The Civilian Bride Is The Underworld Boss

On the night I was to consummate my vows with the heir to the Vitiello mafia empire, his childhood sweetheart tipped a pail of hissing cockroaches into my bathwater.

My new husband, Cassius, just stood in the doorway, arranging a wager with his soldiers on the exact minute my mind would splinter.

He coldly announced that our marriage certificate was a forgery, and that a bloodless civilian like me could never sit beside him.

"You are only a pretty distraction, a temporary toy meant to be passed around my loyal men," he sneered.

Bianca slapped me across the face, her diamond ring drawing blood, before ordering the men to dump a massive glass jar of hundreds of frenzied roaches into the tub.

The soldiers surged forward like starving animals, leering at my exposed, wet body, ready to drag me out and tear me apart.

Cassius merely smoked his cigar, fully sanctioning my violation and telling me to curse my own low birth.

I stared at the man I had expended every hidden connection and resource to keep alive during the bloody succession wars.

I had given him everything to secure his seat, only to be discarded the second I outlived my usefulness.

They thought I was just a fragile canary with no moves left on the board.

They didn't know I was the hidden Boss of the Romano Famiglia, the ruthless Don who controlled the entire Eastern Seaboard.

I wiped the dirty bathwater from my face, shed my civilian disguise, and gave the kill order to my tactical strike team waiting in the shadows.

Chapter 1

Sera POV:

On the night I was to have consummated my vows with the heir to the Vitiello mafia empire, his childhood sweetheart tipped a pail of hissing cockroaches into my bathwater.

All the while, my new husband stood framed in the doorway, arranging a ten-million-dollar wager with his soldiers on the exact minute my mind would splinter.

The dark, chitinous shells broke the surface of the warm water with a series of thick, unsettling plops.

I became rigid in the massive marble tub, the air seized in my lungs. My fingers clamped onto the porcelain lip with such force that the blood fled from my knuckles.

Only hours before, Bianca Falcone had taken a blade to my swimsuit by the estate pool, a crude attempt to humiliate the bloodless civilian bride before the entire syndicate.

I had knotted the ruined fabric into a makeshift two-piece that clung to every curve. The made men had tracked my movements with a naked, possessive hunger, and a bitter jealousy had curdled Bianca's features. This, now, was her answer.

Dozens of insects thrashed in the dense white bubbles that lapped against my bare skin, their spiny legs making a dry, scratching sound against the basin.

My mind lurched back to a dark, decaying cellar. I was seven years old again. My cruel stepmother had sealed me in the pitch-black with rotting refuse and a thousand crawling shadows during a syndicate war.

A strangled gasp tore from my throat as I fought to rise, to reach for the silk robe laid out on the counter.

The heavy bathroom doors were thrown wide.

Bianca strode into the en-suite, the sharp report of her heels against the tiles like a series of small cracks in the silence.

Directly behind her was Cassius Vitiello-the man who had slid a wedding ring onto my finger not six hours ago.

A dozen of his trust-fund cronies and low-level soldiers crowded the doorframe behind him, their bodies blocking the light from the hall.

Bianca gestured toward me, a high, sharp laugh cutting the air. She began to narrate the tremor in my limbs, calling to the men to witness the pathetic little bird who could not even save herself from a few bugs.

With a snap of her fingers, the men in the doorway produced their phones, their thumbs moving swiftly to transfer funds into some squalid betting pool.

Through the thinning layer of foam, the gleam of my wet skin was exposed. Not one of them looked away; their eyes were a palpable weight on my shoulders and the swell of my chest.

They tossed out coarse, degrading appraisals of my body-words one might expect to hear in a cheap brothel, not within the fortified walls of a ruling family.

My gaze passed over the leering crowd until it found my husband.

A tremor entered my voice as I called his name, pleading with Cassius to clear the room. I told him the insects were crawling closer to my bare legs, that the fear was a physical sickness inside me.

Cassius merely canted his weight against the doorframe and folded his arms, his dark eyes as flat and lifeless as chips of slate.

He called me a fragile burden in a toneless voice, ordering me to sit still and afford the men who fought for his territory a generous view.

Acid surged up my esophagus, a bitter, rusty taste filling my throat and forcing me to clench my jaw. Fueled by a sudden, cold anger, I reached over the edge of the tub and took up my phone from the dry mat.

I told him I would make a single telephone call. I gave him my word that I could mobilize enough of my own men to hunt down every last cockroach in this city and force-feed them to him and his mistress.

A muscle jumped in Cassius's jaw. Bianca stepped nearer to the tub, her fine-boned face contorting with fury at my sudden defiance.

I folded my arms across my chest, sinking deeper into the dissipating foam to shield myself from the soldiers' stares.

Bianca looked back at Cassius and proposed a wager: she forbade him from intervening to help me for the next thirty minutes.

Cassius did not hesitate. He reached out and tapped the tip of Bianca's nose with a fond, proprietary air, agreeing to her cruel terms without a second thought.

The associates in the hallway erupted in a chorus of coarse cheers, praising Cassius for showing true allegiance to his mafia princess over the civilian he was forced to wed.

As Bianca regarded me from on high, her gaze that of someone inspecting a bag of wet, rotting garbage, Cassius moved his hand and stroked her long, dark hair with a lover's tenderness.

He looked at me and stated, his voice cold, that I needed to learn how to indulge Bianca. He claimed a simple wager was of no consequence, since I already possessed the unbreachable security of being the Vitiello wife.

From the back of the crowd, a tall associate let out a loud, ugly snort.

He told Cassius to stop the pretense, and then he announced the truth in a voice loud enough for all to hear: the marriage certificate signed on the altar today was a forgery.