Feel-Good Story Short Stories & Mafia Female Growth Novels

My fiance, Derrick Lodge, chooses to save me during the typhoon, instead of his first love, Victoria Rayne. My life is saved, but Victoria dies after being struck by flying debris before the rescue team can find her. They aren't even able to find the rest of her body afterward. After going home, Derrick doesn't attend Victoria's funeral and immediately holds a grand wedding for me instead. For the next three years of our marriage, Derrick doesn't stop torturing me because he says that I caused Victoria's death. When I reach my limit and finally ask him for a divorce, Derrick kills me with a gun before killing himself. I open my eyes again and realize that I have traveled back in time. It is the day the typhoon happened, threatening our lives. This time, however, I tell Derrick to save Victoria's life instead.

To protect my boyfriend, Nico, the illegitimate son of our allies, the Moretti family, from their internal power struggles, I agreed to leave New York with him. But on the eve of my adoptive father, the Don of the Falcone family, signing our transfer orders, he backed out. Through the hidden door of the cigar lounge, I heard his right-hand man tease him: "So you really kept up that act for three months just to get rid of the princess?" "But she's your childhood sweetheart. You really have the heart to some miserable fishing village in the Baltics all by herself?" Nico's voice was nonchalant. "It's just an outpost across the pond. How far can it be?" "Scarlett is too controlling. If I don't get her out of the picture, how am I supposed to get any breathing room? Besides, I need to put Chloe at ease." I stood behind that hidden door for a long time that night, my grip on the doorknob tightening until my knuckles were white, before I finally let go. I turned and walked away, pulling out my tablet to change my flight plan. I changed the destination from the official plan of that desolate Baltic outpost to a seat at the High Table in Sicily, which is the absolute center of old-world Mafia power. Everyone seemed to have forgotten. I am the princess of the Falcone family. And he is nothing but filth from the gutter. We were never a match.

I'm Serena Sorrento, the sole daughter of Don Salvatore Sorrento. After seeing the news of a female employee getting stalked and assaulted by a stalker on her way home from work, I spend millions of dollars arranging specialized cars for every female employee in my company when they get off work at night. At first, I thought I'd receive a "thank you" from them. But those employees have the gall to criticize me on various major social media platforms. "Our boss is practically forcing us to work overtime!" "Why must employees hand over the information of their home addresses to the company, anyway?" "Since our boss has money to buy those luxury cars, she might as well give us the money right away!" The entire Internet bashes me for capitalizing on my charity, gloating about my wealth, and not knowing what my employees actually want. After receiving a bombardment of insulting and humiliating text messages, I decide to take the Internet's advice and call for a mandatory company meeting. "After receiving the sincere feedback from all the employees, I shall terminate the specialized pick-up service from today onward. Instead, I shall have it reclassified as a transportation allowance. Those who are eligible shall receive 100 dollars per month." As soon as the announcement is made, the entire company goes crazy.

My baby brother was barely a month old when my father's mistress threw him off the upstairs balcony to his death. Then she turned around and said my mother had done it. And my father, the Don, took the mistress at her word and had my mother killed. That woman framed me too, and I was cast out of the house. For the next fifteen years, I clawed my way up through begging and reckless grit, until I became the Donna of the Vanetti family. Then one day, my adopted son Daniel Vanetti brought his new girlfriend to meet me. "Mother, this is Via, the Principessa of the Vitale family. I want to marry her." I looked at Via. Her face was the spitting image of my father's mistress. What a small world. The daughter of the woman who killed my mother had walked right up to my door. So I refused without a second's hesitation. "I don't approve."

My family, the Cosimos, has been locked in a blood feud with the Romanovs for twenty years. My father, the Don, and Don Romanov once got into a fistfight at someone else’s wedding, tearing each other’s black suits to shreds. “My son would rather be sealed in a concrete-filled oil drum than go anywhere near your daughter.” “Even if every man in America dropped dead, I still wouldn’t let my daughter have anything to do with your family.” But they didn’t know that Leon—the sole heir to the Romanov family—and I had kissed each other’s lips raw.

