You Said Die Quietly, So I Did

Elena POV

The doctor told me I had thirty days to live. Exactly ten minutes later, my husband told me his mistress was pregnant.

I sat in the cold marble living room of the Vitiello estate, watching Dante pace. He was the Capo of Chicago, the man I used to stitch up in a bathroom when we had nothing.

Now, he looked at me with dead eyes.

"Sienna is moving in," he said casually. "She carries the heir. You will raise him."

He treated the destruction of our marriage like a business arrangement.

I tried to tell him about the pain eating my insides, the Stage IV cancer that made standing agony. But he just rolled his eyes, calling my weakness "jealousy" and my silence "theatrics."

He even gutted our first home—the safe house where we fell in love—to build a nursery for her.

When I finally asked him, "What if I'm dying?" he didn't even pause on his way out the door.

"Then do it quietly," he said. "I have enough headaches today."

So I did.

I burned every photo of us. I signed the divorce papers. And I went to a civilian cemetery to buy a plot under my maiden name, far away from his family mausoleum.

I died alone on a cold stone bench, just as he asked.

It wasn't until he stood in the morgue, holding my skeletal hand and realizing I weighed nothing but bones and grief, that the King of Chicago finally broke.

He found my journal in the trash, where I had written my final entry:

"I wish I never met Dante Vitiello."

Now, he is on his knees in the dirt, begging a headstone for forgiveness that will never come.

Chapter 1

The doctor told me I had thirty days to live. Exactly ten minutes later, my husband told me his mistress was pregnant.

I sat in the middle of the sprawling living room of the Vitiello estate. The marble floors were cold enough to leach through my socks and chill my bones, but the cold inside my chest was far worse. This house was a fortress. It was built on blood money, extortion, and the kind of violence that makes the Chicago police look the other way.

My husband, Dante Vitiello, built this.

He strode in through the double oak doors, bringing the smell of winter and gunpowder with him. He was the Capo of the Chicago Outfit. A man who controlled the unions, the ports, and the lives of anyone who breathed in his city. When we met, he was just a street soldier with bruised knuckles and a dream of an empire. I used to stitch his knife wounds in the bathroom of my studio apartment while he promised me the world.

Now he owned the world, and I was just a ghost haunting his hallway.

He didn't look at me. He was on his phone, his voice low and dangerous, barking orders about a shipment in the South Side. He hung up and finally noticed me sitting on the white sofa.

"Elena," he said. His voice used to be the sound of my safety. Now it sounded like a judge reading a sentence. "We need to talk about the arrangement."

He meant Sienna.

She was the solution to his only failure. Seven years of marriage. No heir. In our world, a Don without a son is a man with a target on his back. When the doctors told us the issue lay with me, Dante had stood in front of his Captains and taken the blame to protect my honor. I loved him for that. I worshipped him for that.

But that was before the pressure broke him. That was before he decided that love was a luxury, but a legacy was a necessity.

"Sienna is moving into the East Wing," he said, unbuttoning his cuffs. "She is entering the second trimester. She needs the security of the main estate."

He said it casually. Like he was talking about moving a piece of furniture, not moving the woman carrying his child into the home we built.

I looked at the vase on the table. It was crystal, imported from Italy. I stood up and swept it onto the floor.

The crash was loud. It shattered into a thousand jagged diamonds.

Dante didn't flinch. He just looked at the mess, then at me, with eyes that were black and dead.

"Stop acting like a child, Elena."

"I am your wife," I whispered. My voice was shaking. Not from fear. From the cancer eating my pancreas. From the pain radiating in my back that I had been hiding with aspirin and smiles for weeks.

"You are my wife," he agreed, stepping over the glass. "And she is the mother of the future Don. It is a business arrangement. You know the laws of Omerta. Feelings do not dictate the survival of the Family."

He walked to the liquor cabinet and poured a drink. He looked exhausted. Being a King is tiring work.

"I need a divorce," I said.

The glass paused halfway to his lips. The silence stretched, tight and suffocating. In the Mafia, you do not divorce. You die, or you are widowed. There is no paperwork for leaving.

He turned around slowly. A cruel smirk played on his lips. It was a look I had seen him give men before he put a bullet in their heads.

"A divorce?" he asked. "And go where? Back to waiting tables? Everything you wear, everything you eat, the air you breathe in this city is because I allow it."

"I just want to leave, Dante."

He laughed. It was a dark, dry sound. "You are hysterical. You are jealous. I get it. But do not threaten me with leaving. You are a Vitiello. You belong to me."

He downed the drink and set the glass heavily on the counter.

"I am doing this for us," he said, his voice dropping to a growl. "For the name. Once the boy is born, Sienna will be compensated and removed. You will raise him. You will be the mother."

I felt the bile rise in my throat. He wanted me to raise the evidence of his betrayal.

"I can't do this anymore," I said, clutching my stomach as a sharp cramp twisted my insides.

Dante looked at my hand gripping my midsection. He rolled his eyes.

"Stop the theatrics, Elena. You are not the victim here. I am the one keeping this city from burning down while ensuring we have a future."

He checked his watch.

"I have to go. Sienna has an ultrasound. Do not wait up."

He walked toward the door. The man who once knelt in the rain to tie my shoe because I had a blister. The man who burned down a warehouse because a rival looked at me wrong.

"Dante," I said.

He stopped, hand on the brass handle.

"What if I'm dying?" I asked.

He didn't turn around. He didn't pause.

"Then do it quietly," he said. "I have enough headaches today."

The door slammed shut. The echo bounced off the cold marble walls. I pulled the medical report from my pocket, the paper crinkled and warm from my grip. Stage IV. Inoperable.

I looked at the calendar on the wall. Day one of my long goodbye.