Reborn Mafia Short Stories & Defy Fate Novels

On the day of my coming-of-age ceremony, I must choose a fiancé from among the heirs of three great families. Everyone believes I will choose Dario Morandi—the man I have pursued for years. Instead, I pick up the photograph of his older brother, Cassiano Morandi. Cassiano is known as the lunatic who was kidnapped by enemies at the age of five and thrown into an underground fighting pit. He survived on his own for ten years before the Morandis brought him back. No one thinks he is worthy of me, the Vito family's Principessa. In my previous life, I choose Dario. On our wedding day, Lina Greco—the daughter of Papa's chauffeur—shows up in a white wedding dress with her pregnant belly on display, crying as she claims the child is Dario's. Enraged, I have her thrown out. But amid the chaos, she suffers a miscarriage. Dario smiles and goes through with the wedding. But in the third year of our marriage, he steals classified intelligence and hands it over to my famiglia's enemies. I die that very night. Now that I have a second chance at life, I decide to fulfill his wish and let him be with Lina. What I never expect is that he has been reborn as well.

In my last life, I single-handedly wiped out a rival gang, winning great honor for the Family. My mother handed me control of her private arsenal, worth hundreds of millions. Before I could even take inventory, the convent orphan my family had adopted quietly changed the codes, and handed the entire shipment to homeless men in slums controlled by our enemies. Staring down my gun, she crossed herself, her face full of pity. "God tells us to love the world, Alessia. Sitting on all those instruments of murder is a sin. I am only atoning for you." I scoffed, but one second before I pulled the trigger, my childhood friend, the Family's top killer, shot the gun from my hand and denounced me as bloodthirsty, cruel, and incapable of empathy. My older brother, the new Don, only sneered and stripped me of my inheritance on the spot. He threw me into the lowest end of the red-light district to wash dishes until the violence had been ground out of me. That same night, addicts from the rival gang cornered me at the end of an alley, stabbed me more than twenty times, then dumped me into the Thames. I opened my eyes, and I was back on the day the orphan girl walked toward the arsenal with my key in her hand.

As the Cavallo family's consigliere, I had a perfect record. Time and again, I'd planned hits that left rival territories soaked in blood. But today, they were calling the escape route I'd spent three months perfecting for an operation across the border a trap. They said I'd set our own men up to die. Not one of our men made it out. Every last one of them was dead. Back at the estate, every gun in the room was aimed at me. No one wanted to hear another word out of me. They pinned me to the floor and beat me until my face was a bloody mess. They didn't stop until someone pulled up the dark-web transaction records. Just an hour earlier, someone had put my escape route up for sale on the dark web for 30 million dollars. "Elowen, you'd sell out your own people? What, the family didn't pay you enough?" Riccardo Lombardi, the fiancé I'd grown up with, pressed his gun to my forehead. My adopted sister, Sophia Cavallo, pulled up my bank records. The most recent deposit was for exactly 30 million. Her voice was cold. "Father, the proof is airtight. Execute her according to the code. We owe the men who died that much." The evidence was right there in front of everyone. My father, the Don, looked at me with nothing but disappointment. In the end, he had me strapped to an iron chair and strangled with a wire until my neck snapped. I died with one question still unanswered. How had the plans I kept locked in my safe, behind a combination only I knew, ended up on the dark web? When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day before they accused me.