The Stand-In’s Stoke Back, Everyone Regretted It
The day someone told me I was legitimate blood of the Mafia family, I went from being the Don's daughter's personal maid to being the Don's daughter myself.
Three days after they brought me home to the family estate, I went looking for Luciano, the man I'd secretly married, and found him in the study, talking to Don Moretti.
"Nina is obedient. She wouldn't dare utter a word even when bullied. She is the perfect person to take the fall for Avery at that bloody party and she won't crack."
"Good, Luciano. You think of everything! She's nobody — a street girl. She walks into that bloodbath and dies, nobody's going to miss her. Let her go. Avery's waiting for you to make underboss first, then we do the wedding proper."
I stumbled back three steps. My heel hit the marble floor and the pain shot straight up my leg, but it was nothing compared to what just exploded in my chest.
I wasn't Don Moretti's real blood. And the man who had sworn his life to me, my own husband, was planning to send me into that slaughterhouse so he could marry the Don's actual daughter.
I'd already heard what happened to the last stand-in at one of those events. Shot to pieces. That news drove into my spine like an ice pick.
But what they didn't know, what I'd only just found out, was this:
My brother, who'd been missing for years, was the highest power in the Cosa Nostra. The one they called the Shadow King.