Carved From My Body, His Regret
My eyes struggled open, but a heavy weight held them shut. I was paralyzed, trapped in a cold hospital room, the rhythmic beep of a heart monitor a cruel reminder of my mother's death. I, Elena Vitiello, who controlled everything, was now helpless, reduced to a slab of meat.
Then I heard his footsteps. Dante. My husband, my anchor. But his voice was chillingly devoid of warmth as he ordered, "Do not increase the dosage. I will not risk damaging the organ's viability." The organ. My mind went blank, ice filling my veins.
Trapped and unable to move, I realized Dante saw me only as a "political placeholder," never loving me. He was having my kidney removed, carved from my body like livestock, to save his mistress, Sofia-the woman whose messes I'd cleaned for ten years. His hand, usually my comfort, smeared away my tear with sheer disgust.
The scalpel tore into my flesh, a blinding, white-hot agony. Every tug and pull hollowed me out, stripping away my potential, my love, my future. How could the man I bled for reduce me to a mere object, a spare part for his true love? The sheer insult of it fueled a volcanic rage.
As my kidney was lifted out, the final illusion of our marriage shattered completely. My fear dissolved, replaced by a chilling, absolute calm. The darkness that embraced me was not defeat, but the coiling silence of a viper preparing to strike. This kidney was not a sacrifice. It was the down payment for Dante Moretti's life.
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Chapter 5
Elena Vitiello POV:
"Elena."
Enzo Falcone’s voice poured through the encrypted frequency. It was dark, gravelly, and laced with a terrifying undercurrent of tension. He had waited five years for this call.
I swallowed hard, my throat parched and raw from the breathing tube. The simple movement sent a vicious spasm of pain shooting through my lower back. I couldn't stop the sharp, hissing intake of breath from escaping my lips.
"What happened to you?" Enzo demanded. The lazy arrogance vanished instantly. His voice dropped an octave, turning into a weapon. He noticed everything.
I ignored the question. I refused to sound like a victim. "The promise you made me in Palermo," I rasped, keeping my tone completely flat. "Does it still stand?"
A loud, violent crash echoed through the phone. It sounded like a heavy oak desk being violently overturned, followed immediately by the startled shouts of his lieutenants. Enzo had jumped to his feet. The untouchable Don of Sicily was losing his legendary composure over a single sentence.
"Say the word," Enzo’s voice came back, cold and sharp as a freshly honed straight razor. "I will burn Chicago to the ground. Every man wearing a Vitiello or Moretti pin will be dead by morning."
The absolute, unhesitating promise of violence hit me right in the chest. My eyes burned, the edges of my vision blurring with unshed tears. For ten years, my own husband had offered me nothing but cold calculation. Now, a rival boss was offering me the world on a platter of blood.
I blinked the tears away rapidly. "Dante drugged me," I stated, my voice eerily calm. "He cut me open and took my left kidney. He gave it to Sofia Bianchi."
The line went completely dead.
For five agonizing seconds, the only sound was the terrifying, rhythmic rasp of Enzo’s breathing. It was the sound of a hurricane gathering off the coast.
Then came the deafening sound of shattering glass. Enzo had just put his fist through the bulletproof window of his office. He didn't care about the politics or the money. He was enraged because his property—the woman he had secretly claimed in his mind five years ago—had been damaged.
"Elena," Enzo said. His voice was suddenly sickeningly gentle. It was the voice of the Devil making a pact. "Keep breathing. I am coming."
"No," I countered immediately, my strategic mind overriding the pain. "I am in Dante's private hospital. He has three hundred armed men in a ten-mile radius. A frontal assault will start a war with the Commission. You will lose too many men."
"I don't give a fuck about the Commission," Enzo snarled.
"I do," I replied firmly. "In seven days, Dante is hosting the Syndicate Gala to solidify his alliance with my father. The security grid will be entirely focused on the perimeter. That is my window."
Enzo let out a dark, appreciative chuckle. He respected my mind. Dante only ever saw my body.
