Familial Bond Mafia Short Stories & Marriage Novels

My son, Jasper Cole, won the gold prize in an art competition. When I took off my apron and rushed to the award ceremony, I found that the painting titled 'Mother' was not of me but Maeve Leighton, my husband's secretary. Maeve pretended to be troubled as she told my son, "Your mom will be sad when she sees this painting." However, Jasper was unperturbed. "What does her sadness have to do with me? She's an ordinary-looking and incompetent housewife, always nagging me about what I can and can’t do. She's too strict with me. It's annoying! Maeve, I wish you were my mother. My dad doesn't like my mom at all. He's only happy when he's with you. He's only with my mom because he feels obligated." My heart broke at that moment. Since he no longer wanted me as his mother, it was pointless for me to stay. I called my dad. "Dad, I want to go home. Can you pick me up?" My dad could not believe it. He answered after a long pause, "Of course. I'll come pick up my brilliant daughter in three days."

My husband's childhood sweetheart was diagnosed with a terminal illness. To fulfill her last wishes and let her experience the warmth of family, my husband, Aaron Turner, gave her my necklace. He even let her claim my birthday. Even our son started calling her "Mom" in private. He told me, "Chrishell, Sylvia is dying. Just give in to her, will you?" Whenever I asked him to spare even a little time and affection for me, our son, Lucas, would rush to speak on their behalf. "Mom, didn't you always teach me to be generous? Sylvia is dying. Why do you always make things difficult for her?" Over time, I stopped asking for anything at all. Then one night, I overheard my son speaking to his father after returning from the hospital. "Sylvia is so gentle and graceful. I wish Mom could be more like her." Aaron chuckled and affectionately brushed his hand over our son's hair. "Your mom may be a little strict, but it's all for your own good. Since you like Sylvia so much, how about we let her be your godmother?" So even the child I risked my life to bring into this world didn't like me. I lowered my gaze, quietly closed the bedroom door, and pretended none of it had happened. Since they were both filled with such regret, I'd leave quietly and give them what they wanted.

After five years of marriage, the doctor told me I was pregnant. It was something I had waited for so long. Yet, along with that good news came a nightmare. My medical tests showed that I had cancer, and it had already spread. The doctor gave me less than a month to live. I froze, gripping the report so tightly my knuckles turned white. Tears streamed down my face as I thought about how my unborn child would never get to feel a mother's embrace. My grief was interrupted by the ping of an incoming text message. It was from Mom. [Since you're so selfish and refuse to donate a kidney to save Nattie's life, you should divorce Davon. Let him marry Nattie instead. At least that way, you can fulfill her dying wish.] My tears fell harder. It was not that I refused to donate a kidney to Natalie Rivera, my sister, who was in the final stages of kidney disease. In truth, I only had one kidney left. Five years ago, I had already given one to Dad. Now, with my life counting down to its final days, I decided that I would donate my remaining kidney to Natalie. I would also let my husband, Davon Parker, go with her. Before I went into surgery, my parents praised me for finally being thoughtful, saying I had finally learned to care about my sister. They said that once the surgery was over, the whole family would go on vacation together. Davon even said he was proud that I was no longer selfish and promised he would make it up to me in the future. None of them knew I did not have a future. After the surgery, what would be pushed out of the operating room would be a cold, lifeless body.

From my earliest memories, my entire family is cold and distant toward me. When my parents look at my younger sister, Claire Lloyd, their eyes fill with warmth and joy. Yet, when they turn to me, only disgust remains. Claire's life is filled with applause and excessive love, while mine is filled with disdain and suffering. When the explosion erupts at the street corner, I save the stranger beside me. Later, I learn he is Byron Whitmore, a mafia family's Don. He begins pursuing me after I rescue him. Later, I quit my job and move to a new place, but he finds me and proposes in 100 different ways. "Why me?" I ask countless times. "Because it's you," he always answers. The wedding causes a sensation throughout the city. I truly seem to have transformed from an ugly duckling into a swan. That is, until I'm five months pregnant, when Claire needs a transfusion of rare Rh-negative blood after a car accident. The blood bank has a shortage. Because of that, my parents knock me unconscious and send me to the hospital. In my daze, the blood extraction machine hums continuously. As two thousand milliliters of blood leave my body, I see Byron. Tears well up in my eyes. I begin thinking he's here to save me. Instead, I hear him say, "We can't take any more. Sharon and the baby will die." "But Claire has lost too much blood. She'll die, too..." My mother pleads. "No one wants Claire safe more than I do." Byron's voice is thick with pain. "She's my first love. I've never forgotten her. I only married Sharon because her face looks so much like Claire's. "But I can't trade her life for Claire's. Trust me—I'll find another way." So, that's his reason for marrying me. The blood extraction machine continues running, but my heart has already stopped beating. The affection I see in his eyes has never been for me. He's always looking through me at someone else. Everyone in the world loves Claire, and Byron is not the exception that I foolishly believe him to be. That grand wedding is nothing but an ugly duckling's self-deceiving fantasy.

