I sent my husband's mistress out of the country thinking I was cleaning up the mess. But when Niccolo found out, he took our six-year-old twins as leverage. Strapped bombs to their chests and set a timer.

He slid his phone across the table, screen glowing with the horror I couldn’t unsee. “You’ve got forty-nine minutes, Geneva,” he said calmly. “Where did you send Margot?”

I flinched.

Margot.

That snake. His mistress. The woman who whispered lies into his ear until he believed our children weren’t his. Until he looked at me and saw nothing but betrayal.

I couldn’t speak.

This was the third time he’d asked. The first time, he just looked at me...like I was some stupid girl playing games. The second, he grabbed my chin, ran his thumb across my lips like he used to when we were in love, and whispered, “Geneva… stop acting up.”

Now?

Now, he had bombs on our babies.

“Y-you’re really doing this…” My voice came out broken, almost like it wasn’t mine. “Niccolo… they’re our kids…!”

He gave a short laugh. No humor. Just ice.

“THEY’RE YOUR KIDS,” he said sharply, leaning back. “Margot told me what happened during that trip to Milan. Said you were already pregnant when I married you. Said they can’t be mine. I saw the test. The DNA..”

My vision blurred.

“They’re yours,” I whispered. “Trust me! You know they’re yours. Please… you used to hold Elle like she was your little princess…Eli followed you around like your damn shadow—”

He slammed his hand on the table. “Then why the hell did you hide Margot from me?! Where is she, Geneva?!”

My breath hitched. I didn’t mean for it to go this far. I just wanted her gone. Wanted her to stop poisoning what little we had left. So I sent her away. I didn’t even tell my own damn shadow where.

I wiped at the tears streaming down my cheeks, but they just kept falling. My throat burned. My heart felt like someone took a bat to it.

“I sent her out of the country,” I finally admitted, voice raw. “I wanted her gone. I wanted you back.”

Niccolo stared at me. His jaw clenched. That muscle on his neck ticked. He stood. Walked around the table. Stopped right in front of me. Then, he leaned down until his lips were beside my ear.

“You have thirty-two minutes left,” he said quietly. “Tell me exactly where. Or you’ll watch them blow into pieces… starting with Elle.”

My knees buckled.

He didn’t catch me. And in that moment, I realized...my husband wasn’t the man who swore he’d protect me anymore.

He was the devil Margot turned him into. And I had to figure out how to beat the devil… before he destroyed what’s left of my heart.

Back then… I was just an ordinary girl. Nothing special. Just a nobody from a quiet street and a half-broken family.

And Niccolo Salvacion?

He was the goddamn prince of the underworld. The heir to the Salvacion family—rich, ruthless, born into power like he owned the whole damn city. Men bowed when he walked by. Cops looked the other way. People whispered his name like it was holy or cursed. Depends which side you stood on.

He was arrogant. Sharp. Always in control. And somehow, he fell for me.

Hard.

I still remember the way the city buzzed when he started chasing me. The way people stared when black Escalades lined up outside my apartment building, blocking traffic. The way strangers took photos of the night sky when he made the entire skyline light up with “G, marry me.” On my birthday, he shut down half the city with fireworks—just for me.

He made sure the world knew I was his.

I didn’t know whether to run or fall harder. My friends said I was crazy. But he was relentless. Soft with me. Dangerous with everyone else. He kissed me like I was the only thing keeping him alive.

I should’ve seen it coming. I should’ve known fairy tales in the mafia never end well.

Even when I told him it wouldn’t work, that he was too far out of my world, too different but he didn’t care. I pushed him away, said I wasn’t mafia wife material. He still showed up, night after night, sitting in the rain outside my tiny apartment like some idiot in love.

He didn’t just break his pride for me. He shattered it.

When I got pregnant with the twins, he kissed my belly like it held his whole future.

He said, “They’re ours. You. Me. Them. That’s it.”

But that was before Margot whispered her venom in his ear.

Before she told him the twins weren’t his. Before he looked me in the eye with that cold, unreadable stare and asked, “Who’s their real father, Geneva?”

That shattered me more than any bullet could.

I really thought I married the right man. I thought love would be enough.

That was before I ever heard the name Margot Jenner.

It started off harmless. Just a throwaway line from Niccolo’s right-hand man, Luca, over a glass of whiskey.

