Mafia Regret Short Stories & Novels

Ten years of marriage, and my husband slid the divorce papers across his mahogany desk. "You contributed nothing to this family. Under the prenup, you walk away with nothing." "Consider this a courtesy. Ten thousand a year. A hundred grand for a decade of your youth." "Don't even think about touching a cent of family money." I smiled and signed. I'm the kind of woman who's already died once. The next day, I took that hundred-thousand-dollar check and walked straight into the territory of his most dangerous enemy—Dominic Salucci. The man who controls half the East Coast underworld looked at me like I was inventory he hadn't ordered. "Why should I help you?" I leaned in close. "Because I know every decision Vincent Moretti is going to make for the next ten years. Every property. Every shipping route. And I know about the son he's hiding in Zurich." He studied me for a long moment. Then he smiled. "Interesting." What he doesn't know—what Vincent doesn't know—is that in my last life, men like them buried me without a second thought. This time, I'm going to watch every last one of them kneel.

I spent eight years raising Dante's children. Three of them, and every single one belonged to him and his arranged wife Bianca. Not one was mine. I fought against it. I really did. But the Costello family needed heirs, and my background was too ordinary. The family would never accept me. Dante always had something to say about it. "Nora, once Bianca has the baby, I'll take you to the States. You can go to art school, open your own gallery. It's what your mother always wanted, isn't it?" Then Bianca had a son, and suddenly the family needed a daughter too, someone they could marry off to another faction. When the daughter came, the elders stepped in and said the mob was a bloody business and you needed enough children to guarantee the line would continue. Eight years. I went from Dante's lover to something worse than a servant. Then I got pregnant. I was so happy I could barely breathe when I told him. I thought this baby would finally be our way out. But there was no smile on his face. Just a look that was pained and apologetic, like he already knew what he was going to say. "Nora, you don't have a place in this family. Neither does your child. He'd disrupt the line of succession. We can't let him be born." I pressed my hand to my stomach, just barely starting to show. Hot tears hit the floor. Fine. If we couldn't leave together, I would leave alone.

I am the only godmother in the underworld who has been divorced three times. The first divorce happened because Andre's childhood sweetheart, Alice, returned. He told me: "Rachel, she and I once swore before God that neither of us would marry anyone else while the other was still single." The second time was because Alice fell into depression. He stroked my hair and said: "Alice is the daughter of a man who made great contributions to the family. She needs me more right now. Don't make this difficult for me." Again and again, I was forced to leave the home Andre and I shared. Until the third time, Alice deliberately damaged my car's brakes to threaten me with divorce. I personally handed him the divorce papers with my signature already on them. Andre praised me for being understanding and began planning an even grander wedding ceremony to remarry me. What he didn't know was, this time, I would never come back.

The first thing my brother did after returning from his studies in Europe was drag me before the family council. I ran the rundown bar our Capo father left me, stocking shelves at dawn and scrubbing counters past midnight. I even took on debt from loan sharks to keep him afloat. "Just one last time," he always promised over the phone. "I'll pay you back once I marry rich." But today, a summons from the family arrived at his request. It demanded I be stripped of my birthright and forced to hand over the bar and our territory. My phone pinged. A photo flashed on the screen: my brother in a silk shirt, sitting close to a woman, her hand digging into his thigh. The message followed: Meet my fiancée, the daughter of the Valenti family boss and their Chief Legal Counsel. She says you don't stand a chance. I stared at that hand for a long, long time. Then I crouched down and pried open the hidden compartment beneath the bar.

For six years, I used countless offshore trusts and hidden laundering pipelines for Dominic. I turned him from an East Side underboss into the undisputed king of New York's underworld. Then came our wedding anniversary. He got attacked. He woke up remembering nothing about me. I searched frantically for the family doctor to find a cure. That same night, I walked in on him. He had his newly hooked-up art curator, Sienna, pinned against the floor-to-ceiling window, taking her from behind. She moaned breathlessly, begging for power. Dominic gripped her jaw, laughing in her face. "Relax. I put on this trauma amnesia act. I told them my brain got rattled and I only know you as my wife. It gives me an excuse to strip Camilla of her financial power and lend it to you for a few days. She won't even have a reason to throw a fit. Look at her. Didn't she fall for it today?" The next morning at the family round table, he put on his little show without blinking an eye. Right in front of the council, he slammed the table and swore he didn't know me. With his own hands, he ripped the black diamond signet ring of the matriarch off my finger and shoved it onto his new girl's hand. He ordered me out of the inner circle. A room full of armed outlaws waited to laugh at my breakdown. I didn't even twitch an eyebrow. I gave up all my authority on the spot, turned around, and walked downstairs. Dominic assumed I was blind to his game. He still thought I was the obedient tool on call, waiting for him to snap his fingers once his memory came back in a few days to coax me back home. He had no idea. The St. Petersburg godfather pushed a sixty-million-dollar high-purity diamond wash onto us. The drop deadline hits in three days. That lockbox and darknet routing recognize my voiceprint alone. Without me holding the line, those accounts are the death warrant for the entire Corvin family.

