Roses never fade
For seven years, I was his eyes. But the moment he regained his sight, he decided to marry someone else.
Seven years of devotion couldn't buy his heart.
I gave him back his dignity. Now that he was restored as the Godfather of the New York Mafia, he laughed with others, degrading me to the status of a mere "mistress."
He thought I didn't understand Italian, but I heard him loud and clear: he was going to marry his first love.
He arrogantly believed I would always love him, willing to stay in his penthouse like a caged bird.
But he was wrong. I boarded a one-way flight to Australia.
Dante, I don't want you anymore.
By the time he returned home, he would have lost me forever.
But a sore loser refuses to concede. Even if he had to burn the world to the ground, he would search for me and beg for my forgiveness.
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Chapter 8
Elena Rossi's POV:
I didn't pack clothes; I only packed the essentials.
My birth certificate. The bank transfer codes provided by Donna Isabella. My passport.
I stuffed them into the hidden lining of my purse.
Suddenly, the electronic lock on the front door beeped.
Dante.
He wasn't supposed to be back until morning.
Panic flared instantly. I hastily threw a blanket over the suitcase and sat on the edge of the bed just as the handle turned.
He walked in.
He smelled like rain and the cloying sweetness of her perfume.
He looked exhausted.
He loosened his tie, let out a heavy sigh, and tossed his jacket over a chair.
"Packing?" he asked, his eyes darting to the lump under the blanket.
"I'm cleaning," I lied, fighting to keep my voice steady. "Getting ready for the charity clothing drive."
He looked at me.
The air in the room seemed to shift.
He sensed something. He always did; his intuition was sharp.
He walked over and stood between my knees.
He reached out, his thumb gently brushing over the bandage on my cheek.
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
He sighed, running a hand through his dark hair.
"About Sofia..." he began.
"Don't," I interrupted softly.
I stood up, needing to put distance between us.
I walked over to the dresser and picked up the black card he had left there weeks ago.
"Is this still active?" I asked, holding it up.
He frowned. "Yes. Why?"
"I want to buy a dress," I said, meeting his gaze. "For the gala next week. If you'll still let me go."
I lied.
I didn't want a dress, and I didn't want his black card.
Next week, I wouldn't be at the gala; I would be in Australia.
His eyes softened, filling with a profound sense of relief.
He thought I had accepted my role as a mistress, willing to be bought off with haute couture.
"Of course," he said, his voice husky. "Buy whatever you want. Wear red."
He leaned down and kissed my forehead.
I didn't pull away.
I stood still as a statue, letting him believe I was his.
"Get some sleep, Dante," I said softly. "You look tired."
He nodded.
He stripped down to his boxers and climbed into the massive bed.
He fell asleep almost instantly, exhaustion finally taking over.
I stood in the dark, watching him.
I memorized the rise and fall of his chest.
I gently traced the line of his cheek with my fingers one last time.
"Goodbye, my love," I whispered into the silence.
He shifted.
He buried his face in my palm, seeking warmth.
"Sofia..." he mumbled in his sleep, the name plunging into my heart like a dagger. "Stay..."
I yanked my hand back as if I had been burned.
A bitter smile touched my lips.
That was the closure I needed.
I grabbed my purse.
I walked out of the bedroom, down the hall, and into the elevator.
I exited onto the street through the service door.
I pulled the SIM card out of my phone and dropped it down a storm drain on Fifth Avenue.
I hailed a cab.
"JFK Airport," I told the driver.
I watched the city blur past the window.
New York had been a cage of steel and glass.
For the first time in seven years, the door was wide open.
I used a burner phone I had bought at a bodega to call Donna Isabella.
"It's done," I said the moment she picked up. "I'm leaving."
"Good girl," she replied, her tone cold but approving. "Don't look back."
I hung up and snapped the phone in half.
I didn't look back.
I looked at the flight information board.
Melbourne. One-way.
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7.1
I was the Architect who built the digital fortress for the most feared Don in New York.
To the world, I was Brendan Wiggins’s silent, elegant Queen.
But then my burner phone buzzed under the dinner table.
It was a photo from his mistress: a positive pregnancy test.
"Your husband is celebrating right now," the caption read. "You are just the furniture."
I looked across the table at Brendan. He smiled and held my hand, lying to my face without blinking.
He thought he owned me because he saved my life ten years ago.
He told her I was just "functional." That I was a barren asset he kept around to look respectable, while she carried his legacy.
He thought I would accept the disrespect because I had nowhere else to go.
He was wrong.
I didn't want to divorce him—you don't divorce a Don.
And I didn't want to kill him. That was too easy.
I wanted to erase him.
I liquidated fifty million dollars from the offshore accounts only I could access. I destroyed the servers I had built.
Then, I contacted a black-market chemist for a procedure called "Tabula Rasa."
It doesn't kill the body. It wipes the mind clean. A total hard reset of the soul.
On his birthday, while he was out celebrating his bastard son, I drank the vial.
When he finally came home to find the empty house and the melted wedding ring, he realized the truth.
He could burn the world down looking for me, but he would never find his wife.
Because the woman who loved him no longer existed.
9.0
For Her Sake
9.0
Kelvin held her wrist and pulled her into a room in the hotel. "What are you doing?" Amelia asked, trying to tug at him.
"Don't pretend you don't want this too." He said, rubbing his thumb at her hard nipples threatening to tear out of her dress, his eyes watching as her body responded to him. He held her neck in the most seductive way and pinned her against the wall.
His hand went up under her black dress tracing her skin in a calculated path, as his fingers touched her already soaked pants, Amelia let out a soft moan and pulled him closer with a kiss.