"Seven days," Enzo agreed, the violence simmering just beneath his words. "I will have my fleet in the Atlantic and my planes locking down Chicago airspace. We take you out, and we leave them nothing."
"If you do this, the American Mafia will hunt you," I warned him. I owed him the truth.
Enzo scoffed, a deeply arrogant sound. "Let those Chicago street rats try to bite a Sicilian lion. They will choke on their own blood."
A strange, heavy warmth spread through my chest. For the first time in a decade, I felt safe. I let my tense muscles relax into the mattress. The sudden shift yanked at my stitches, and a muffled groan slipped past my lips.
"Don't move," Enzo ordered instantly, the raw panic bleeding through his ruthless facade. "Lie perfectly still, Elena. Do not agitate the wound."
The microscopic attention to my physical pain was a stark contrast to Dante leaving me to bleed.
"I need you to do one more thing," I said, catching my breath. "I need you to open a ghost account. I am draining Dante's offshore funds."
Enzo didn't ask why. He didn't question my authority. He immediately rattled off a string of numbers for a top-tier Swiss encrypted account.
Heavy, distinct footsteps approached my door. Leather soles.
"Someone is coming. I have to go," I whispered rapidly.
"Wait for me, my queen," Enzo murmured in flawless Italian.
I hit the end call button and shoved the black phone deep beneath the mattress. I adjusted my posture, smoothing the pain from my face, and stared blankly at the ceiling.
The door pushed open. Matteo walked in. He was holding a plastic cup of water, his shoulders slumped, and his eyes refusing to meet mine. He was the picture of pathetic, useless guilt.
I turned my head and looked at him. My eyes were completely dead. I didn't see Dante's friend anymore. I saw an enemy combatant.
Matteo walked to the bedside table and set the water down. His jaw worked, his mouth opening as if to offer a pathetic apology for watching me get butchered.
I didn't look at the water. I closed my eyes, cutting him out of my vision entirely.
"Get out."
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9.4
As a "wolfless" Omega at the absolute bottom of the pack hierarchy, my only goal was to build a safe, normal life with my fiancé, Dan.
That illusion shattered the day I came home early from work. I found Dan completely naked, tangled in my bedsheets with my cousin, Laura.
The suffocating stench of their betrayal polluted my home. Dan frantically tried to blame Laura, while she shrieked that they had been sleeping together for months. My sanctuary was destroyed. With no family to turn to, I fled into the night. Heartbroken and desperate for oblivion, I ended up in the office of my terrifying boss, Alpha Kane Cain. Fueled by whiskey and grief, I recklessly surrendered to him, signing a note consenting to whatever he wanted just to make the pain stop.
But the next morning, the blinding pleasure was replaced by pure terror. Kane hadn't pulled out. In our brutal world, an unmarked, wolfless Omega carrying an Alpha's child would be cast out and hunted. I panicked, begging him to let me leave, convinced I was just another disposable mistake.
Instead of letting me go, the ruthless Alpha's eyes darkened with a terrifying, primal possessiveness. He pulled out the note I had signed in my drunken haze.
"You gave me this power, little wolf," he growled, ordering his men to move my belongings to his estate. "Don't pretend you can take it back now."
7.3
Seven years ago, my fiancé, Don Dante Moretti, sent me to prison to take the fall for my adopted sister, Chiara. He called it a gift-a way to protect me from a worse fate.
Today, he picked me up from prison only to abandon me at my family's estate. His reason? Chiara was having another one of her "episodes."
My parents then informed me I'd be staying in the third-floor storage room, so as not to disturb the fragile girl who stole my life.
They celebrated her "recovery" with a lavish dinner party, while I was treated like a ghost. When I refused to join, my mother hissed that I was ungrateful, and my father called me jealous.
They assumed I couldn't understand their venomous whispers. But prison was my university. I learned Spanish. I understood every word.
It was then I realized I wasn't just a sacrifice; I was disposable. The love I once felt for all of them had turned to ash.
