Bias Mafia Short Stories & Marriage Novels

Five years ago, my family died in a car crash. My parents. My adopted sister, Liz. Everyone but me. They left behind grief, an empty house, and a debt so large it swallowed my life. When the collectors came, I turned to the only person I had left—my husband, Adrian. He told me he had cut ties with his own family to marry me and had nothing left. I believed him. For five years, I worked every job I could find, paid every dollar I earned, and told myself love was worth the suffering. When the balance dropped to its final $18,000, I signed up for a paid drug trial at a private clinic. They handed me a waiver, warned me about possible delayed reactions, and promised fast money if I swallowed the experimental dose. I thought it would buy us a new beginning. Instead, I came home early and heard Adrian on the phone. “Let Liz use the card. Evelyn still doesn’t know. She took away Liz’s money five years ago, so she has to earn every dollar back herself.” Then he laughed softly. “One more year, and her punishment is over.” That was how I learned the dead were alive. The debt was fake. My husband had never been poor. And the life I had fought so hard to survive was only a sentence they had given me.

In my last life, Enzo Saletta saved me from the fire. Chiara Bellini died in my place. For months, he cared for me like a devoted husband. He guarded my hospital room. He bought gifts for our unborn child. He told me none of it was my fault. I believed him. Until the night after I gave birth. Our son was asleep beside me. I was too weak to move, still aching from labor, but for one brief moment, I believed we were safe. Then I smelled smoke. The door would not open. Outside the locked door, Enzo’s voice cut through the smoke. “You took Chiara from me. Now burn with your child.” I screamed his name until my throat bled. No one opened the door. The flames swallowed me and my newborn son. When I opened my eyes again, I was back inside that burning warehouse. Five months pregnant. Smoke in my lungs. Chiara still alive. This time, I did not call Enzo. I waited until he came. I watched him carry Chiara out first. Then I crawled through the fire alone, bleeding for a child he would never get the chance to kill. Everyone believed I had set the fire. Everyone called me jealous, vicious, and insane. But they had forgotten one thing. Before I became Enzo Saletta’s wife, I was the woman who helped build the Carmine family’s security system. Chiara deleted the main footage. She did not delete mine.

My fiancée and I had been together for ten years. In everyone's eyes, we were the perfect couple. After she saved my life, with tears in my eyes, I made her a promise: "In this lifetime, I'll do 100 things for you." On the eve of our wedding, we decided to climb a snow-covered mountain. An unexpected avalanche struck, and we were stranded at a local farmhouse. Her first love, who was the expedition leader, was injured while trying to save her. In the confusion, he accidentally took an aphrodisiac rather than a painkiller. My fiancée, who had always seemed so traditional and reserved, did not hesitate. She began taking off her clothes, saying she needed to "help" him. Everyone waited for me to explode in rage. Instead, I calmly stepped aside. Three promises remained. Once they were fulfilled, Yvette Jenkins and I would owe each other nothing. However, then it would be time for me to return… and take over my mafia family.

On our seventh wedding anniversary, I found another woman’s lace thong in my bedroom. My husband, Mark Donovan, stood in front of the closet and said coldly, “She’s just a kid, Leslie. Don’t make this ugly.” That “kid” was pregnant with his child. That “kid” had already moved into my home, worn his shirts, slept in my bed, and made him cut down the magnolia tree my dead parents planted for me. Everyone in the Donovan family thought I would scream, cry, and beg. After all, I had loved Mark for nine years. But this time, I only picked up my suitcase. Because they didn’t know one thing. The divorce had already been filed. The Donovan wife’s emerald brooch had already been returned. And the evidence against his precious little mistress had already been delivered to the old Don. Mark thought I was walking out of his mansion. He didn’t know I was walking out of his life. Forever.