Some girl at the underground auction had caused a scene, pretended to stumble right in front of Niccolo. Claimed her heel broke, but everyone knew it was staged. Girls like that were always trying to catch his eye. Thinking a fake blush and a desperate bid could earn them a seat at a table built on blood.

I laughed it off. I trusted him.

He’d always kept things clean, never messed around like the other men in our world. He told me I was different. He said he wanted a wife, not a liability. He swore I was it for him. But the second time I heard that name?

It was in our bed.

He was inside me, hot breath against my neck, my legs tangled around his waist and then he whispered, “Margot…”

When I confronted him the next morning…shaking, small, desperate to understand, he didn’t even deny it. He pulled me into his arms, calm, steady, like I was the one spiraling.

“Yeah… I thought about keeping her,” he said. “But she’s just for fun. Don’t overthink it. Everyone in our world has someone on the side. You’re the one I come home to, Geneva. That won’t change.”

That was his excuse. That I was supposed to accept it. Be grateful, even. But it did change.

He got bold.

He stopped hiding her.

He bought her jewelry. Gave her a penthouse uptown. Took her to private parties, dripping in diamonds, while I sat at home stitching lies together for our six-year-old twins. His twins.

They kept asking why Daddy never tucked them in anymore.

And when I cried, when I screamed, when I begged him to choose us over whatever illusion Margot had woven, he just stared through me…cold, detached.

“Stop being so fucking dramatic, Geneva.”

That’s all he said. I wasn’t a wife to him anymore. Just noise. A problem that needed quieting.

So I did what any cornered woman would do.

I sent her out. Margot disappeared, erased from our lives before she could finish tearing apart what little was left of our family.

I thought that would be the end. But instead? He kidnapped our twins.

“She’s in Monochalie,” I said, my voice splintering. “That villa under my name. The one by the lake in Klarevia”

Niccolo didn’t move for a few seconds. He just stared at me, those dark eyes drilling into mine, silent, cold, unreadable.

Then he picked up his phone and made a call.

He didn’t even step out of the room to do it.

After a few words in Italian, he hung up, grabbed his suit jacket, and turned to leave...fast, urgent. Going to get his precious Margot.

I grabbed his sleeve, fingers trembling. “What about the twins? Niccolo!”

He stopped. Turned halfway. His face was stone. “They’re at the old hospital. Eastwood District.” His voice was flat. “Go get them yourself.”

My knees almost buckled.

I didn’t say anything else. I just ran.

I drove so fast my vision blurred, nearly crashed into a truck at an intersection. My heart was beating in my throat, my mind was already there already in that hospital, already pulling them out and wrapping them in my arms.

When I finally got there, the place was dead quiet. Rusted gates, broken glass, old machines half-covered in dust. But inside… I found them.

Eli and Elle.

Tied to chairs. Mouths gagged. Bomb strapped to their chests.

My heart shattered right there.

Elle’s eyes were soaked in tears. Eli looked at me and started shaking his head over and over, as if telling me to run.

“No… no, no, baby…” I rushed forward, hands shaking so badly I couldn’t even grip the damn ropes right.

The timer on the bomb ticked louder than my own breathing. 03:12.

I kept fumbling, crying, doing everything I could to loosen the straps. Elle sobbed beneath the gag. I let go of Elle first and told her to run. She listened. Then I turned to Eli. My brave boy just stared at me.

And then he did something I’ll never forget. He looked straight at me… calm. Too calm.

And then he moved. “I love you, Mommy. Tell Daddy, I love him, too.”

He threw himself forward, hard, toward me. His small body slammed into mine and knocked me back. I fell, hit the concrete, scraped my hands.

“Eli!” I screamed.

But he didn’t stop. He turned… and lunged at the bomb.

“ELI!”

The blast threw me back. My head hit the floor. My ears rang so loud I couldn’t even hear myself scream. Blood poured into my mouth. Smoke choked me. And through it all… I couldn’t hear my son’s voice anymore.

—

I woke up in a hospital bed. Tubes in my arm. Elle beside me, hooked to machines, but breathing. The doctor said we made it out alive.

But not all of us.

Eli was gone.

I knelt beside the hospital bed, forehead pressed against the edge of the mattress where Elle lay, wrapped in bandages and wires.

Tears slid down my cheeks, “I’m so sorry, baby…” I whispered, my voice torn. “Mama chose the wrong man. I thought he’d protect us. I thought he loved us.”

