The Don's Discarded Bride

TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND REASONS

Two hundred thousand dollars.Sophia sat in Dominic’s study the next morning and stared at the dark web posting on the screen in front of her. Her face. Her name. The address of her old apartment. A photo from her social media the one where she was laughing at a friend’s birthday party two years ago, red wine in her hand, head thrown back, completely unaware that the man sleeping beside her every night was the kind of monster who would one day put a price on her life.Dead or delivered.She read it three times. Memorized the screen. Then she closed the laptop and turned to Dominic.“What happens now?”He was already on the phone. He’d been on the phone since 6 AM, and his voice had that calm, measured quality that she was learning meant someone, somewhere, was about to have a very bad day.He hung up.“Every bounty hunter in the city just received a message,” he said. “Anyone who touches you answers to me. Personally.”“And that’s enough?”“Yes.”He said it like he was telling her the weather. No bravado. No performance. Just a fact the same way you might say water is wet or gravity pulls down. In Dominic Cross’s world, his word was the law, and the law did not negotiate.The next three days reshaped Sophia in ways she didn’t know she could be reshaped.He brought in a trainer. Not a gym trainer a woman named Kira with short-cropped silver hair and forearms corded with muscle and eyes that looked like they’d seen the inside of more than one war zone. She’d spent twelve years in Israeli special forces before going private, and she shook Sophia’s hand with a grip that could crack walnuts.“I’m going to teach you how to hurt someone,” Kira said on the first morning. “Not fight them. Hurt them. There’s a difference.”Sophia was terrible. Her punches were wide. Her stance was wrong. She tripped over her own feet twice and hit the mat so hard the third time that she saw stars.She got up every single time.Kira noticed. She didn’t say anything, but Sophia caught the small nod the military acknowledgment of someone who takes the hit and stands back up. By the end of day two, Sophia could throw a palm strike that snapped Kira’s focus pad hard enough to echo off the gym walls. By day three, she could break a wrist lock.She wasn’t dangerous yet. But she was becoming someone who could be.Between sessions, she cooked. It started as a way to burn off the adrenaline, but somewhere between the second batch of tiramisu and the rosemary focaccia she made at midnight, it became something else. The penthouse staff the security team, the housekeepers, the two men who stood at the elevator like statues started appearing in the kitchen.First one. Then three. Then six men in dark suits sitting at the counter eating her cannoli like children at a birthday party.Dominic found his head of security at midnight, a man named Torres who weighed two-fifty and had once broken a man’s collarbone with his bare hands, eating tiramisu with his eyes closed and a look of pure bliss on his scarred face.Dominic stood in the doorway and watched this for a long time. Sophia caught his expression from the corner of her eye. It wasn’t amusement. It wasn’t annoyance. It was something she couldn’t name something between wonder and fear, like a man watching a fire he’d lit and realizing it was bigger than he’d planned.She was embedding herself in his world. Not with violence. Not with seduction. With butter and sugar and the simple, devastating power of feeding people who’d forgotten what it felt like to be cared for.* * *Marcus’s world was falling apart.Sophia didn’t see it happen. She didn’t need to. Nico brought the reports like a man delivering the morning paper: three of Marcus’s shell companies frozen. Two bank accounts flagged. Four associates arrested on charges that had been sitting in sealed files for years, suddenly unsealed by prosecutors who owed Dominic favors they couldn’t afford to forget.Dominic wasn’t just dismantling Marcus. He was erasing him. Methodically. Quietly. Like a surgeon removing a tumor one cell at a time.Vanessa was pulling away. Nico’s sources said she’d stopped answering Marcus’s calls. The bounty on Sophia had gone cold not one taker. Not one. The message Dominic had sent was louder than two hundred thousand dollars.Marcus was alone. Broke. Watching his kingdom crumble from a rented apartment because the penthouse he’d shared with Vanessa was in her name, and she’d changed the locks.Sophia heard all of this and felt nothing. Which scared her more than the bounty had.* * *Late night. Fourth day since the bounty. Sophia couldn’t sleep.She wandered the penthouse in bare feet and one of Dominic’s T-shirts that she’d stolen from the laundry because it smelled like cedar and she was too tired to pretend that didn’t matter.She found the study door open. The lamp was on. Dominic was at his desk, and he was holding something a photograph, small, creased, the kind you carry in a wallet for years until the edges go soft.He didn’t hear her. Or maybe he did and didn’t turn around. Either way, she saw the photo before he could hide it.A woman. Dark hair. Olive skin. High cheekbones and a wide, generous mouth. Beautiful in the way that certain women are beautiful not perfect, but alive, every feature sharp with intelligence and warmth.And her eyes.Sophia’s breath caught.The woman in the photograph had Sophia’s eyes. The exact same shape. The exact same color. Like looking into a mirror that had aged twenty years.Dominic saw her in the doorway. His hand moved fast the photograph disappeared into the drawer, the drawer slid shut, and his face reset to that controlled blankness so quickly it was like watching a door slam.“Who was that?” Sophia asked.His jaw worked. The muscles in his neck were tight, and the scar on his face looked paler than usual, like the blood had drained away from it.“No one.”But his hand was on the drawer. And his hand was trembling.Dominic Cross did not tremble.Sophia stared at the closed drawer. At his white knuckles. At the face of a man who could make an entire city flinch with a phone call but couldn’t hold a photograph without shaking.She didn’t push. Not tonight. But she filed it away the woman with her eyes, the trembling hand, the lie in the growing catalog of things Dominic Cross was hiding from her.And she promised herself she would find every single one.