The day Lorenzo got kidnapped by a rival family, I found out I was three months pregnant. I took the million dollars his father offered, and I ran. The next time we met, I looked him in the eye and told him I'd been a mole for the rival family the whole time. He was chained up in a cellar, staring at me through the iron bars utterly despairing. He said he'd kill me himself, and then grind my bones to dust. Seven years later, when I saw him again, there was a beautiful woman on his arm. They were getting married. And I was so far down I had to beg him for a loan. He pulled out a thick stack of bills. Lit it on fire right in front of me. He said he'd rather burn it than give it to some whore feeding another man. He didn't know I was begging because my son was dying. His son too.

For three years, I lay in a coma after a car accident. While I slept, my husband, Damien Blackwood—the ruthless heir to the Blackwood mafia empire—found a woman who looked exactly like me. She was supposed to replace me. Instead, he fell in love with her. They even had a child together. When I finally woke up, everyone expected me to fight for my marriage. But they didn’t know what happened during those three lost years. I had already lived this life once. I knew how Damien’s betrayal would destroy me. So this time, I won’t fight for a man who replaced me while I was fighting to survive. But Damien isn’t prepared to lose me. Because the woman who woke from that coma isn’t the wife who once begged for his love. This time, I’m not dying for Damien Blackwood. I’m going to make him regret ever replacing me.

At his lowest, Ernesto Gambino has no money to his name and is despised by everyone for being the illegitimate son of the Gambino family. That year, I leave him. Three years later, he climbs through blood and fire to claim the title of Don. Also, he marries the innocent and bright youngest daughter of an allied family, Elisa Rossi. During an exclusive interview he accepts to repay an old favor, the reporter asks him, "You've gained such wealth and power at such a young age. Do you have any regrets?" Ernesto slips an arm around Elisa's waist and replies, "I just want to know—how has my ex, Chiara Leone, been since she left me?" The reporter hesitates. "She's… had a tough time." A faint smile plays on Ernesto's lips. "Really? That's a relief." "But before Ms. Leone died, she left behind this box of videotapes." The smile on Ernesto's face freezes. The tapes contain a daily record of my life, from the moment I leave him until the day sickness takes my life.

Married to Don Victor for three years, I thought I could finally forget the pain and betrayal of my ex-husband, Dominic. This cold, ruthless man ruled the East Coast underworld. But he handed me the world on a silver platter, healing my broken pieces. Until late one night. Victor's underboss called, frantic, begging me to rush to Manhattan's top private hospital. Victor and Dominic were in a standoff outside the maternity ward. Guns drawn, surrounded by their elite hitmen. They were inches away from sparking an all-out mob war. And standing between them was my ex-best friend, Chloe. She was visibly pregnant. The Commission's mediator slid a truce across the table. His expression was painfully awkward. "The security tapes are clear. The two Dons nearly blew up the entire floor just to decide who gets to stay in her room tonight." Numbly, I signed the papers as the Donna of the Costello family. Prenatal vitamins bought by Victor already piled high in the room. Meanwhile, his and Dominic's men were still arguing over the schedule—how the two Mafia Dons would split their week to keep Chloe company, three days each. When I walked up to the bed, the two lethal men who were just at each other's throats now stood guarding her on both sides. Victor shielded her belly. The same lips that used to kiss every inch of my body now spit out bone-chilling words: "I forced her. If you have a problem, take it up with me." My ex-husband, Dominic, glared at me viciously. "Keep your mad dog of a husband in check. Tell him to stop harassing my woman!" I slowly shook my head. Watching this farce, silent tears slid down my cheeks. A mobster's love... in the end, it's just a cheap lie. Victor, I don't want you anymore either.

