Neglected and Betrayed by My Mafia Husband (Her Marriage in Crisis #142)

1. Kylie

— ? —

Kylie

Six a.m. and the sheets on his side were cold.

I pressed my palm flat against the Egyptian cotton, thread count high enough that Donna Rosa had raised an eyebrow at the invoice, and felt nothing.

No warmth. No dent still holding the shape of him.

Just the smooth, undisturbed surface of a bed that might as well have been a museum exhibit.

Here lies the marriage of Giovanni and Kylie Ferraro. Please do not touch.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d woken up next to my husband.

That not-knowing sat wrong in my chest as I lay counting the seconds until the alarm I didn’t need would go off.

Not that he was gone. Giovanni was always gone, had been gone in some essential way since before I’d learned to stop reaching for him in the dark.

But that I couldn’t pinpoint when. When had the cold sheets stopped being an exception and started being the rule?

When had I stopped rolling over expecting to find him and started rolling over to confirm he wasn’t there?

The alarm shrieked. I slapped it silent and threw off the covers.

The brownstone was already awake. In a house that doubled as the nerve center of a crime family, someone was always awake.

I heard the low murmur of Marco’s voice in the hallway, doing the shift change with Sal.

Six a.m. meant Marco clocked out and Sal clocked in.

Sal would be the one outside my door until two, when Enzo took over.

I knew their schedules better than I knew my own husband’s.

I padded to the bathroom in bare feet, avoiding the creaky board by the closet, not because I was trying to be quiet, but because after three years in this house, my body had memorized every groan and whisper of the old floors.

The brownstone was a living thing, four stories of mahogany and marble and money so old it had stopped smelling like anything at all.

Giovanni’s family had owned it for three generations.

I was just the latest wife to haunt its halls.

The shower was too hot. I let it scald me anyway.

By the time I made it downstairs, the machinery of the don’s household was in full swing.

Lucia had coffee waiting, she always did, black with one sugar, the cup placed exactly where my hand would land when I reached the bottom of the stairs.

I’d stopped questioning how she knew my timing so precisely.

By then I’d given up questioning a lot of things.

“Morning, Mrs. Ferraro.” She didn’t look up from the tablet where she tracked deliveries, appointments, and approximately seventeen security checkpoints. “The car will be ready at eight. You have the charity luncheon at eleven, then the meeting with the St. Vincent’s board at two.”

“The St. Vincent’s meeting got moved to three,” I said, taking a sip of coffee that burned all the way down. “Sister Catherine has a conflict.”

Lucia frowned, tapped her tablet. “I’ll adjust the route.”

The route. Because I didn’t go anywhere in this city without a driver who was also a guard, a second car that swept the block before I got out, and a third man who materialized from wherever third men materialized to make sure no one got too close to the don’s wife.

I hadn’t opened my own mail in three years.

I hadn’t answered my own door since before the wedding.

I’d stopped being a person sometime around the first anniversary and started being an asset, protected, polished, and utterly, completely interchangeable.

I finished my coffee standing at the window that overlooked the garden.

Giovanni had proposed to me in that garden.

Well, no. Giovanni had informed me we were getting married in that garden.

The actual proposal had happened years earlier, in a back room that smelled like cigar smoke and old blood, when two men who’d spent a decade trying to kill each other decided their children’s bodies were an acceptable peace treaty.

I was twenty-four. Fresh out of my architecture program, head full of blueprints and building codes and the naive belief that I could design my way out of the life my family had built.

My father had been dead a year by then, accident, they said, which was the word our world used for we know who did it but we can’t prove it and starting another war would kill more of us than it would kill of them.

I was the only Jordan daughter. Declan, my uncle, had taken over the docks.

And the Ferraros had come calling with an offer that wasn’t really an offer at all.

“You’ll marry the heir,” Declan had said, like he was telling me the weather. “Ends the bloodshed. Secures the alliance. You’ll want for nothing, Kylie.”

Nothing except a choice.

The betrothal dinner was held at a restaurant in Brooklyn that had been serving the same families for sixty years.

I wore green because my mother had always said it made my hair look like fire, and I wanted to look like something that could burn.

I went in ready to hate Giovanni Ferraro, this massive, ink-covered heir apparent who’d probably killed more men than he’d read books, who’d probably never had a thought in his head that wasn’t about money or power or blood.

He barely spoke.

Three hours of our families circling each other like wolves, and Giovanni Ferraro sat across from me in a suit that cost more than my first apartment and said maybe twelve words total.

He answered direct questions. He deferred to his father.

He cut his steak into precise, even pieces and ate without looking up.

But I caught him. Twice. Three times.

His eyes kept drifting to my bag, the worn leather tote I’d shoved under my chair because it didn’t match my dress.

More specifically, his eyes kept drifting to the book spine visible through the gap in the zipper.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Jane Jacobs. My Bible. I’d read it so many times the pages were soft as cloth.

The fourth time I caught him looking, I raised an eyebrow.

He looked away so fast I almost laughed.

A week later, a package arrived at my apartment.

No return address, which should have terrified me, in my world, anonymous packages were usually followed by funerals, but something made me open it anyway.

Inside was a first edition. Jane Jacobs.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Worth more money than I’d ever seen in one place.

The margins were full of his handwriting.

Cramped, slanted, aggressive handwriting that picked a fight with every paragraph.

This assumes a density threshold that ignores income stratification, see Mumford’s critique.

And Jacobs romanticizes disorder; there’s a reason zoning exists.

And, on page 47, underlined three times: She’s right about the eyes on the street, but she’s never had to worry about whose eyes.

At the bottom of the last page: You’ve clearly read this book to pieces. I’ve read it once. Tell me what I’m missing.

I should have sent it back. The smart thing would have been to let the betrothal die the cold death it deserved, to find some other way to end the war between our families, to do anything other than what I did.

