Escaping The Cage: I Married His Worst Enemy

My husband, the Capo of New York, gripped my hand as we walked into the soundproofed room.

He wasn't there to save me.

He was there to watch the family doctor carve out my mind.

A stranger named Sofia claimed I had sold her to a brothel twelve years ago.

It was a lie.

But Dante looked at me with cold marble eyes, believing the woman sobbing in his arms over the wife he had vowed to protect.

"Sit, Elena," he ordered.

He strapped me into the chair. He watched as they injected liquid fire into my veins to force a confession.

He dragged me to the kennels, forcing me to feed the dogs I was terrified of, and watched as they tore into my flesh.

He even locked me in a freezer to "cool off" my jealousy.

The final straw wasn't the pain.

It was hearing him plan a Vow Renewal with Sofia, intending to parade me as her Maid of Honor to teach me humility.

I realized then that Elena Moretti had to die.

So, I set the hospital room on fire.

I left my wedding ring in the ashes and vanished into the night.

Six months later, Dante found me in Paris.

He fell to his knees, begging for forgiveness.

I looked at him with dead eyes and handed him a knife.

"Kill yourself," I said.

"That is the only way I will believe you are sorry."

Chapter 1

My husband, the Capo dei Capi of the New York mafia, gripped my hand as I walked into the soundproofed room. It was a touch I once craved, but he wasn't there to save me.

He was there to watch the family doctor carve out my mind.

According to the woman sobbing in the shadows, I had sold her to a brothel twelve years ago. A lie. It had to be.

I looked at the chair in the center of the room. Heavy oak. Restraints made of thick, worn leather.

Then I looked at Dante.

His face was a mask of cold marble, void of the warmth that had greeted me at the altar only two years ago. The man who looked back at me now was a stranger wearing my husband’s skin.

"Sit, Elena," he said.

His voice was low, vibrating with the same lethal authority that commanded legions of soldiers and made rival Dons in Chicago and Las Vegas tremble. It wasn't a request. It was a verdict.

"Dante, please," I whispered, my legs turning to water beneath me. "She is lying. I don't know her. My sister died in the fire. We saw the body."

"That body was a decoy," the woman named Sofia choked out. She was curled in the armchair, wrapped in a blanket—my blanket, I realized with a sick jolt. She looked up, her eyes red and swollen. "You knew, Elena. You watched them drag me away. You wanted to be the only one. You wanted the Moretti fortune for yourself."

She let the blanket slip.

The evidence was mapped across her skin. The scars on her back were visible—branding marks, cigarette burns, a roadmap of hell etched into flesh.

Dante’s jaw tightened. A dangerous vein pulsed in his temple.

He walked over to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. The gentleness of the gesture made bile rise in my throat. He had sworn to protect me. He had sworn to burn the world for me.

Now he was handing the match to a stranger.

"The evidence is irrefutable, Elena," Dante said, refusing to meet my gaze. "Her DNA matches. Her testimony matches the timeline. And you... you have been unstable since the miscarriage."

"I am not unstable!" I screamed.

Two guards stepped forward, their movements synchronized and brutal. They grabbed my arms.

I thrashed, kicking out. I wasn't a soldier like them, but I was a survivor. I had clawed my way out of the gutter before the Morettis ever found me.

"Dante! Look at me!" I begged as they forced me into the chair. The leather straps bit into my wrists, cold and unforgiving. "I am your wife! I am your Elena!"

He finally looked at me.

There was no love in his abyss-black eyes. Only a twisted, dark sense of duty. He looked at me like a judge sentencing a criminal he once pitied.

"My Elena would never sell her own blood," he said softly. "You are sick, *tesoro*. The guilt has twisted your mind. You have repressed the truth to live with yourself."

He nodded to Dr. Ricci.

The doctor approached with a syringe. The liquid inside was a pale, sickly yellow that seemed to glow under the harsh lights.

"It is a combination of scopolamine and a new compound," the doctor murmured, tapping the glass to remove an air bubble. "It will help her access the repressed memories. It will break down the walls of denial. It will be... unpleasant."

"Do it," Dante said.

He turned his back on me. He went to Sofia and pulled her into his arms, shielding her eyes so she wouldn't have to witness my undoing.

The needle pierced my skin.

Fire.

Liquid fire raced up my veins, searing through my blood. It hit my brain like a sledgehammer.

I gasped, my back arching off the chair against the restraints. The room began to spin. Colors bled into each other, melting the world into a nightmare. The face of my husband dissolved into a monster.

"Dante," I croaked.

"Shh," I heard him say to Sofia. "I've got you, Giulia. You're safe now. Justice is being served."

My memories began to tear.

The nightlight he made for me when I was twelve. Gone. Replaced by a memory of me laughing while a girl screamed in a van.

The origami cranes I folded for him. Gone. Replaced by me counting money in a dark alley.

"No," I sobbed, the taste of metallic blood flooding my mouth. "That's not real. That's not real!"

"Accept the truth, Elena," Dante’s voice boomed from everywhere and nowhere, a god of judgment in my crumbling mind.

The pain was absolute. It wasn't just physical. It was the sensation of my soul being surgically removed without anesthesia.

I looked at him one last time through the haze. He was stroking her hair. He was whispering comforts to the liar while I burned alive.

And in that moment, the love I had held for Dante Moretti for ten years didn't just break.

It died.

I let the darkness take me.