By the fifth year of my marriage to James Hill, he began pretending to be his late twin brother, the late Don of the family. With that, he took over all of a Don’s duties and the role of my sister-in-law, Hilary’s husband. Every time after he slept with her, he would cut his arm open, kneel before me, and beg for forgiveness. “Pia, you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. Once Hilary gives birth to the heir and secures her position, I’ll fake my death and come back for you.” He told me his twin brother had died saving him, so he had to fulfill his brother’s last wish. During the year he pretended to be his brother, James slept with Hilary ninety-nine times. After a full year, Hilary finally gave birth to the family’s heir. I truly believed James would fake his death as promised, then take our son and me away from this bloody life. However, I saw him with Hilary in his arms, teasing the tiny baby she carried. “Hilary, I’ll stay with you and our child until he’s ready to take over as the next Don.” Silently, I wiped my tears and went back to my room to pack my suitcase. My son saw me crying and ran into my arms, gently wiping away my tears with his little hands. “Ma, Aunt Hilary already had her baby. Why isn’t Papa coming home yet?” I placed my clothes into the suitcase as I told him softly, “Because he doesn’t want us anymore. But don’t be sad, sweetheart. I will build us a home.” If James wanted to raise an heir, then I would return to North Atlantis’s most powerful mafia family, take my rightful place as my father’s heir, and become the Godmother of the Mafia.

I’m the Blackthorn family’s top surgeon and their “cleaner.” I’ve handled countless messes for Evan Blackthorn. I was also his secret lover for five years. He was inside me more times than I can count, holding me tight as I came apart, kissing me with an obsession for my body he never bothered to hide. It all ended after sex one night, when he said with a casual laugh, “I should get a wife, Rachel.” “And maybe you should find a good man and get married, too.” I wasn’t angry. I just quietly said, “Okay.” In my last life, I insisted on staying by his side. It got me both my hands broken, my career as a surgeon shattered. In the end, during a raid by a rival family, he left me behind as bait, holding his brother’s widow, Sofia, tenderly in his arms. So this time, I learned my lesson. I stayed away from him. Found a new man, just like he wanted. But this time, the always cool and calculated Mafia Don lost his mind.

My secret boyfriend, Marco Ross—the fastest rising mafia star in New York—hid a ring in our home. I thought it was for me. Instead, I received a video of him proposing to another woman—Bianco Conti —on our anniversary. The same night, masked men broke in, held me at gunpoint, and forced me to call Marco. A woman answered the call, “Marco, your little orphan is calling again.” Then Marco’s cold tone. “Don’t bother, babe, she’s just your substitute, a stray I keep around, a free woman to warm my bed.” The masked men shot me in the stomach—then fled. What Marco didn’t know? The real Conti heiress… was me. The Bianco he cherished so much… was just an imposter. I once refused to take the Conti name because of Marco, afraid it would ruin us. But if he never cared… why should I? I made one call. “Papa, I’ll come home, take over the business, and accept the marriage alliance—but Bianca has to be go.”

The day I married Dante Moretti, I became the youngest Donna in New York. He took the Family seal from me and put the Family's ledgers and vault keys in the hands of his Underboss Valentina. She was his second-in-command and his lover. Even as Donna, I needed her signature before I could spend a dollar of the Family's money. Then Beatrice Moretti, Dante's mother and the former Donna, was attacked outside a church. The secret clinic demanded half a million dollars in cash before they would operate. I couldn't reach Dante, so I had to go to Valentina for access to the emergency vault. She sat behind Dante's desk, painting her nails. "You want money? Kneel, kiss my instep, and submit a request form." I did as I was told. Because my mother-in-law was lying on that operating table, and she was the only person who had ever treated me like a daughter. Valentina deliberately spilled coffee on the form and tore it to pieces. Not long after, the church bells tolled for the dead. And Dante, with his arm around Valentina, asked, "It's your mother who died. Why should we pay for her?"

