THE MAFIA WIFE

Borrowed Name.

Chapter One

NATALIE POV

My mother helped me escape from my father's territory the night he announced my upcoming marriage to the son of Viktor Deluca.

I remember sitting at the end of the dining table when he said it — my father's voice filling the room the way it always did, leaving no space for anyone else's. Don Sergio Romano did not make announcements. He issued verdicts. And that evening, with the candlelight catching the silver in his hair and his pale grey eyes settled somewhere above my head as though I were a fixture in the room rather than a person sitting in it, he delivered mine.

I was to marry Luciano Deluca.

The son of Viktor Deluca — a man known throughout the underworld for his cruelty and his complete indifference to other people's suffering. To Viktor, the marriage was nothing more than a way to tighten his grip on territory, port, and shipping routes. A transaction. A handshake between powerful men conducted over the life of a girl who had not been asked.

I sat very calm and said nothing. I had learned early that saying nothing was the only language my father respected.

My mother's eyes found mine across the table.

"You mean Luciano Deluca?" she asked, her voice carefully neutral.

"Yes," my father said. "Luciano Deluca."

She looked at me then — just long enough for me to see what she was hiding behind her stillness. Not surprise. Grief. The quiet of someone who has been bracing for a blow so long that when it finally lands, all they feel is confirmation.

Luciano had a reputation that preceded him into every room. He was not a man you married because you wanted to. He was a man you were given to because someone with more power than you decided your life was a fair price for their purposes.

Neither of us said another word that evening.

But that night, long after the house had gone quiet, she slipped into my room.

She moved like she had practised it — quiet and deliberate, a small leather bag already packed and hanging from her hand. She set it at the foot of my bed and looked at me with an expression I had never quite seen on her face before. Not fear. Something steadier. The look of a woman who has made her decision and made peace with its cost.

"Get dressed," she said softly. "You are leaving."

My heart seized. "Now?"

"Now."

She pressed a passport into my hands while I pulled on my clothes with shaking hands. Someone else's name over my photograph, belonging to a girl from nowhere in particular. Along with it came an address — her distant cousin in New York. A woman named Kristy Malcolm who had built a quiet life far from anything our family touched.

"There is a car waiting down the street." She drew my coat hood up and tucked a loose strand of hair out of sight with careful precision. "The driver does not know your name. He only knows where to take you."

She took my phone and replaced it with a burner, untraceable.

"What about you?" I asked.

I watched her choose the version of the answer that would make it easier for me to walk out the door, and I loved her for it and hated the necessity of it at the same time.

She cupped my face in both hands. Her palms were warm. She smelled the way she always had — something faint and floral, a perfume she had worn her entire life. Standing there in the dark with her forehead pressed against mine, I understood that I was memorising her.

"I am already lost here," she said softly. "You do not have to be."

I nodded, because nodding was all I could do without falling apart, and then I picked up the bag and followed her out.

We moved silently through the house — past the portraits, past the closed doors behind which my father's world slept undisturbed, past every room that had ever made me feel like a guest in my own life. At the balcony door she stopped.

I hugged her tightly, the way you hold someone when you are trying to memorise the exact weight of them, so that you can carry it with you wherever you are going next.

She smiled against my hair. And then she let me go.

The car was where she said it would be. I climbed in without looking back, because I knew that if I did I would not leave, and not leaving was no longer something I could afford.

The driver said nothing. The streets were empty. The city moved past the window in amber and shadow, and I sat with the forged passport in my coat pocket and the weight of everything pressing against my sternum like something solid.

I did not cry. Not then. I saved that for later, when there was no one to see it.

A few days later, settled into Mrs. Malcolm's spare room with the unfamiliar sounds of a new city filtering through the window, I was beginning to understand what starting over felt like. Less like freedom and more like standing in a very large empty room, trying to decide where to begin.

Mrs. Malcolm came home one afternoon smiling before I had even opened the door fully.