***
Amelia found herself getting married to her ex-fiancé's brother, it was an almost perfect revenge. Only to find herself wrapped deeper in the evil hands of the brothers. Would she ever be able to get her revenge and find her true love?
Explore a tale of romance, suspense, treachery, and love. The fascinating novel 'For Her Sake' will have you reading until the very last page.
9.0
I shattered my knee jumping in front of a silver bullet meant for him.
The poison seeped into my marrow, putting my wolf into a coma and leaving me crippled.
I thought my sacrifice would secure his love forever.
Instead, five years later, Brennan stood in a warehouse while a Rogue held a silver-laced dagger to my throat.
Beside me sat Debbi, his mistress—a spy who had staged the whole kidnapping.
"You can only save one," the kidnapper sneered.
Brennan didn't even hesitate.
He looked me in the eye, his gaze cold and devoid of the bond we once shared.
"I choose Debbi," he said.
He walked out with her in his arms, leaving his Fated Mate to bleed out on the concrete floor.
As the blade dug into my skin, I felt the mate bond snap.
He thought I died in the explosion that followed.
He spent weeks howling in grief when he finally realized Debbi was a traitor and he had killed the only woman who truly loved him.
But he was wrong.
I didn't die.
A federal agent pulled me from the fire, and the trauma didn't kill my wolf—it woke her up.
A year later, Brennan walked into a small bistro in Italy, looking for redemption.
He fell to his knees when he saw me standing there, healed and glowing with the aura of a White Wolf.
"Alyssa," he wept, reaching for me. "I'm so sorry. I'll do anything."
I looked him dead in the eye, my gaze icy blue.
"Get out," I said. "We don't serve traitors here."
8.4
I was exactly three thousand words away from eviction when the heir to the New York underworld smashed my laptop and offered me a job instead of an apology.
Dante Vitiello wanted me to write a memoir that would paint him as a saint.
I moved into his penthouse, thinking I could keep things professional. But when his arranged fiancée, the daughter of the Chicago Outfit, arrived, she didn't see an employee. She saw a threat.
She didn't just humiliate me; she leaked fake evidence to the press, branding me as a federal informant.
I woke up in a hospital bed with the word "RAT" plastered across every gossip site.
Sofia’s guards were stationed outside my door, blocking even the nurses. I was a liability. A stain on the Vitiello name.
I knew how these stories ended. The Prince always chooses the Family. The Alliance is more important than the girl.
I was packing my bag, shaking with fear, ready to disappear into the night to save him from ruin.
But Dante didn't come to fire me. He walked into the boardroom where his father and the Chicago Boss were waiting for him to beg for forgiveness.
He looked at the crown that was his birthright, then he looked at the gun on the table.
He didn't kneel. He didn't apologize.
He slammed his weapon down, shattering a hundred-year alliance and forfeiting his empire with a single sentence.
"Keep the crown. I take the girl."
7.8
Seven years. That was the price tag attached to my father's life.
When my father gambled away money he didn't have, Michael Vance paid the debt.
He bought my father's safety, and in return, he bought me.
I was nineteen then. A peasant girl he polished up to look like a mob wife.
I was reapplying my lipstick in the vanity mirror of his armored SUV when I found a diamond choker tucked behind the sunshade.
It was a million-dollar piece of jewelry that wasn't mine, engraved with a date that wasn't my birthday.
That night at the gala, Michael threw his mistress's heavy fur coat at me.
"Hold this, Sarah. Jessica gets hot easily."
I stood there like a servant, buried under the scent of another woman’s perfume, watching my fiancé hold her on the dance floor with a tenderness he never showed me.
When I stumbled from hunger, he called me a liability to his image.
But when Jessica faked a crisis, he abandoned me at the venue to rush her home.
I walked to the nearest trash can and shoved the expensive fur down past the half-eaten caviar.
As the sugar from a cheap candy bar hit my bloodstream, the fog lifted.
I realized I wasn't a wife-in-training. I was a debt that had been paid in full.
I left the penthouse, the ring, and the life.
But Michael wouldn't let his property go.
He cornered me in a parking garage, screaming that I belonged to him, threatening to start a war.
He didn't expect me to be standing next to David Chen, the Underboss of the rival Triad faction.
And he certainly didn't expect me to take off my Louboutin stiletto and use it as a weapon.
"I don't love you, Michael," I said, looking him in the eye as he knelt on the concrete.
"And I'm not for sale anymore."
7.4
I was the wife of Damien Valenti, the most ruthless mafia Don in Chicago.
But to cement his power and marry a rival family's daughter, he exiled me to the slums without a single dime.
"Stay not as my wife, Izzy, but as my whore."
That was his final ultimatum before dumping me out of his black SUV like trash.
Terrified of losing me, my five-year-old son, Angelo, secretly hid in the car to follow me.
Two days later, in a squalid Indiana motel, Angelo caught severe pneumonia.
I had no money and no doctor. In sheer desperation, I sliced my own wrist with broken glass, pressing my bleeding arm to his pale lips, begging him to drink and live.
But my little boy died in my arms.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, Damien was sipping vintage champagne with his new bride, casually dismissing the life of his own flesh and blood.
The grief turned me into a monster. I spent twenty years clawing my way through the underworld to destroy his empire, only to die with a bullet in my chest.
I gave him my absolute devotion, yet he traded our family for political power without a single ounce of hesitation.
Opening my eyes again, I was back in that hellish neon-lit motel room.
Angelo was burning with fever and fighting for air, but he was still breathing.
This time, I wasn't the naive girl who loved Damien Valenti. I was a woman holding two decades of their darkest secrets, and my vendetta had just begun.