Chapter 1
Gio
Youcanrun,butyou can’t hide,tigrotta.
Through window blinds, I watched my little tigress of a wife bustle about, waiting tables at the restaurant across the street. The patio seating was full this evening, the fool’s spring bringing enough warmth that patrons were eager to dine outside after a cold and snowy Colorado winter.
Seven years. That’s how long it had been since Rory vanished without a trace, and I’d been trying to track her down to drag her ass back home ever since.
Before her disappearance, she’d made it no secret that she loathed me, hated the man I became after my father’s untimely death, which required me to step up as Don of the Bellini Crime Family.
I hadn’t particularly given a fuck, to be honest. Marriages in the mafia world didn’t revolve around love; they were brokered to create alliances and strengthen your family’s position of power.
Rory didn’t have a damn thing to complain about. She went from being the spoiled daughter of Boston-based Irish mobster, Seamus O’Malley, to the future queen of the Bellini Mafia upon our marriage. Being the wife of a don was the highest position a woman could hold in our world. She should have been thrilled when the crown was placed upon my head, but instead, she went out of her way to voice her displeasure, bitching and moaning about her cushy role.
She had only one job: to provide me with an heir to secure the Bellini bloodline.
But the five years she spent warming my bed had resulted in zero pregnancies. While during that same time, my younger brother, Matteo, had managed to get his wife pregnant within mere months of their wedding.
Though it pained me to swallow my pride and accept that perhaps I was the problem, I asked our in-house physician to conduct a semen analysis. When those results came back, indicating that my sperm count was high and my swimmers had good motility, I had Rory tested for any internal issues that might be impacting her fertility. It turned out there wasn’t anything wrong with either one of us, so we just kept trying to conceive.
Even if my wife outright hated my guts, the sex was off the charts. Hell, that’s probably what made it so hot. I got off on her claws scratching so deep she drew blood and her teeth biting down hard enough to tear a chunk out of my flesh.
For one single terrifying moment after she’d gone AWOL, it crossed my mind that the reason she’d run was that she discovered she was pregnant, that she’d taken my heir and fled.
It wasn’t out of the ordinary for women to get sentimental over the idea of a baby and panic that their powerful husband would separate them after birth. Because that, too, was common. Myown mother had been sent away after producing two sons, thus ending her usefulness in my father’s eyes.
But an interrogation of the entire household staff uncovered that a maid had found used feminine hygiene products in the bathroom trash can only a week prior. If Rory had recently had her period, the odds of her carrying my heir were almost non-existent.
My life narrowed down to a singular focus: find my fucking wife.
And damn if that didn’t come with significant fallout.
When my in-depth search of Chicago came up empty and her father began calling me, asking why Rory hadn’t checked in for months, I was forced to tell him that she was gone. But instead of telling him the truth, I lied and said that our cross-town rivals, the Russians, had abducted her.
That started an all-out war, and the collateral damage was extensive.
We lost countless loyal men, our ranks thinning dangerously. Though that paled in comparison to the day I lent my pregnant sister-in-law my car and it was ambushed by the Russians. Under heavy fire, the tires were shot out and the SUV rolled several times. Allegra hadn’t been wearing her seat belt and died from her injuries. It was a goddamn miracle she survived long enough for the doctors to deliver my niece, Serafina, three months premature. My brother was left a widower with two little girls to raise, all because I couldn’t own up to my wife leaving me.
To this day, it still boggled my mind that Rory had managed to not only escape my heavily fortified estate but the city without leaving a damn trace. There hadn’t been a single hit on any of her credit cards or withdrawals from her bank accounts—even the secret one she thought I didn’t know about.
Someone had to be helping her. But who?
It took three years before a real lead landed in my lap. Most of the potential sightings to that point had been dead ends, cases of mistaken identities—apparently, petite redheads were a lot more common than I’d once thought—but this time, it was really her. There was photographic proof.
Though every instinct demanded I haul her home kicking and screaming, I knew that in order to get what I wanted from my runaway wife, I needed to play the long game.
A lesser man in my position might force himself upon his wife, take what he was owed before cutting her loose after the stunt she pulled. And while I was guilty of many crimes, I wasn’t keen to add rape to the list. So instead, I devised a plan.
Leaving Matteo in charge, with a blood sample to confirm my identity upon my return, I took off for the dusty little Arizona town Rory had last been seen in. I needed to lay eyes on her for myself before committing to the sheer insanity my brain had conjured up.
Sure enough, Rory was there. Though the only thing I recognized about the woman I’d been married to for almost a decade was her flaming red hair. Everything else about her was completely different—how she dressed, how she carried herself. Hell, even her name. She now went by Ro Shepherd and worked three jobs in town, all of which paid in cash.
Visual confirmation was all I needed to set my plan in motion.
With the help of several plastic surgeons, I had a complete facial reconstruction, in addition to a procedure on my vocal cords to deepen my voice. By the time I recovered from all of that, Rory had moved from Arizona to a small town in the Colorado Rockies.
Following her there, I hit the gym hard, bulking up my previously trim frame. I would need to buy all-new suits when I got back to Chicago, but that was a problem for another day. Then I got tattoos to hide the identifiable scars lining my torsoand limbs. Not quite as many as my cousin Enzo had—the man’s ink covered every available inch of skin—but enough that they’d draw the eye when I rolled up my sleeves. The final touches included allowing my hair to grow out—both on my head and on my face—using color-correcting contacts to change my eyes from brown to green, and wearing non-prescription glasses.
