The Don's Wife Is His Executioner

Aria POV

Not an hour after Dante had locked himself away, my phone vibrated on the marble counter.

The screen displayed an untraceable number. A cold flutter of intuition moved my hand, and I answered it.

“Hello, Sister Aria,” a young, saccharine voice chirped from the speaker. “I am Sofia.”

My throat tightened, but I kept my breathing perfectly even, a mask of placid composure.

“I am twenty-three,” she continued, her tone dripping with a confection of innocence and raw arrogance. “Dante assured me you were a good, obedient wife who would never touch his encrypted devices. I suppose he was wrong.”

I remained silent, letting her dig her own grave with each foolish syllable.

“You should step down from your position,” Sofia suggested breezily. “Dante only stays with you out of a sense of duty because of the past. But he gives his true love to me.”

She paused, waiting for me to scream or cry. The silence that met her was absolute.

“If you leave quietly, Dante will provide a handsome severance package. You can live out your days in peace.”

The chill of the marble crept up my fingers, and I felt the tendons in my forearm contract into a series of fine, tight spasms. Instead of letting go, I dug my nails into the seam where two slabs of stone met.

“And if I do not leave?” I asked softly.

Sofia let out a high, mocking laugh. “The heir growing in my womb is my ultimate trump card. You have been barren for four years. I have been pregnant for three months. Who do you think the Don will choose?”

She hung up before I could reply.

A moment later, my phone chimed with a rapid flood of notifications. Sofia was sending me dozens of photos. My thumb, numb and disobedient, opened them.

There was Sofia cooking in a modern luxury penthouse. Intimate selfies of her and Dante in a tangle of bedsheets. Dante escorting her past velvet ropes into VIP boutiques. A positive pregnancy test resting next to a cup of expensive herbal tea.

The final photo was Sofia sitting on Dante's lap. His arm was wrapped around her waist, his Famiglia signet ring in plain view on her bare thigh.

I set my phone down face up.

I picked up my porcelain teacup and took a slow, measured sip of the cold tea.

Then I slammed the cup down against the marble floor.

It shattered into a hundred jagged pieces, the report of its breaking like a gunshot.

My heart hammered against my ribs, fueling a sudden, blinding rage that burned away every shred of my practiced composure.

The Ming vase on the console gave a dull, percussive thud as it met the wall. It was answered by the high, shattering report of a crystal lamp, its fragments raining down upon the Persian rug like a squall of cheap hail. The heavy oak fruit bowl overturned, its contents rolling in lazy arcs across the floorboards. I did not stop until the fine point of my stiletto had punctured the canvas of the oil painting he had gifted me, the sound of tearing fibers a welcome noise against the frantic drumming in my ears.

Heavy footsteps pounded down the stairs.

Dante appeared in the archway, his chest rising and falling in sharp, deep breaths. He surveyed the wreckage of our living room, his dark eyes taking in the devastation.

I picked up my phone from the counter, woke the screen with a tap of my thumb, and tossed it directly at his chest.

He caught it effortlessly, his reflexes honed to a razor’s edge. The screen was lit, frozen on the photo of Sofia sitting on his lap.

“Do you have anything to say?” I asked. My voice did not shake; it was a dead, hollow thing.

Dante looked at the photo and let out a long, exhausted sigh, as if my discovery were a tedious inconvenience.

“She is just a kid who does not know the rules,” he said, rubbing his temples. “Why stoop to her level?”

A wash of ice water seemed to pour through my veins, extinguishing the fire and leaving behind a chilling clarity.

I walked toward him, my shoes crunching over broken porcelain with each step.

“I took a blade to the ribs for you when the Russians ambushed us three years ago,” I said, stopping just before him.

“I was kidnapped at seven months pregnant by the Romano Family because I was your wife. I lost our child on a cold concrete floor while waiting for you to save me.”

Dante flinched, a spasm of genuine pain crossing his stoic features. His jaw locked tight.

“You promised me eternal compensation for that loss,” I reminded him, my whisper cutting through the charged air.

I reached into my bag and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

I slapped the medical consent form onto the only unbroken table in the room, sliding it toward him.

Dante stepped forward and read the header.

It was a surgical abortion consent form, a document procured by my underworld contacts. It bore a flawless forgery of Sofia's signature and an underground clinic's official stamp.

His pupils constricted to tiny black dots, as the architecture of my vengeance became clear to him.

“What did you do?” he demanded, his voice a low rumble that seemed to originate not from his throat, but from the very foundations of the house.

I looked into the eyes of the man I had married—the same man who had once shattered another’s skull with a lead pipe and then smiled at me through the carnage.

“She did not know the rules of our world,” I replied coldly. “I taught her.”