I am halfway through filling out the marriage application with Luca Moretti when his phone rings. He glances at the screen, and the moment he sees the caller's name, his expression changes. "I have something urgent to take care of. We'll register our marriage another day," he says after answering it. Before I can say anything, Luca is already on his feet. A moment later, he hurries out of city hall, leaving me sitting there alone with the unfinished application in front of me. All because his childhood friend, Rosa Conti, has woken up from a nightmare. A little while later, my phone buzzes. Luca has sent me a text. "Rosa is extremely upset. I need to stay with her. I'm not coming back today." I stare at the message, my fingers tightening around my phone. This isn't the first time Luca has abandoned me for Rosa. There have been countless occasions when he's chosen her over me. Every time, I've argued with him, cried, and eventually forgiven him when he comes back. But this time is different. For once, I'm not going to argue. I'm not going to wait for him to come back, and I certainly won't forgive him and pretend everything is fine like I always have before. Under the sympathetic gaze of the clerk, I quietly push the marriage application aside and pull out my phone. I scroll through my contacts until I find the name of someone I haven't spoken to in a very long time. I stare at the number for a moment. Then I type my message. "Come to City Hall now. Let's get married."

For three years running, Matteo always had a reason to push the engagement date back, all because he was certain I could never want anyone but him. The first year, his parents refused to let him marry a poor girl like me, and the engagement was shelved. The second year, he lost the engagement rings I had made myself. No rings, no ceremony. The third year, he "forgot" to tell his parents the date and only told them at the last minute. There was too little time, they could not get there, and the engagement was shelved again. This year, though, none of those earlier "accidents" happened. There was only one exception. On the day of our engagement, the gown my mother had sewn for me stitch by stitch before she died somehow ended up on my stepsister, Capucine. She let her cat climb up the skirt and bite and claw at it until the lace was full of holes. Matteo did not scold her. He soothed her in a gentle voice instead. "It's fine. If it's ruined we'll just have another one made. It's an old dress, it's not like it's anything special." He ignored my red, swollen eyes. "The gown is gone now, so it looks like the engagement will have to wait until next year." I let out a cold laugh and stepped forward to strip the gown off Capucine. "Three times is enough. There won't be an engagement next year either." What he did not know was that before she died, my mother told me a secret she had kept for twenty years. I was never some poor girl. I was the only daughter of a Sicilian mafia family. My real father had found out where I had ended up, and he was already on his way to bring me home himself. Since this engagement was not going to happen, I had decided to go home with him.

The year I returned to the Moretti family, everyone expected the biological daughter and the adopted daughter to fight for their place in the family. But Gianna was different. She was the first to learn sign language so she could communicate with me. She knew I hated sitting with my back to a door. She also knew I didn't want anyone asking why I still refused to speak after two years back home. That night, at a charity gala, my father was supposed to sign an agreement that would end our family's involvement in the port's illegal operations. Instead, Luca Vitale stormed in with representatives from eight families and proposed a toast to my father. He took one sip and collapsed. A second later, the ballroom screen lit up. Gianna's payment to a pharmacist and chat messages mentioning "Dad's wine" had been used to make it look like she'd bought drugs to murder our father. She really had made that payment. She handed over her phone for everyone to see, but the original messages had been deleted, and she couldn't recover them. Luca gave us ten minutes: hand over Gianna or hand over the port. All the while, Luca's doctor stood beside my father with a syringe in his hand. He refused to say where he'd gotten it. My mother told Luca, "You can have the port. You can't have either of my daughters." Gianna pulled away from her anyway and walked straight to Luca. All she asked was that he let our father go to the hospital first. As she passed me, she signed with trembling hands, "Don't tell them about your past for my sake." I stared at the syringe. I'd seen that same medical kit at the clinic in Malta. I'd also seen what happened to patients once they became bargaining chips. If Gianna was willing to go that far for me, then I was willing to risk everything for her, just this once.

For seven years, I stood by Reese Moretti as he fought his way up from a mafia nobody until he stood as an equal among the Three Families. Then I got pregnant with Reese's child. He promised me the wedding of the century. I was overjoyed and couldn't wait for our future together. Until his childhood sweetheart, Layla, came back, and everything changed. Layla was frail, and she'd once done Reese a great favor. Without even realizing it, he began to favor her over me—his fiancée. One week before the wedding, Layla shoved me to the floor. She leaned in close to my ear. "Ivy, if Reese walks in and sees us both on the floor, who do you think he'll worry about?" Before I could react, Layla suddenly screamed and collapsed. When Reese rushed in, Layla was clutching her chest, whispering weakly that her old heart condition had flared up. "Reese, I can't breathe. I don't think I can hold on much longer." Before I could say a word, Reese scooped Layla up in his arms and rushed her to the private medical wing. Blood spread beneath me. In that moment, the pain in my body was nothing compared to the agony of my heart tearing apart. Seven years of love and the child not yet fully formed inside me vanished in that single instant. Heartbroken and numb, I decided to leave and let them be together. But Reese refused to let me go.