Her eyelids fluttered weakly, “You don’t have to be sorry, Mama…” she mumbled. Her voice was dry and broken. “You’re here now.”

That shattered me. I buried my face in her small hand and cried. I cried until I couldn’t breathe. Until my chest hurt. Until all I could taste was salt and grief.

Eli was gone.

My son. My brave, bright boy. The one who used to call me “soldier mama” when I patched up his scraped knees. The one who used to hum lullabies to his sister when she had bad dreams. The one who shielded her in the end, and paid for it with his life.

I wasn’t strong enough to protect him.

I wasn’t fast enough.

And I let a man like Niccolo Salvacion into our lives, into my body, into my heart thinking he’d be the kind of father he never was.

When I first found out about Margot, I should’ve walked. I did try. Wrote the divorce papers three times. Each time, he tore them up in my face.

"Don’t be dramatic."

"She’s just a toy, Geneva. You’re my home."

"You belong to me. Always."

I begged him to let me go. He never did. Until now.

Now I had something he didn’t remember. Something he signed without reading, back when he still trusted me. One piece of leverage.

---

It happened months ago. Right after our twins got into that elite academy for mafia heirs' children. There was a stack of paperwork, and he was sitting behind his desk, signing with one hand while sipping whiskey with the other.

Margot had walked in mid-way wearing my silk and threw herself into his lap like she owned him. They started kissing right there, right in front of me.

I felt invisible.So I slid the divorce agreement quietly into the pile.

Just one signature.

When I handed him the pen, I said, “The twins’ school needs your signature for the field activity clearance.”

He paused. Squinted at me. “Didn’t I sign something for them already?”

“Just this one more,” I said, calm, collected.

Margot giggled and tugged at his collar. “Come on, Nic, let her finish whatever housewife thing she’s doing. We’ve got plans.”

He scribbled his name across the page without looking and waved me off.

“Go,” he said. “I’m busy.”

He didn’t even notice.

---

And now, a week later, after we buried Eli… just me and Elle, no flowers, no family, no father beside us we walked into that law office hand in hand.

I sat there with her tiny fingers wrapped around mine, while the lawyer flipped through the document, brow raised in surprise.

“This is valid,” he said after a pause. “Legally binding. His signature is here. The divorce is effective immediately.”

But the lawyer told me the identity erasure would take two weeks, I just nodded and said okay. Two weeks. That’s all we needed.

Elle and I left the lawyer’s office the same day we buried Eli.

Now we were back in the Salvacion estate, pretending to be the picture-perfect family for just a little longer. Because if Niccolo suspected anything, if he found out I planned to disappear with Elle... we’d never make it out alive.

The staff still looked at me with pity. I didn’t care. I wasn’t here for them.

I spent the first day emptying the house of him—quietly, methodically. His favorite mug disappeared from the cabinet. I deleted every playlist he ever made me, even the one we danced to at our wedding.

On the second day, I repainted the bedroom. I changed the sheets, replaced the curtains, moved the bed to the opposite wall. Not a single trace of how it used to be.

On the third day, I visited the safe.

Inside was the antique watch I gave him on our first anniversary. The one he said he’d pass down to our son one day. I took it. Sold it to a collector overseas. Not for the money. For the knowledge that it’d never land in his hands again.

When I came back to the mansion, Elle was waiting in the foyer. But so were two other people. Niccolo. And her. Margot.

She was curled up on the couch beside him like some porcelain doll; thin, fragile, the kind of fake sick that men fall for. Her hands wrapped around his arm like she belonged there.

I held Elle’s hand and walked past them without a word.

“Stop,” Niccolo’s voice rang out behind me. Cold. Commanding.

I paused but didn’t turn around.

“Where’s the bastard boy?” he asked.

My hand twitched, but I said nothing. Not here. Not in front of Elle.

“Where’s Eli?” he pressed.

Still, I said nothing. I felt Elle's fingers tighten around mine. I looked down at her. Her face was calm. Too calm for a six-year-old. So I knelt, brushed her hair behind her ear, and said softly, “Come on, let’s go cook something, sweetheart.”

We walked toward the kitchen, but before I could step inside, Niccolo’s hand wrapped around my arm and yanked me back hard.

“Don’t fucking ignore me,” he snapped. “You think you can just act like nothing happened? Where is my son?”