That night, in the dusty storage room, I logged onto an encrypted channel I'd set up years ago. A single message was waiting: "The offer stands. Do you accept?" My hands, scarred and steady, typed back, "I accept."
9.7
For three years, I was the dutiful wife of billionaire Ervin Valdez.
On our third wedding anniversary, he came home smelling of his mistress's perfume, pinned me down, and brutally mocked me.
His mistress, Sylvia, had even sent me a fake ultrasound report to force me out of the picture.
In Ervin's eyes, I was just a vicious, calculating liar who used a pregnancy to trap him into marriage.
He didn't care that I had actually lost that baby, nor did he know the trauma of my gambling father selling me to a dark club where I was assaulted by a stranger.
When I finally handed him the signed divorce papers, giving up all assets, and left the penthouse with nothing but an old suitcase, he just sneered.
"She is playing a game of hard to get. She won't last three days before she comes crying back."
He froze all my bank accounts, let his mistress humiliate me in public, and waited coldly for me to starve and beg.
He thought my entire existence relied on his wealth, completely confident that I would inevitably surrender to his control.
But he was wrong.
I calmly opened my old laptop, bypassed the complex encryptions, and looked at the dozens of unread emails from top-tier global brands begging for my return.
I resurrected my hidden identity as the legendary jewelry designer "R," and walked straight into the top design firm in Manhattan.
"It is time to find myself again."
7.4
For three years, I documented the slow death of my marriage in a black journal. It was my 100-point divorce plan: for every time my husband, Blake, chose his first love, Ariana, over me, I deducted points. When the score hit zero, I would leave.
The final points vanished the night he left me bleeding out from a car crash. I was eight weeks pregnant with the child we had prayed for.
In the ER, the nurses frantically called him-the star surgeon of the very hospital I was dying in.
"Dr. Santos, we have a Jane Doe, O-negative, bleeding out. She's pregnant, and we're about to lose them both. We need you to authorize an emergency blood transfer."
His voice came over the speaker, cold and impatient.
"I can't. My priority is Miss Whitfield. Do what you can for the patient, but I can't divert anything right now."
He hung up. He condemned his own child to death to ensure his ex-girlfriend had resources on standby after a minor procedure.
8.2
After an accident left me blind, I spent six months trapped in darkness, relying entirely on my devoted fiancé and my caring adoptive sister.
But when my vision miraculously returned one morning, the first thing I saw was the two of them tangled in my guest room bed.
"As soon as that blind bitch signs the marriage proxy, the money defaults to my control."
I kept my eyes unfocused and played the fool. I watched as they forged my signature to drain my thirty-million-dollar trust fund. My adoptive parents even demanded I surrender my company shares because a disabled woman was a liability. When I refused, they went completely insane. Under the guise of a family dinner, they locked me in a VIP room with a grotesque Wall Street vulture, planning to sell my body to save their bankrupt business.
I had given this family everything, yet they were dissecting my life like vultures, convinced I was just a helpless, blind toy they could easily throw away.
But they had no idea I had already hired a supposedly homeless man to be my proxy husband to protect my assets. And they certainly didn't know this "beggar" was actually the ruthless, hidden billionaire heir of the Sweeney family. Gripping the hidden knife inside my dress, I dropped the blind act. It was time to burn them all to the ground.
8.0
A suggestive iMessage on the family iPad was the first crack in my perfect life.
I thought my teenage son was in trouble, but anonymous Reddit users pointed out the chilling truth. The message wasn't for him. It was for my husband of twenty years, Anthony.
The betrayal became a conspiracy when I overheard them talking. They were laughing about his affair with my son's "cool" school counselor.
"She's just so... boring, Dad," my son said. "Why don't you just leave Mom and be with her?"
My son didn't just know; he was rooting for my replacement. My perfect family was a lie, and I was the punchline.
Then, a message from a lawyer on Reddit lit a fire in the wreckage of my heart. "Gather proof. Then burn his entire world to the ground."
My fingers were steady as I typed back.
"Tell me how."