Everyone warned me never to fall for Dante Moretti. They said he was the ghost of the Velasco family—an underboss who ordered hits without blinking, his heart colder than the barrel of his gun. But when he bent me over that mahogany desk, his mouth against my ear commanding me to say his name, I was stupid enough to think that was possession. It took me an entire year to see the truth. The photographs locked in his study drawer were never of me. The woman in white waiting for him in the cathedral district on Sunday mornings was never me. The girl who took a bullet for him, the one he called his "salvation"—her name is Elena Abate. And Elena happens to be my stepmother's daughter. My father is trying to sell me to a half-dead Agosti heir for five hundred million to save the family. My stepmother is scheming to erase me from existence entirely. And the man I thought would burn this city to the ground for me? On the day I needed him most, he was lifting Elena up a flight of stairs, cradling her like something sacred. They all thought I was just a pawn to be moved around their chessboard. They were wrong. If Dante can't let go of his precious white moonlight, his "salvation," then I'll become someone else's "widow." If Elena believes she's already won this game, I'll let her watch from the front row as a woman with nothing left to lose burns it all down. My name is Serafina. Remember it. Because I am about to become the reckoning none of them saw coming.

I spent sixty years married to Vincent under a fake name, bearing him a daughter and raising his adopted son as if he were my own flesh and blood. On the surface, I was the quiet, dutiful wife who managed the household and cared for the children without a word of complaint. Behind the scenes, however, I tapped into the Capelli mafia family’s vast resources and network to clear every obstacle from his path. I truly believed we were a devoted couple growing old together, but that naive dream shattered the moment his will was read after his death. He had left his entire fortune to his adopted son. As for our daughter and me? We got absolutely nothing. In his final words, he pined for his adopted son's biological mother, claiming he had finally fulfilled his promise to her. Yet, all that remained to me was a simple thank-you. With that, I collapsed in tears and breathed my last. When I opened my eyes again, I was right back on the day of our sixth wedding anniversary. This time, I was done playing his dutiful wife. It was time to take my place back as the Mafia Principessa.

On the day I signed the divorce papers, I was ordered to leave with nothing. When I walked out of the Crane estate, I had twenty-six dollars in my wallet and nowhere safe to go. My phone was nearly dead when a message from an old classmate appeared on the screen, linking to a discreet placement notice. 【Seeking a live-in maternal figure for three children. Room, board, salary, and protection provided.】 I stopped at the word protection. A roof, a meal, and a place the Cranes could not reach me were already more than I had that night. The address led me to the iron gates of an old mansion on Chicago’s Gold Coast. Only after the butler opened the door did I learn who had placed the notice. Dante Bellandi. The Don of Chicago’s oldest Italian crime family. I had only wanted a place to stay. Somehow, I became the legal mother of the three Bellandi children and the contract wife of Dante Bellandi himself. Later, my ex-husband, Sebastian Crane, stood before me with the same careless arrogance and asked, “Do you realize you were wrong now?” Before I could answer, the triplets stepped in front of me. Little Livia clung to my leg, her eyes red. “My mom wasn’t wrong!” Her two brothers stood on either side of her, staring Sebastian down. Dante placed one hand at my waist, his voice calm enough to make the air turn cold. “Mr. Crane, my wife owes no explanation to a man who lost the right to speak to her.”