I yanked my arm free.

“You said he wasn’t yours,” I said flatly. “So why are you asking now?”

He glared at me. But before he could say anything else, Margot’s voice came in, soft and pitiful.

“Niccolo, don’t… you’re scaring her.”

I turned. Margot was curled up on the couch like some frail little thing, one hand clutching his sleeve, the other resting over her heart as if it was all too much for her.

He softened immediately.

“You always get anxious when I raise my voice,” he murmured, brushing her hair back. “You should rest.”

He kissed the top of her head. Right in front of me.

Elle watched in silence. Not a sound. She just stood beside me like a ghost.

I turned to leave again.

Then Niccolo said it—real smooth, real slow:

“Geneva, apologize to her. She’s been suffering ever since you dumped her in Monochalie. She couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. You went too far.”

That made me stop.

I turned, expression empty. “And if I don’t?”

Margot straightened slightly, eyes glistening like she was about to cry but I saw the smirk underneath. “It’s okay, Niccolo… I don’t mind. Geneva’s still the lady of the house.”

She looked down shyly, but I caught the flicker of smugness in her eyes.

Niccolo kissed her forehead. “You’re too kind. From now on, I’ll spoil you. You don’t have to take anything from anyone.”

I nearly laughed. It was pathetic. A joke.

Just then, a maid brought in a cup of chamomile tea.

“For Miss Margot,” she said politely.

Chamomile. Her favorite.

I stood there, cold, blank, dead inside. Then his phone rang.

He glanced at the screen. “You always get headaches when I talk business around you,” he whispered to Margot. “I’ll take this outside. Drink your tea.”

And just like that, he left. The moment the door closed, Margot’s whole act dropped. Elle hiding behind my leg. Margot sitting on that damn couch like a queen.

“See that?” she said with a light laugh. “You sent me away, but he still chose me.”

I said nothing.

“He holds me now. Loves me now. You’re just a ghost in this house.”

I looked at her, calm. Empty. “If you want him, Margot,” I said, “then take him.”

She blinked, like I’d slapped her. “I don’t need your permission!” she snapped. “I’ll have everything—him, this house, his name...everything!”

Her voice grew louder, panicked. Then Niccolo’s footsteps echoed outside. She acted fast. Grabbed the scalding tea and poured it over her own chest. Screamed. Elle screamed too, clutching my leg. Niccolo burst in seconds later. Margot was on the floor, sobbing, clothes soaked.

His eyes locked on me.

“Geneva!”

“I didn’t touch her,” I said flatly. “There are cameras. Check them.”

He looked ready to kill. But before he could speak, Margot gasped through fake tears, “It’s not her fault, Niccolo. I just... I probably spilled it myself. I shouldn’t have tried to stay here… I’ll go.”

She stepped forward dramatically.

He caught her wrist. “You’re not going anywhere. I searched every corner of this planet for you, and now you think you can walk out again? You trying to kill me?” Then he looked at me. “Lock them both in the basement.”

My heart stopped. I stepped in front of Elle instantly, arms stretched wide. “No—no, please, don’t punish her! Niccolo, she’s just a child! She’s been through too much already!”

He didn’t even look at me.

Margot, still clinging to his arm like some bruised porcelain doll, gave a little whimper. “You saw how she looked at me… I can’t live like this, Niccolo. I’m scared she’ll hurt me again…”

“You’re overthinking it,” I snapped. “You faked the entire thing!”

“Enough!” His voice cut through the air.

I turned to him, desperate. “Check the damn cameras. Please. Just check them.”

“There’s no need,” he said, eyes like ice. “She’s the only person I trust.”

My stomach twisted. Elle gripped my hand tighter.

Margot turned, her voice suddenly steady—too steady. “Drag them down. No food. No water.”

“Wait! Niccolo!” I screamed. “Not Elle. Do whatever the hell you want to me, but not her! She’s your daughter—”

“She’s not,” he said flatly.

That silenced me. Two of his men grabbed me. Elle screamed and clung to my waist, sobbing.

“Mama! Don’t let them—”

“I’m right here, baby. I won’t let go,” I said, holding her tight even as they yanked us both down the hall. My knees scraped the floor. My arms burned. Elle cried into my shirt.

The basement door creaked open. Dark, damp, and cruel. They shoved us inside like we were garbage. Then the door slammed shut.