Married To The Mafia Devil

Chapter 2: Ghosts of the Past

The taxi drops me three blocks away. I pay cash—no trail, no questions. Dawn breaks over what used to be the most beautiful house in New York, and now I can barely recognize it.

The De Luca estate.

My home.

I stand at the rusted gates, fingers curled around iron bars that were once polished daily by staff I knew by name. Mrs. Chen, who always slipped me cookies. Marco—not my cousin, the groundskeeper—who taught me how to climb the oak tree out back. All of them are gone now. Dead or scattered to the wind.

The house looms ahead like a rotting tooth. Broken windows stare back at me like hollow eyes, and spray paint mars the once-pristine stone walls. Castellano territory. Death to traitors. The De Lucas burn in hell.

I should feel something. Rage, maybe. Grief. But I've spent eight years learning to bury those things so deep that even I can't find them anymore. Emotion is a liability. Madame Chen taught me that on my third day in Thailand, right after I tried to kill myself with a shard of broken glass.

"You want to die?" she'd asked, watching me bleed onto her floor. "Then die useful. Or live strong."

I chose strong.

Now I scale the fence—easy, despite the barbed wire someone added to keep out urban explorers and nostalgic ghosts like me. My boots hit gravel that's choked with weeds, and I move toward the servant's entrance. The front door would be too exposed, too obvious. I learned a long time ago that survival means staying in the shadows.

The door hangs crooked on its hinges. I slip inside.

The smell hits me first. Mildew. Rot. Decay. And underneath it all, something else. Something that makes my stomach clench and my hand instinctively reach for the knife strapped to my thigh.

Blood.

Old blood, years old, but I know that smell. I lived in it the night I ran.

Don't think about it. Don't go there.

But the memories don't care what I want. They never do.

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Running. My feet slipping on marble floors slick with blood. Screaming—my mother's voice cut short. Gunfire echoing through halls where I'd played hide-and-seek as a child. My father's study door open, and inside—

No. Stop.

I force myself back to the present, jaw clenched so tight my teeth ache. The foyer is destroyed. Our family portraits—six generations of De Lucas—torn from the walls, frames smashed. I step over broken glass and scattered papers, each footfall deliberate and silent.

I know where I'm going.

My father's study is on the second floor, east wing. I take the servants' stairs because the grand staircase is half-collapsed. Probably sabotaged. The Castellanos are nothing if not thorough when they're sending a message.

The hallway upstairs is darker. Most of the windows are boarded up, and morning light barely penetrates. I pull out my phone and use the flashlight. The beam catches on more graffiti, on water damage, on—

I stop.

There. On the wall outside my old bedroom.

A handprint. Small. Sixteen-year-old girl small. Rust-brown.

My handprint. In my own blood.

I remember now. I'd cut my hand on broken glass, pressed against the wall to stay upright while the world spun and my family died, and I tried not to make a sound because if they heard me, I'd die too.

I survived because I was small and silent and scared.

I'm not that girl anymore.

I move past the handprint without touching it and head to the study. The door is off its hinges, lying on the floor like a fallen soldier. Inside, chaos. My father's massive mahogany desk is overturned. Bookshelves emptied, their contents scattered and torn. His chair—where I used to sit on his lap while he worked, where he taught me about loyalty and honor and family—is stained dark with something I don't let myself identify.

They ransacked this place looking for something. Money, probably. Secrets, definitely. My father kept records on everyone. Every debt, every favor, every sin. He used to say knowledge was sharper than any knife.

I wonder if that knowledge got him killed.

The portrait is still there, though. Above the fireplace. My mother was painted when she was thirty, wearing the diamond necklace my father gave her on their anniversary. She's smiling in the painting, eyes warm and alive. I remember her exactly like that.

I remember her dead too, but I shove that memory back into its cage.

I cross the room, broken glass crunching under my boots. The portrait is crooked, and the frame is cracked. I reach up and tilt it further.

Behind it, hidden in the wall—exactly where my father showed me when I was twelve, swearing me to secrecy—is the safe.

"If anything ever happens to me," he'd said, "this is yours. Only yours, *piccola*. Promise me."

I'd promised.

Now I kneel in the debris and enter the combination. My mother's birthday, my birthday, and his birthday. Six numbers that are burned into my brain the way some people remember prayers.

The safe opens with a soft click that sounds impossibly loud in the silence.

Inside, I find what I'm looking for.

Three leather journals, their pages yellowed and covered in my father's precise handwriting. Encrypted, of course—he taught me the code when I was fourteen and said I'd need it someday. God, I hate that he was right.

A manila folder stuffed with documents. I pull them out and scan quickly. Financial records. Shell companies. Wire transfers. And a list—handwritten, in my father's hand—of assets belonging to all five families. Not just surface-level businesses. The real ones. The ones they'd kill to keep secret.

This is leverage. This is power.

This is ammunition.

And at the very bottom, wrapped in velvet cloth, is my mother's necklace.

I lift it carefully. The diamonds catch what little light filters through the boarded windows, throwing fractured rainbows across my hands. It's heavier than I remember. When I was small, I'd sneak into my parents' room and try it on, pretending I was a princess at a ball.

My mother wore this the night she died.

I should feel something now. Grief. Loss. The weight of memory.

Instead, I feel cold calculation. This necklace is worth half a million dollars, easily. But more than that, it's a symbol. Everyone in our world knew this piece. When I wear it, they'll know exactly who I am. They'll know I'm not afraid.

I clasp it around my neck. The metal is cold against my skin, the diamonds heavy against my collarbone. I catch my reflection in a shard of broken mirror leaning against the wall.

I look like my mother. Same dark hair, same sharp cheekbones, same eyes that can cut through lies. But I look like my father too—in the set of my jaw and the steel in my gaze.

I look like a De Luca.

"They took everything," I whisper to the empty room, to the ghosts that linger in the walls, to the girl I used to be who died here eight years ago. My voice is steady. Certain.

"I'm taking it back."

I gather the journals and documents and stuff them into my bag. There's nothing else here for me now. Just memories and blood and the ruins of a life I can never reclaim.

But I don't want that life back.

I want something better. Something of mine.

I want revenge. I want power. I want every single person who thought the De Luca name could be erased to learn exactly how wrong they were.

Starting with Lorenzo Moretti.

As I leave the study, I don't look back. I learned a long time ago that the past is a weapon you wield, not a prison you live in. And right now, I'm armed to the teeth.

The sun is fully risen by the time I slip back out through the servant's entrance. The city is waking up around me—traffic building, people heading to work, life moving forward like my family never existed at all.

But I exist.

And I'm just getting started.

I touch the necklace at my throat, feeling the weight of it. The weight of legacy. The weight of names carved in stone and blood spilled on marble floors and promises made in the dark.

In thirty days, I'll marry the devil himself.

And then we'll see who ends up in hell.