"There is a vacancy," she said. "Front desk. My friend's husband's company."

I threw the door open the rest of the way. She laughed at my face.

I had spent years in a house where good news arrived already wrapped in conditions. The uncomplicated generosity of this woman — opening her home, going out of her way for a cousin's daughter who had arrived with a forged name and very little explanation — undid me in ways I was not prepared for.

She hugged me in the hallway. "Don't be anxious," she said. "You will do perfectly well."

I nodded into her shoulder and let myself believe her.

I was up before my alarm the next morning. Mrs. Malcolm had brought an outfit home the previous evening without being asked: well-fitted trousers, a button-down shirt, flat shoes. The kind of clothes that said I belong here without trying too hard.

I stood before the small mirror and looked at the girl looking back — dark hair in a clean bun, glossed lips, a borrowed name.

"Perfect," I said. It was the first thing I had said in that room that felt entirely true.

I got the job.

I called Mrs. Malcolm from the pavement outside with my heart still beating fast, and she made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

"Congratulations, figlia," she said.

I stood in the thin afternoon light and let myself feel it — the specific, unfamiliar texture of something that belonged only to me. Not leverage. Not an arrangement. Not a transaction conducted over my head by men who thought they owned my future.

Mine.

My first day was chaos dressed up as routine. The phones rang constantly. The printer jammed twice before ten. I transferred three calls to the wrong extensions and spent twenty minutes apologising to people too busy to be properly annoyed about it.

Maya saved me. She appeared at my elbow at half past nine with the quiet efficiency of someone who had once been exactly where I was standing and decided, without being asked, that she was not going to watch it happen to someone else.

"First days are always the worst," she said, already reaching past me to unjam the printer. "Don't worry. I've got you."

She stayed close all morning — showing me how to transfer calls, walking me through the building, explaining the unwritten rules. By lunch I was breathing again. By the end of the day I was almost steady.

Maya had told me about Di Cape, the café around the corner — close enough to reach on a lunch break without rushing. A short escape from ringing phones and glowing screens. I had taken to going every day, sitting for exactly twenty-five minutes with a cup of coffee and the pleasure of being anonymous in a city that did not know my real name.

That Tuesday I was two minutes late getting back.

I gathered my things quickly and pushed toward the exit just as the door swung inward from the other side.

The collision was immediate and total. My coffee went everywhere — steaming, directly onto an expensive coat. A splash caught the back of his right hand.

"I am so sorry — your hand, are you burned?" I pressed my napkin to his skin before he could answer.

"It's fine."

"Come inside, I will get ice." I took his hand. He did not pull away.

The large man behind him shifted — a subtle tension in his shoulders — but I paid it no attention. I was already steering the stranger toward a seat, dimly aware of heads turning around us without being able to identify why.

In my haste to reach the counter I stepped directly into a waitress's path. He moved before I finished registering the danger — his arm around my waist, clean and fast, pulling me back onto his lap as the waitress stumbled past with her tray, saved by inches.

The room settled.

His hand stayed at my waist. His voice came close to my ear, calm, with the faintest trace of amusement.

"Be careful," he said. "If you want to take care of me."

I became aware, in the way you notice things when it is already too late to pretend otherwise, of how close I was sitting to him. The warmth of his body. The smell of his aftershave — clean and sharp — and something richer underneath, settling in my senses before I had consciously registered leaning into it.

This was the first time in my life I had ever been this close to a man.

"I didn't know you'd be so comfortable on my lap, Miss," he said.

"I am so sorry. I will get the ice."

"You should get back to work."

His gaze dropped to the ID card around my neck. Not long. Just long enough.

I felt it like a hand on my shoulder — a pressure I could not explain and did not know yet to be afraid of.

I smiled, the way you do when you don't know what else to do, and walked back to the office two minutes late. I spent the rest of the afternoon telling myself that the warmth I could still feel at my waist meant nothing at all.

I was almost convinced.