Three years into my marriage with Dominick, Gia, his stepsister, sent me a video clip out of nowhere. I tapped on the video, only to find Dominick tying his stepsister to the bedpost with the tie I had given him. His stepsister lay naked under him, addressing him intimately. After getting their freak on, they shared an embrace, and Gia cozied up against Dominick and uttered, “I don’t like the ring you bought me. Give it to Luna, and tell her it’s a birthday gift from me.” The next day, I sat in an upscale restaurant and stared at the vacant seat across the table. Suddenly, the Underboss wheeled a massive cake toward me. “Don Costa was called away on urgent business. He sent me to deliver your birthday gift.” The box contained his stepsister’s discarded reject. My phone buzzed with new pictures from Gia. Dominick was at the hospital with Gia for a check-up. Without a fuss, I signed the divorce papers and made preparations for a wedding. “Donna Costa, whose names should I put down as the bride and groom?” “Dominick and Gia.” A week from now, I would show the world the kind of filth the supposed solemn Don had been rolling in with his stepsister.

On my wedding day, my fiancé's first love walked in holding a little boy and named the groom as the child's father. My mother saw it, and her heart gave out. She died right there on the floor. The wedding collapsed and I went down with it, fainting in front of everyone. When I came to, my oldest friend, Lucian Graves, was sitting beside me. He held me tightly in his arms. He took care of all my mother’s funeral arrangements for me. When the reporters swarmed, he put himself between me and the cameras. He cleared my name over the wedding, and then he got down on one knee in front of everyone and asked me to marry him, swearing he would take care of me for the rest of my life. After marriage, we became the happiest couple in our circle. Then, on our first anniversary, I opened the chat history on his phone. "Don, thank God you set up that wedding disruption. My son and I are happy now." "You did get her mother killed, though. Don't blame yourself. She's the one who insisted on marrying a man who was never hers." The replies were from Lucian. "Nothing to blame myself for. It was just an accident." "As long as you're happy, there's nothing I won't do." The ground dropped out from under me, and the phone hit the floor.

Bianca is dying. Acute myeloid leukemia, stage three. The family doctor told me on the phone—bone marrow transplant, only option, perfect match. Identical twins share ninety-nine percent compatibility. I crushed the diagnosis report. My name was at the top: Gemma Blackwell. But the doctor trembled, whispering apologies. A clerical error. The sick twin was Bianca. The cure was me. I had to get home. Rain lashed the taxi windows. I rehearsed the scene: Father setting down his cigar, Mother gasping, me explaining the mix-up. The report has my name, but the blood work is Bianca's. I can fix this before it's too late. My phone lit up. Family group chat. Father's message was short: [Gemma is terminal. Bianca forbidden from donation. Family decision.] My blood turned to ice. They had seen the misdelivered file. They thought I was the one dying—and they had voted to let me rot. When I pushed open the door and saw Father, I felt it— the temperature drop, the world freezing around me. Tears burned my eyes. I couldn't stop them. "Father," I said, my voice barely steady. "I have a question for you." He looked up from his cigar, annoyed. "If it were Bianca dying," I whispered. "Would you have made me give her my marrow?" The room went silent. He set down the cigar. A long pause. "No," he said finally. "Of course. We have resources. We would find another donor. We would never ask you to take that risk." I smiled a little. Just a small, sad smile. "Good," I said softly. "That's exactly what you said. Don't regret this."

I spent ten years by Luca Romano’s side, helping him rebuild after the shooting and seize control of the Romano family. At his lowest, even soft footsteps in the hallway kept him awake all night. Night after night, I held his trembling hands and helped him fight his fears. When he recovered, the first thing he did was cook for me: simple tomato meat-sauce spaghetti. I finished every bite. He said he’d make it for me for the rest of my life, whenever I wanted. But once Luca reclaimed the family, work swallowed him. Coming home needed advance scheduling, and I hardly saw him. On the rare nights he joined dinner, I’d ask for that pasta again. He’d rub his brow and say, “I’ve worked all day. I just want to unwind at home. We have a chef. Tell them if you want food.” I knew how strained he was, so I never mentioned it again. Then Friday, Luca’s right-hand man Mark Rossi came to the house for painkillers. Afraid Luca’s old gunshot wound flared up, I went with him — and found Luca at Selina Bruni’s apartment. In the kitchen, he’d shed his jacket, rolled up sleeves to cook pasta. Selina sat at the counter; her brother, Luca’s former deputy, died saving him. A chef stood nearby, yet Luca plated the pasta himself. He wiped a smudge of sauce off the plate, handed it to her, and leaned down to ask if it was too hot. I thought of the week before: he’d promised dinner at home. I waited four hours, six till ten, only to get a message that he was worn out and going straight to bed. So tiredness wasn’t the issue. He simply no longer wanted to cook for me. I left the painkillers there and walked away. That night, I took a London magazine job offer and messaged my lawyer. As I slipped off my wedding ring, my phone lit up. Luca texted: “I’ll come home for dinner this weekend. I’ll make your favorite pasta.” I stared long and sent no reply. He’d already made that pasta for someone else. There was no reason left for me to wait at the table.