During my second year of marriage to Vincent DeLuca, Don of the DeLuca family, I was kidnapped. By the time I escaped, I was four months pregnant. The first person to find me was Luca Moretti, the childhood friend I'd loved for ten years, the one who had refused to marry me. When Vincent saw my pregnant belly beneath Luca's coat, he had his men drag me to a hospital and forced the doctors to end my pregnancy. That night, I heard Luca confront him. "You know Victoria never betrayed you! How could you kill your own child?!" Vincent laughed, and there was nothing warm in it. "I only married her so Sophia could marry you without a hitch. You two are about to get engaged, and I'm not letting this baby become the talk of New York. The man Sophia marries can't have a scandal hanging over him!" The blood in my veins went cold. Back when Luca turned me down, Vincent stepped in and claimed he'd fallen for me at first sight. It had all been for Sophia! And now he'd killed his own child for her, too! I wiped away my tears. That same night, I answered an email from Professor Diane Walker that had been sitting in my inbox for two years. "Professor Walker, I'd like to join your sculpture studio." I was going to leave New York and leave Vincent, and I was never coming back.

I was Don Alexander's most skilled assassin and Consigliere, and also his secret wife. But for five years of our secret marriage, he never allowed our son to call him Dad. He always said that the enemy families were constantly watching our family, and that I and our son were his only weakness, so this was to protect us. I believed him, and silently helped him manage all the family affairs, until his first love, Bella, returned with a five-year-old boy. He booked out the entire Disneyland for them to play all day. That day was my son's birthday, and he stubbornly waited for his father to come home, holding a melting cake. I completely lost hope and made a phone call: "Help me cancel my and Leo's identities and erase all our information." But when my son and I truly disappeared, the powerful Don went mad, searching the entire world for traces of us...

In the tenth year of being held captive by Kevin Hemsworth, he lost his memory in a car accident. When he woke up and saw my bloated figure, he frowned in disgust. "Who are you?" Recalling his past threats, I was terrified this was just another test. So I told him the truth that I had been by his side all these years. He laughed sarcastically. "Don't joke around. You're not my type." Laura Powell, my friend who had secretly loved him for ten years, pointed at me and cursed, "Just because you look a little like me, you barged into Kevin's life and became his maid. Fine. But how dare you pretend to be his lover?" As punishment for lying, Laura had me dragged away from Kevin. She broke my hands and slashed my face. Lying on the ground and barely alive, I smiled at Kevin. For the past ten years, he never allowed me to escape, but he wouldn't let me die either. Now, I leaped off a cliff under his cold gaze. He wouldn't have my body even after I died.

I spent six months and more than 30,000 pounds organizing a ten-day trip to the south coast for my husband and his family. Safe-passage papers, inns along the way, an armed convoy, a private doctor. I even checked the spare tire on every car myself. The night before we left, my husband's ex, Victoria, said she wanted to come along. He didn't even talk it over with me. He just gave her my seat in the convoy and told me to go alone through the Blackmoor district, controlled by a rival gang. That route took 36 hours, and just last month, three people had turned up dead along it, their faces beyond recognition. His parents said Victoria had grown up in their household. The sister-in-law I'd helped raise said Victoria was delicate and couldn't take risks. As for me, I could make money, I knew medicine, and I'd always cleaned up their messes, so of course I should figure it out on my own. On the day they left, I didn't argue anymore, and I didn't chase after the cars. They went south, and I turned and went north. For the next few months, I stayed at a mountain lodge, soaked in hot springs, took only the patients I wanted, and stopped paying all their bills while I was at it. Later, the man who'd never cared whether I was safe pulled nearly every string the family had, just to beg me to take one call.

On Halloween, my mafia husband's assistant, Chloe Ferri, knocked on my door with her son, Ron. "Trick or treat!" When I turned around to grab the candy, Ron slipped in behind me and poured honey all over the floor. Then he charged straight into me. The floor was slick, and I went down hard. My rounded belly slammed into the corner of the table. Pain ripped through my whole body. The color drained from my face, and within seconds the hem of my dress was soaked with blood. But my husband, Oliver Marino, ran to the frightened, wailing boy first. Luca Ferri, one of Oliver's longtime men, had taken a knife meant for Oliver and died. Ever since, my husband had kept Luca's widow, Chloe, at his side as his assistant. From then on, Chloe and her son came first in everything. When the hurricane made landfall, Oliver got Chloe and Ron to safety first. While I was scrambling for cover, a falling billboard slammed into my arm. On our wedding anniversary, he left me standing in the freezing wind for four hours, all because he had to go fix Chloe's broken bread maker. Once, because Ron said he hated the smell of my perfume, Oliver even dumped me in the middle of nowhere and made me walk 19 miles along a mountain road to get home. And now he was ignoring me again, rushing to that kid instead. Something inside me died for good. If he wanted so badly to take care of another man's wife and kid, then fine. I'd step aside.

