed temperature."Big day," the nurse said. "You'll want to look presentable.""For who?"She didn't answer. She just smoothed the collar and stepped back.I sat on the edge of the bed after she left, my hands folded in my lap to keep them from shaking, and watched the door the way you watch a pot you know is about to boil over. I'd waited three days to know his name. Three days of half-sentences and swallowed words and people flinching at a pronoun. Now the waiting had a shape to it, close and inevitable, and I hated how loudly my heart was beating for a man I didn't remember loving.The door opened without a knock.He filled the doorway the way I imagined he filled every doorway he ever stood in — not because he was especially tall, though he was, but because of how he ca