At our wedding rehearsal, Dante Corleone brings Lucia Ferrante, the fiancee of his late brother, Davide. "Davide died protecting me in that shootout on Thanksgiving. Without him, I never would've become Don to the Corleone Famiglia," Dante says. "We have the rest of our lives together, Camilla, but this is Lucia's only chance." So I stand below the stage, watching my fiance drop to one knee before another woman in a wedding dress and reverently kiss the back of her hand. Then the priest turns to Dante and asks awkwardly, "Do you wish to stand before God and recite your vows to Ms. Ferrante?" Lucia bursts into tears and throws herself into Dante's arms. "Camilla, I'm not trying to steal anything from you," she sobs. "I just want to exchange the vows Davide never got a chance to give me before he died. If Dante is willing to stand in for his Fratello and marry me just this once, I'm sure Davide wouldn't mind." Without a second thought, Dante steps up to the altar. I stand below, watching him slip the very wedding ring I designed onto Lucia's finger. I look down at my own empty ring finger. And suddenly, it all feels so pointless. The vows could be borrowed. The ring could be borrowed. Even my man could be loaned out to comfort another woman. In that case, I'm done with this wedding.

On the day of our engagement, Caesar Greco brings the wrong ring. The one he's supposed to give me is a ruby ring engraved with the family crest. Instead, he slips a silver band onto my finger, the gift that comes with a necklace he bought a few days earlier. His eyes stay fixed on my sister, Anna Benedetti, in the audience. Barely paying attention to me, he answers, "I grabbed the wrong one by mistake. The audience sits so far away. Who's going to notice?" "By mistake" is something I've heard far too many times. On our date, he books tickets to a symphony concert Anna likes instead of the opera I've wanted to see by mistake. On our vacation, he brings the wrong passport by mistake. He and Anna board the plane while I am still stuck back home. At a dinner party, he sends my invitation to Anna by mistake. The next day's headlines are filled with photos of them arriving together, announcing to the world that she's the Don's wife instead of me. Every time, Caesar dismisses it with the same careless excuse. "It was just a mistake. Every day, I'm dealing with arms shipments and checking on the family's casinos. I have to watch my back in case someone tries to kill me. Why can't you cut me some slack over something this trivial?" I've made a point of putting the ring in a custom jewelry box and setting it in the most conspicuous spot on the table, right beside the pistol he never goes anywhere without. Somehow, he still picks up the wrong one. I follow his gaze to Anna. That's when I notice the ruby ring on her left ring finger, its facets blazing under the lights. Caesar steps in front of me, blocking my view, his tone impatient. "It's just a ceremony. Let's get through it. I have something important to get to." That so-called important thing is that Anna has found a newly opened boutique and wanted him to go with her to check it out. I slip the ring off my finger and hold it out to him. "Since I'm clearly never on the top of your list, you should save your time for the person who is."

I had been secretly dating my brother’s best friend, the heir to the Moretti family, for seven years, and I was planning to propose to him at the family banquet. Following his location, I found him at a drinking party, only to overhear their laughter through a crack in the private room door. “Vito, your Cinderella is back. What are you planning to do with the little stand-in?” The room fell silent for a few seconds. Then another underboss sneered. “Vito’s got some nerve. You even dared to touch the most beloved princess of the current Sicilian Mafia Don. Now that you’ve had your fill of sweetness, Lucia has come back…” “She left so heartlessly back then. She deserved to be pissed off with a replacement!” The next day, Vito took me to Lucia’s welcome-back banquet, putting on an extravagant show of affection for me. But when Lucia rushed into the rain with tears in her eyes, he shoved me aside and chased after her in a panic. Covered in soup stains and burns, I went home and opened the secret door he had never allowed me to enter. Photographs of him and Lucia, once inseparable, covered the desk. My heart turned to ash as I picked up the encrypted line to my brother in Sicily. “Brother, I’ve thought it over. About the arranged marriage in Chicago—I agree!”

