Too Late, I Married The Mafia King

For six years, I endured my fiancé Silas's calculated cruelty, believing it was the only way to pay for my dying father's black-market lung medication.

Then, I overheard him talking to his secret lover—his late brother's widow.

"Once the old man suffocates, I'll put Aria in a fortified apartment as my personal whore, and you will wear the Capo's ring."

At the syndicate's annual Feast, Silas put his ruthless plan into motion.

He publicly humiliated me, tearing my dress open from collarbone to shoulder in front of hundreds of leering mobsters.

He deliberately scattered my father's bloody medical money across the dirt and forced me to draw the White Carnation, making me the ultimate laughingstock of the Family.

My frail father coughed up blood trying to protect me, while Silas and his lover sneered at my absolute ruin.

For six years, I swallowed my pride, thinking I was making a noble sacrifice to keep my father breathing.

I never realized I was just a disposable pawn in his sick game, kept on a leash only until my father was in the ground.

But Silas didn't know that the night before, I had taken the last of my money to buy a silver Vendetta Rosary.

I had ventured into the shadows and pledged myself to Dante, the terrifying, newly ascended Don of the entire syndicate.

As I sobbed on the cold wooden floor, the courtyard fell dead silent, and a pair of large, scarred hands reached into my vision holding a flawless Crimson Rose. And in the heavy silence that followed, I understood: either salvation or damnation had come for me, and I was no longer the one choosing.

Chapter 1

Aria POV

My feet seemed nailed to the heavy oak threshold, my calves aching from a prolonged tension. The sharp edge of an overdue medical bill pressed a white line into the side of my index finger, the paper emitting a faint, brittle sound. That brittle sheaf of paper was the only partition between my father and the grave.

I had come seeking salvation; instead, I had raised my hand to knock on Silas's study door when the sound of my own name froze me in place. I arrived just in time to hear the man I was supposed to marry planning the architecture of my own ruin.

He was describing to his secret lover exactly how many days they had to wait for my father to finally suffocate on his own blighted lungs.

Once the old man was gone, Silas would finally make her his official Capo's wife—and consign me to a fortified apartment across town as his personal whore.

Silas laughed. It was a low, proprietary sound that I had spent six years contorting my own soul to please.

"You just have to be patient, Bianca," Silas murmured, his voice low and thick with a desire that curdled the air.

"Arthur is coughing up blood every morning. The syndicate doctors give him two months, maybe three."

"Once the old man is in the ground, Aria will have no one."

"I will put her in that fortified apartment across town. She will be a quiet, obedient little secret, and you will wear the Capo's ring on your finger."

Bianca let out a soft, satisfied sigh.

She was the widow of his late brother, the former Underboss, a fact which made her betrayal a particularly venomous vintage.

"I want the Crimson Rose again this year, Silas," she whispered.

"If I draw it six times in a row, the Family laws say my status is elevated. I can marry above my station. I can marry you."

"You will get it, my love," Silas promised, a smirk I could hear in the very cadence of his words.

"I have paid the Estate Matriarch to swap Aria's token every single year."

"My pathetic fiancée will draw the White Carnation again tomorrow. She will be the laughingstock of the Feast, and no other Made Man will ever look at her. She belongs to me."

A surge of bile, hot and acidic, clawed its way up my throat.

Just three hours ago, I had begged the Estate Matriarch to make sure a Crimson Rose was placed in my drawing box for the annual Feast of the Patron Saint.

The old woman had simply wept.

Her gnarled hands had trembled so badly the teacup rattled in its saucer as she confessed that my tokens had been secretly swapped for five years.

She had been paralyzed with terror, unable to tell me who did it.

Now, the pieces of the last six years clicked into place, forming a picture of devastating clarity.

I looked down at the creased medical bills in my hand, its tremor a visible sign of my life's foundation crumbling to dust.

For six years, Silas had used the exorbitant cost of my father's black-market lung medication as a leash. He had delayed our wedding with an endless procession of fabricated excuses. I had swallowed my pride. I had endured his calculated coldness. I thought I was forging a noble sacrifice to keep my father breathing.

In truth, I was nothing but a pawn, to be discarded in his sick, protracted game.

I turned around and walked away from the heavy oak door.

My footsteps made no sound on the thick pile of the expensive carpet, the silence of my escape absolute.

I left the gilded cage of the mansion and walked straight into the gritty, indifferent streets of Little Italy.

The raw cold wind scraped at my face, but a cold numbness had already settled deep in my marrow, a void where grief should have been.

I returned to my rundown apartment and retrieved the last roll of cash I had hidden under my mattress.

It had been set aside for groceries, but a different kind of survival now demanded its own currency.

I walked into a pawn shop lit by a single, fly-specked bulb at the edge of the territory.

I bought a silver Vendetta Rosary.

In the narrow alleys of Little Italy, where even the sunlight struggled to penetrate, it was the final currency of the desperate.

A woman in the syndicate's underworld wore it to pledge herself to a new protector, a public appeal for salvation from a cruel master.

But I could not wait for salvation to find me. That night, beneath a sliver of moon, I took the silver beads and ventured into the heart of the Boss's territory. I stood before the wrought-iron gates of Dante's estate, the newly ascended Don, and demanded an audience. When I was finally brought to his shadowy, imposing study, I offered him the rosary. I begged him to claim me at the Feast tomorrow—to put on an act of taking me as his own, just long enough to break Silas's hold and secure my father's safety. Dante had stared at me, his pupils two pools of darkness that swallowed the lamplight, for what felt like an eternity before giving a single, curt nod. The pact was sealed in the silence between our heartbeats. But as I slipped out of his estate, I could not shake the feeling that I had just made a deal with a predator far more dangerous than the one I was fleeing.