After losing a game of truth or dare, my fiancé went to City Hall and married another woman. I had called him forty-seven times. In the end, the only answer I got was Seraphina’s Instagram story. In the photo, she and Vincenzo were holding a brand-new marriage certificate. She was smiling like she had won, and he was wearing the white shirt I had ironed for him that morning, his fingers casually pinching her cheek. One minute later, he called me. “Elena, don’t make this bigger than it is. It was just a game. Give me thirty days. I’ll divorce her, and then we’ll get married like we planned.” He thought I would forgive him the way I always had for the past three years. But this time, I didn’t cry. I didn’t make a scene. I simply liked Seraphina’s post and commented, Congratulations. Then I took off my engagement ring and left New York. He thought I was just throwing a fit. Only when his calls stopped going through, and his men searched the entire city without finding me, did he finally panic. But he had no idea. The Elena who loved him had died the moment he married someone else.

My boyfriend, Enzo Valenti, is the sole heir to the Valenti mafia family. He has more than enough wealth to last for generations. Despite being together for three years, he's never bought me a single gift. He even makes me split the cost of the cheapest box of condoms. After a car accident, I find out that I'm ten weeks pregnant. The baby still has a faint heartbeat. If I can come up with another 500 dollars for the medication, there's a good chance the baby will survive. I drain my bank account and borrow from every friend I can. When that's still not enough, I have no choice but to beg Enzo for help. Enzo, on the other hand, is convinced that I'm faking the pregnancy to get money from him. He refuses to send me anything. Three days later, I lose the baby. That's when I discover that Enzo has just given his childhood sweetheart, Vivian Moroni, a villa, a Rolls-Royce, and countless pieces of jewelry. His stinginess over the past three years was all part of a test. He wanted to see if I was only with him for his money. When I tell him I want to break up, he transfers a penny to me in front of the entire company with "Gold Digger" written in the memo. Then, he demands that I admit that the pregnancy was a lie. I pull out the paperwork confirming my miscarriage and the records of the wages he's been secretly withholding from me and lay them on his desk. "You're right. I'm not pregnant. You killed our child over 500 dollars."

To marry me, Don Vincenzo Ricci defies the entire Elders' Council and stands against his own Famiglia, pushing through the wedding despite their fierce opposition. In our seven years of marriage, he gives me all the wealth and glory befitting of a Donna, but never truly takes my wishes to heart. I hope he will give me a meaningful keepsake on my birthday, but even though the gifts pile up in the collection room, not a single one is something he chose himself. Vincenzo says, "I had my men prepare these things. How is that any different from choosing them myself?" I hire a painter, wanting to create a portrait of the two of us, but Vincenzo gets his men to place his old solo portrait beside me. Vincenzo leans down and kisses my cheek, asking matter-of-factly, "Can't the painter just use this portrait as a reference to paint me?" I've never blamed him. He's the Don, and I understand that he spends all of his time and energy on handling Famiglia matters. Until one day, I'm on my way back from the villa on the outskirts of the city when a rival famiglia ambushes me, shattering the car windows with shotgun blasts. I only barely escape thanks to my bodyguards. Vincenzo rushes home when he hears what happened, but after seeing that I'm fine, he leaves again after barely exchanging a few words with me. "The recoil on this latest batch of guns is a little too strong, and it's been hurting Siena's wrists. I need to check on Luca and make sure he adjusts the balance for her." I watch him and suddenly realize that he does have time to remember something someone casually mentions after all. It's just that all these years, he's been giving me nothing but halfhearted attention. In that case, I'll pursue a life where people no longer treat me halfheartedly. When I get back to my room, I book a flight out of Sicilia in five days.