For seven years of my marriage to Damian Moretti, my daughter and I were so poor that every night we collected empty bottles from the alley behind a bar. Every time Ella traded the bottles in for change, she would ask me, "Mommy, do we have enough saved to go to the aquarium with Daddy yet?" Damian always said we had no money. Then, on the day I finally saved enough for three tickets, I arrived at the aquarium only to find him at the entrance holding his ex-girlfriend's hand, with her son in his arms. A staff member stopped us. "Sorry, Mr. Moretti has reserved the entire aquarium for a private event tonight." A bodyguard in black stepped up beside Damian and bowed his head. "Don, the car is ready." The truth was that my supposedly penniless husband, the man who claimed he could not afford his own daughter's ticket, had reclaimed the Moretti Family long ago and become New York's new Don. It was not that he had no money. He simply refused to spend any of it on us. Later I took my daughter and left New York, and the Vitale Family found me. I inherited the family's ports, took control of the Atlantic Shipping Alliance, and became a Donna before whom countless mafia families bowed. Damian, eyes red, begged me to come home. I only pushed the divorce papers across to him. "Damian, I am already home. And you were never my family."

Emma, the fake heiress, and I were sold into an underground BDSM club. When my parents, the richest couple in the country, and my husband, Leo DeLuca, the feared Don of the DeLuca crime family, finally found us, I was bound with duct tape and covered in wounds. Emma lay beside me, heavily pregnant and unconscious. Three months later, doctors confirmed that her baby had died in the womb. She was the adopted daughter my parents had cherished for twenty years, and the girl my husband had never gotten over. My parents and husband went half mad, offering a nationwide one-hundred-million-dollar bounty for any lead on the person responsible. I was the only one who might have seen the culprit's face, and I said nothing. My father locked me in the basement for seven full days without food or water, but I still refused to identify the person responsible. At my weakest, my enraged husband dragged me before a memory tribunal. "Your sister is still unconscious, and you are protecting the person who did this because you are jealous of her! The thought that I share a bed with someone as poisonous as you makes me sick!" My father, Victor Valenti, watched from a distance, his face hard with disappointment. "I regret ever going through hell to bring you home from the slums! Why couldn't you have died instead of Emma's baby! Today I'll use the Valenti family's own interrogation device, the memory extractor, and neither you nor the person behind this will have anywhere left to hide!" But when my real memories appeared on the huge screen, my husband completely lost his mind. My parents hung their heads and knelt before me, wrecked.

During our eight years together, Lorenzo, the Falcone family Don’s heir, cheated on me with eight women. A dancer, a college student, a sex worker... Every one of them was nothing like me. Eight times, I fought, I raged, and I even cut my wrists. And every time, Lorenzo knelt before me and swore it would never happen again. "I swear to God, Beatrice, I was just tempted by someone new. You're the only woman I love." I believed him. Today was our ninth anniversary. Then I found the ninth: my best friend, Giuliana. They were holding each other like real lovers. Hands shaking, I called home, expecting the comfort my family had given me the other eight times. Instead, my parents said I had it coming. A daughter from a minor noble house had never been good enough for the Falcone heir. My brother said I was too stupid to make myself lovable, and that was why I'd finally driven Lorenzo to cheat. Eventually, even I began to wonder if it was all my fault. I saw a therapist. She advised me to divorce as soon as possible and stop clinging to someone I wasn't good enough for. I came back to the estate in a daze, only to hear Lorenzo's voice in the study, warm with laughter. "Giuliana, you're the clever one. You suggested I fake those affairs so she'd get used to me cheating and wouldn't lose her mind and hurt you. "I've taken care of the therapist. Her parents and brother will keep pressuring her. Soon enough, she'll ask for the divorce herself. "As soon as she's gone, I'll marry you." I stood there listening as tears slipped down my cheeks. I'd been living inside a lie they had all helped build. I was done playing the fool in their elaborate charade.

I was in the living room, handling some work, and casually asked the smart assistant to play some music. "Alexa, play some jazz." "Sure. By the way, just a reminder—four days from now, at ten in the morning, you're scheduled to accompany Sienna to her prenatal checkup." My hand froze midair. My name is Victoria. And I'm not pregnant. Jonathan was walking out of the bathroom, towel-drying his hair. He saw the look on my face and pulled me into his arms. "What's wrong, sweetheart?" I casually darkened my phone screen and smiled. "Nothing. Just a little tired." Jonathan kissed my forehead, his eyes tender and full of love. "Go get some sleep. Don't miss your birthday party tomorrow—you're the star of the night. I can't wait to spend it with you." I leaned into his chest, my lips curling into a cold little smile. My dear husband, you'd better not have done anything to betray me. Otherwise, you're about to find out exactly what it costs to betray the daughter of a mafia family.