Page 13 of Forsaking All Others

How ironic it was to be married now and feel as if no one left in the world cared for me.

I wasn’t someone who wallowed by nature, but I allowed myself a long indulgent crying jag, missing home, worrying for my family, and feeling utterly despondent about the future before I dried my eyes on the sheets and flopped over on my side.

Because the truth was, this was my life now.

Fiammetta Cavallaro was dead like the rest of her family, and Fiammetta Ferretti had taken her place.

So who would I be in this new iteration?

Whoever it was, I refused to be the same docile, sheltered girl I had been back home.

This was a new city for a new me, a territory I was in charge of just as much as my capo dei capi husband, and I intended to flex that power for the first time in my life and carve out my own space in society. I would have friends, I would have followers, I would have freedom.

And there was nothing my husband could do about it short of locking me up in this room forever.

Going toe to toe with Dario was not how I had envisioned my marriage beginning, but I felt reforged in the fires of the last twenty-four hours of trauma, and I wasn’t willing to lie down for some bully even if he thought I was his property.

Even if he was one of the handsomest men I had ever seen in real life or television.

He was still absent when I fell asleep, and I hoped, with my last thought before sleep claimed me, that I wouldn’t see him again for at least a week.

Chapter Five

Dario

I was in a foul mood, but then I had been since my father Lando and my mother Carla informed me that I would be marrying a twenty-year-old, sheltered Italian Mafia princess.

Fury burned in my throat so brutally, it felt scorched, beyond use.

I poured myself two fingers of Amaro Averna liqueur and slammed it back to relieve the pain.

When that didn’t work, I glared at my parents where they sat arranged artfully behind Lando’s desk, Carla perched daintily on the arm of the ornately carved, ridiculously uncomfortable wooden chair that looked like some medieval throne.

I was thirty-fucking-six years old, and those two were still pulling my strings like goddamn master puppeteers.

But this was the final straw.

I had earned my autonomy with the heavy golden band on my left ring finger.

“Really, Dario, the girl is hardly difficult to look at,” Lando said in his affable way, cheeks rosy from one too many after-dinner drinks. “We could have paired you off to the Concetta girl in Vegas and then you would have been sorry.”

I clenched my teeth to stop from spitting poison at him, exercising all my thirty-six years of restraint.

“I agreed to marry the twit, I did not agree to be happy about it,” I reminded him. “And now that the deed is done, I want assurances.”

“Really, darling,” Carla murmured, wide eyed with distress. As the quintessential Mafia wife, my mother was everything docile and demure. Even though I loved her, her obedience often sickened me. She had been convinced to do terrible things in the name of supporting Lando, things I was still personally bearing the consequences of. “You shouldn’t speak to your father that way, not when he’s finally agreed to start transitioning control of the Outfit into your capable hands.”

“Given I’ve been running most of our successful ventures for the last twelve years, it’s mostly ceremonial,” I corrected mildly, sliding my gaze from my mother, flawed but beloved, to the father I barely respected. “You can remain as a figurehead if it will stroke your ego, but the soldiers and associates will know it’s me in charge.”

“As they already do,” Lando demurred, sipping from his almost-empty glass of grappa.

“I want you to retire from the Ferretti Corporation by the end of the fiscal year,” I declared and had the satisfaction of watching his eyes widen and his flushed cheeks pale.

“You cannot be serious,” he sputtered.

“Darling, that’s rather harsh. You know your father enjoys the perks of being CEO,” Carla rebuked me, even as she stood to walk to the bar to refill my father’s rocks glass. As she passed by, she curled a hand around my forearm and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

That was the game Lando forced her to play. Her support of me had to be secondary to, and secret from, her husband. He had to come first in all ways.