On my son’s birthday, my husband, the godfather of the Vitale family, once again went to spend the day with his widowed sister-in-law’s child. Dante Vitale came home after midnight with a limited edition racing set in his hand. “Wake Luca up,” he said. “I’ll celebrate with him now.” I only shook my head. There was no need. I used to care because I had been with Dante for ten years, yet I had never officially become the Donna of the Vitale family. Every time our wedding came close, it was interrupted by another emergency from Lucia, his widowed sister-in-law. I did not want my son to stand in this family without a proper place. Everyone knew he was Dante’s child, yet no one truly treated him as a Vitale heir. Now I suddenly stopped caring. Because he had missed our son’s birthday for the sixth time. And because Luca’s birthday wish today was simple. He did not ask for a toy. He did not ask for another chance. He only looked at me and whispered, “Mommy, I don’t want Daddy to come anymore.” That was when I finally understood. Waiting for a man who always chose someone else would only hurt my child more. Seven days later, I would take Luca to Sicily. This time, we would never come back.

My husband of five years, Eric Vale, came home drunk again. As I laid him in our bed, he murmured, “Don’t worry, my love… I’ll take care of you and our baby.” My heart stopped. Baby? We’d been on birth control since the day we married. There was no baby. I shook him lightly. “What are you talking about, Eric?” He blinked at me, confused, then smiled like nothing had happened. “Hey, babe… did I say something?” The next morning, I checked our joint account. Every month, ten thousand dollars had been wired to a woman named Bella Evers. Yesterday, he sent two hundred thousand more—with a note: I can’t wait for our baby to be born. Bella was Eric’s mistress and was now six months pregnant. So I made one call. “Papa,” I told the most feared Don in the South, “I’m getting a divorce.” I glanced at my sleeping husband. “I want him gone. And I want him broke.”

Four years ago, I took three bullets for my husband, Marcus DeLuca, heir to New York's most powerful mafia family. It cost me three years in a rival family's flooded cell. They interrogated me, drugged me with hallucinogens, and starved me, trying to make me reveal the DeLuca family's accounts, warehouses, and shipping routes. Three years later, I finally escaped. At the DeLuca Foundation's charity gala, everyone was talking about Rachel Bellini. The same woman I'd slapped in public years ago after she drunkenly draped herself over my husband's shoulder. "God only knows how much Marcus has spent on Rachel over the years. Now she's even got a Golden Globe nomination." "After Sarah disappeared, she moved into the DeLuca estate." "That's not all she got. She gave Marcus two kids." "But Sarah is Marcus's wife. The DeLuca family threw the biggest wedding this city had ever seen." "Oh, come on. She was abused for three years. She can't have kids anymore. Look at her." For more than 1,000 days and nights in that flooded cell, I'd believed he was tearing the city apart to find me. It turned out he'd had other things to do. Pathetic. In the middle of the ballroom, Marcus and Rachel gazed into each other's eyes. Someone shouted, "Make it official, Marcus!" Just then, the spotlight swept across me. Everyone turned to look at me, waiting for me to slap her a second time. I just raised my champagne glass and smiled. "Don't stop on my account." Then I turned and walked out of the ballroom before they could see my red, swollen eyes. I called Lily. "Last time, you said your jewelry studio in Sydney still needs a partner. I've thought it over. I'm in."

My family's driver, Marco, always brought his girlfriend along when he drove me. I put up with it. His dead father took a bullet for my family once. Until today. I opened the door of my custom bulletproof Cadillac. Someone wrote on the inside of the window in red lipstick: "Stay away from my man, bitch." I wiped the smudge off with a tissue. "What is this?" I asked, my voice dead. Crystal sat in the passenger seat. She glared at me like I was poison. "Can't you read?" she spat. "Stay away from my man, you parasite. Buy your own car, you broke bitch." I watched this circus. I said nothing. Marco rushed to my side. He whispered frantically: "Aurora, she doesn't know I'm just a driver. She thinks... she thinks the whole family business is mine. She loves the power. Please." Then came the ultimate betrayal. "I need to take her to Fifth Avenue first. I'll come back for you later." He drove off in my car. He left me in the dust. I stood there and scoffed. I called Cassian, my brother's top enforcer. "Someone stole my car. And my patience is gone. Find them. I want them alive."