Ever since I was brought back to the Colonna Famiglia, my adopted younger sister, Ilaria Colonna, has kept trying to push me into the arms of Luca Balzano, Don of the Balzano Famiglia. 99 times, to be exact. Every single time, she chokes out the same words to him. "The true Principessa of the Colonna Famiglia is the one you're supposed to marry. I'm nothing but an adopted daughter." She dumps every piece of jewelry Luca gives her into my room and keeps arranging opportunities for the two of us to be alone. She even drugs us both and locks us in a room together. Yet every single time, Luca pushes me away, choosing to spend the entire night soaking in ice-cold water rather than lay a finger on me. The satisfaction of triumphing over me, along with Luca's obvious preference for her, feeds Ilaria's ego until she grows bolder and more reckless. Then comes the 100th time. At a high-society gala, Ilaria has Luca publicly announce their upcoming marriage. But as prominent guests offer their congratulations, she pushes me toward Luca once again and repeats the same speech about how she's only the adopted daughter. "Luca, I'm not worthy of you. Rosalia is the woman you should marry." That very night, she boards a flight and flees to Vestrand, certain that everything will play out exactly as it has the previous 99 times. But this time, when Luca takes in the gathered elites and the rival families waiting to watch him make a fool of himself, he looks down at me in his arms. "Rosalia, will you be my wife?"

For the past ten years, all of Boston society had been guessing whether I would end up marrying Alexander Grant, Nathan Cole, or Julian Vale. One of them took care of every problem that came my way. One remembered every allergy I had. One built me an observatory with a view of the whole city. I never once doubted that I was loved. I had always been the spoiled little princess everyone doted on. Then my mother found her older daughter, Vivian Ashford, who had been missing for twenty-two years. Vivian was the one expected to marry into Black Harbor for the Ashford family. To make up for the life she had lost, the three men started asking me to give up a little at a time. Alexander missed the fitting he had promised to come to, because Vivian needed the practice in front of the cameras more than I did. Nathan canceled the follow-up on my old injury because Vivian had a panic attack when she heard about the medical exam before the wedding. Julian booked the entire observatory to make up for my birthday, then, while I sat there alone until closing, sent me a text that read, "You're the sensible one. Go home by yourself tonight." When I got back to the estate, I asked them why none of them had told me beforehand. But Vivian cried and said she didn't want to be the reason they lost me. So Alexander stepped in front of her, Nathan told me to stop upsetting her, and Julian said I shouldn't be using one broken promise to test whether they loved me. As I turned to leave, I heard them making a pact in that room. "Until the engagement is settled, no more coddling Evelyn." "She'll be angry." "She'll sulk for a few days and get over it. She could never bring herself to leave us for real." They weren't wrong. Back then, I really couldn't bring myself to leave. What they didn't know was that I had already let go, and I was never coming back.

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.

Less than a week after calling off our engagement, Vincent Moretti, the new Don of the Moretti family, married Bianca Marino—the woman I'd once risked my life to save from a firefight. I gave back my family crest and walked away without a fight. The family elders were all waiting for me to fall apart. None of them thought Vincent's "mad dog" could make it without him. For seven years, I'd been his blade, and I'd done it willingly. I betrayed my own family to help him reclaim his territory. I stopped countless attempts on his life and was wounded so many times protecting him that there was barely a patch of unscarred skin left on my body. But the moment he became Don, everything changed. The blood on my hands suddenly disgusted him. He said someone like me had no right to wear the Donna's ring or stand beside him as the face of the family. After that, no one in New York would hire me. I ended up taking jobs cleaning up murder scenes for Brooklyn's underworld. Then I took the blame for someone else and got jumped by a group of gangsters. They shoved my face into the mud and beat me until I could barely move. I thought I was going to die there. Then Vincent came charging in like a madman. He shot one of them in the head, rushed to me, and pulled me into his arms with trembling hands. That familiar cologne hit me at once. I struggled to breathe. I wiped the blood from my eye and gave him a faint, bitter smile. "Thanks for the help, Mr. Moretti. Need someone to clean this up? I'm taking cash only today."

For our fifth anniversary, I planned to bid on a pink diamond ring. A young woman outbid me. I followed her outside to ask if she would consider selling it to me. She stood at the curb, showing the ring on her hand to the friend who had come with her. "I'm already tired of this one. "So my boyfriend told me to pick out something I liked for our first anniversary." I stopped. She would never part with an anniversary gift. Reese was busy handling the smuggling trade along the coast and could not come with me. He had only said he would not be home for dinner and told me to buy myself something nice to celebrate. When I heard her say her boyfriend had a candlelit dinner waiting for her, I smiled and envied their young love. My car pulled up. As I was about to get in, she turned around. I saw the ring on her hand, the one she was already tired of. My breath caught. Cold shot from the soles of my feet to the base of my skull. It was the ring Reese had given me last year, then discarded because it did not fit.