Page 23 of The Mafia Husband's Loveless Marriage

Love was why her own father had abandoned his family. And love was also the reason Diogenes had gradually lost sight of who he was. When Mykos's mother had died a cruel death at the hands of a rival gang, vengeance in the name of love had consumed Diogenes, and since then he had stopped at nothing. He killed everyone who got in his way. It didn't matter if they were innocent. He did what he did in the name of love...even if that love had become so twisted that it could no longer be called love.

In the world Mykos was born to, love wasn't just a weakness.

Love was a disease, and it had to be completely cut off before he, too, would end up forgetting who he was.

He looked down at his hand. His knuckles were bleeding. The wall had a hole in it the size of his fist.

And somewhere downstairs, his wife was sitting at the foot of the stairs, alone, because he had put her there.

Good,he told himself.

Better this than what happened to his mother.

Better this than becoming his father.

He almost believed it.

Taken

taken (v.): past participle of "take"; to seize, to steal, to remove by force; see also: the thing that made Mykos Ravensworth remember he had a heart

MAIKA WAS AT CAMPUSwhen it happened.

Orion was with her, as always, standing outside the lecture hall like a monument to personal security. Maika had been subdued these past few days. Orion had been pretending not to notice, which was his own form of kindness.

She came out of the building with her bag over one shoulder, squinting at her phone. Her professor had asked about her paper, and she'd smiled, said "it's coming along great," and then spent the entire lecture staring at her notebook not writing a single word because she was thinking about Mykos.

She was always thinking about Mykos now. Or rather, she was always doing her bestnotto think about him and failing at it every single time, too.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

The line fromA Midsummer Night's Dreamhad been floating through her head all day, and she wanted to laugh at the irony, because Shakespeare had written it as comedy—two pairs of young lovers getting tangled up in fairy magic—but there was nothing funny about Maika's version. In her version, there were no fairies. No magic. Just a husband who had looked at her like she was boring and walked away.

The ways she used to cope no longer worked, and she could no longer compartmentalize her life the way she used to. She had always been able to open a book and disappear into someone else's words. But now, when she tried to read, every love story reminded her of what she didn't have, and every tragedy reminded her of what she was afraid she did have.

Life had always been hard, but she had never let it affect her studies. There were things that always made her cry, but she had never lost hope.

Now, though...

Maika had gotten a B-minus on her last essay. A B-minus. And for a paper on Shakespeare at that! That, to her, was the sign that her life had hit rock bottom, and it was because her mind was drowning in despair that she didn't notice it while Orion, who had always been so vigilant...

He, too, wasn't able to escape what was ordained.

And so at the very second that Orion had accidentally dropped his phone and he had bent down to pick it up...

It was the very same second that Maika was blind to her surroundings, her thoughts clouded by despair...

And in a blink, she was gone.

By the time Orion straightened, it was done.

An unmarked van. Side door already open. A group of men who knew what to do—they had clearly been watching, waiting for the one moment when her guard's attention would break. One of them grabbed her from behind, a hand clamping over her mouth before she could scream. Another wrenched her bag offher shoulder. A third pressed a cloth to her face, and the smell was chemical and sweet, and the world started to blur.

She tried to fight. She kicked, tried to bite the hand over her mouth, but her limbs were already going heavy and wrong, and the last thing she saw before the van door slid shut was the sky—blue, ordinary, the same sky that had been there that morning when she'd walked to class thinking about nothing more important than her B-minus.

All it took was one second...for the unwanted wife of Mykos Ravensworth to be abducted.

THE ROOM WAS COLD.