My Dead Husband Returned With Another Woman

Three years after I buried an empty casket for my husband, I found him alive in a grocery store parking lot. He was rubbing a stranger's pregnant belly, smiling a soft smile I had never seen in our years of marriage. My husband, the ruthless Don of Chicago, had become "Arthur," a gentle man with no memory of the empire he ruled or the wife he left behind. To protect his happiness, I swallowed my agony and lied. "I am his cousin," I told his pregnant fiancée, Mia. I brought them home to his estate, enduring the torture of watching him give her the tenderness that used to belong to me. But my mercy was rewarded with cruelty. Dante looked at me with cold, unfamiliar eyes and slapped divorce papers onto the table. "Sign them," he demanded, his voice devoid of emotion. "I want to marry Mia before the baby comes. I want a fresh start." He didn't know I was dying of a heart defect caused by the stress of grieving him. He didn't know I stalled for two weeks not for money, but because I wanted to be buried with his name. I died the morning the deadline arrived, taking the secret of my love to the grave. Ironically, that very night, a bullet grazed his temple during an ambush, unlocking the memories he had lost. He remembered the peach orchard. He remembered our blood oath. He remembered that I was his soulmate. He ran to my brother’s gates, screaming my name, blood pouring down his face, desperate to beg for forgiveness. But my brother just stood there, blocking the entrance to the cemetery with a cruel smile. "She waited for you every single day," he spat. "And you killed her." Chapter 1 Elena POV Three years after I buried an empty casket for the most dangerous man in Chicago, a blurred photo on a burner phone had driven me five hundred miles into the middle of nowhere, only to watch my dead husband rub another woman's pregnant belly. The engine of the black SUV hummed beneath me, a low vibration that rattled through my bones. Rocco sat in the driver’s seat, his knuckles stark white against the leather steering wheel. We were parked across the street from a grocery store in a town that didn’t even deserve a name on a map. It was the kind of place where people left their doors unlocked because they had nothing worth stealing. My heart hammered against my ribs in a frantic, broken rhythm. My doctor called it Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Broken heart syndrome. It felt like a fist squeezing the life out of me, a constant reminder of the day the Chicago Outfit lost its heir and I lost my soul. "Principessa," Rocco whispered. His voice was rough, like gravel grinding on glass. "Are you sure you want to see this?" I didn't answer. I couldn't. My gaze was glued to the automatic doors of the store. They slid open, and the air in the car suddenly felt too thin. A man walked out. He was tall, broad-shouldered, filling the space around him with an effortless command that I knew better than my own reflection. Dante Moretti. The Don who had burned down a warehouse in Bratva territory just because they disrespected me. The man who had severed heads and placed them on spikes to mark the border of his city. He was wearing a flannel shirt. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing the familiar ink on his forearms, but his hands weren't covered in blood. They were carrying two paper bags filled with groceries. He turned his head. Sunlight caught the sharp angle of his jaw, the same jaw I used to trace with my fingertips while he slept. He wasn't scowling. He was smiling. It was a soft, easy smile that I had never seen in the five years I had known him. Then she walked out behind him. She was small, with hair the color of wheat and a face that had never seen the inside of an interrogation room. One of her hands rested on the swell of her stomach. She said something to him, and Dante laughed. The sound didn't reach me through the glass, but the sight of it tore through my chest like a bullet. He shifted the bags to one arm. He reached out with his free hand and placed it gently on her stomach. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. The Dante Moretti I knew broke fingers for looking at me wrong. This man looked like he was afraid the wind might blow too hard on this stranger. My vision blurred. The ghost I had mourned for three years wasn't dead. He was just happy. And he wasn't happy with me.