In the same margins, I fired back.

I wrote in red ink, the color of emergency, and I didn’t pull a single punch.

Mumford was a classist snob who thought cities were only valid if rich people liked them.

And Zoning is the tool of people who want to pretend segregation isn’t policy.

And, on page 47: Maybe she didn’t have to worry about whose eyes because she understood that community is its own protection.

It went back with a note: You’re not missing anything. You’re just wrong.

The next book arrived three days later. A Pattern Language. Christopher Alexander. More margin notes. More arguments. More questions that weren’t really questions, challenges dressed up in ink, invitations to fight.

For a year, we argued in the white space of other people’s books.

I fell for his brain first. The way he thought in systems, in structures, in load-bearing walls and foundation principles.

He read like he was preparing for war, annotating everything, connecting ideas across disciplines with a prosecutor’s logic.

He was wrong about a lot of things, dead wrong, arrogantly wrong, but he was wrong in interesting ways.

And every time I proved him wrong, he didn’t sulk or dismiss me. He sent another book.

The rest of him was criminally unfair packaging.

That came later, when the betrothal turned into dinners turned into walks turned into the first time he kissed me in the garden of this very brownstone, his huge hands shaking like he’d never touched anything fragile before.

I found out later he hadn’t. Women, violence, money, those he knew.

But careful? Gentle? Those were languages he had to learn, and he learned them on me.

Or I thought he had.

I set down my empty coffee cup and checked my phone.

Nothing from Giovanni. Not unusual. He rarely texted, and when he did, it was functional: dinner with Calabrese tonight, need you there or home late, don’t wait up.

The love notes of a man who’d married a strategic asset and never quite figured out she wanted to be more.

The charity luncheon was fine. It was always fine.

I sat at the right tables and said the right things and smiled until my face ached, and nobody looked at me too long or asked questions that mattered because everyone in that room knew exactly what I was: the wife, the donna, the pretty Irish girl who’d been traded for peace and was expected to be grateful for the privilege.

Sister Catherine was late to the St. Vincent’s meeting, which meant I got thirty extra minutes sitting in the lobby of a hospital pretending I had any authority over the charitable foundation that bore my husband’s family name.

I spent the time approving flower arrangements for the spring gala and trying not to think about the cold sheets.

I got home at six. Lucia met me in the foyer with a look I couldn’t quite read.

“Mr. Ferraro called. He’ll be late.”

“Big surprise.”

“Mrs. Ferraro.” She hesitated. That wasn’t like her. Lucia didn’t hesitate; Lucia processed and executed, like a human algorithm. “Can I get you anything?”

Something in her voice made me stop halfway to the stairs. “What?”

“Nothing. Dinner’s at seven. I’ll have it sent up if you prefer.”

I did prefer. I ate alone in the sitting room off our bedroom, watching the sun set over the Manhattan skyline through windows that cost more than my childhood home.

The pasta was perfect, it always was; Giovanni employed a chef who’d trained in Sicily and took personal offense at any dish that failed to transport you to his grandmother’s kitchen. I barely tasted it.

At eleven, I gave up on staying awake. At midnight, I heard his key in the lock.

I was in bed by then, because I’d learned that lesson years ago, if you’re still up when he comes home, he’ll apologize for being late and you’ll have a conversation about nothing and go to bed with the taste of small talk in your mouth.

Better to pretend you’re asleep. Better to let him think you don’t care.

But I wasn’t asleep. I was lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, counting his footsteps on the stairs.

He opened the bedroom door quietly. I heard him shed his jacket, his shoes, his belt. The bathroom light flicked on; water ran. Then the mattress dipped, and for one moment, one stupid, hopeful moment, I thought he might reach for me.

He kissed my hair instead. A brush of lips against my temple, so light I might have imagined it.

“Did you eat?” His voice was low, careful not to wake me if I was actually sleeping.

“Mmm.” I kept my eyes closed. “Lucia made sure of it.”

“Good.”

That was it. That was what I got from my husband at the end of a day I’d spent performing his last name for strangers: one perfunctory kiss and a mumbled question he didn’t wait to hear the answer to.

He was already turning away, already settling into his side of the bed, which would be cold again by the time I woke up, because he was always gone by five, always up before the sun, always somewhere more important than beside me.

I lay there in the dark and listened to his breathing even out.

I ate, I’d told him. A lie. I’d pushed pasta around my plate until it went cold, then scraped the whole thing into the trash. But he didn’t notice. He never noticed.

Sleep didn’t come. I lay there until my eyes burned, and then I stared some more, and sometime around 2 a.m. I finally drifted off into dreams I wouldn’t remember.

My phone woke me at eight. Not the alarm, a call. I fumbled for it with sleep-clumsy fingers and saw the name on the screen: Donna Rosa.

Giovanni’s mother didn’t call me. She summoned, she appeared, she swept into rooms with the force of a small hurricane and expected everyone to adjust. But she didn’t call. Not unless-

I answered. “Rosa?”

“Kylie, finally. I’ve been trying to reach my son for an hour but he’s got his phone off, and if you think I’m going to sit here in silence while he-” She stopped. A beat of quiet that felt wrong, felt heavy. “You don’t know.”

I sat up, suddenly very awake. “Know what?”

“Dio mio. He hasn’t told you.”

“Rosa. What’s going on?”

“That girl,” she spat, and the venom in her voice could have stripped paint. “That Russo girl. You tell my son that if she sets one foot in your house, I’ll-”

“Wait.” My heart was doing something strange, beating too fast and too slow at the same time. “What girl? What are you talking about?”

The silence stretched. I heard Rosa take a breath, heard her recalibrate, and somehow that was worse than the yelling.

“Kylie,” she said, and her voice had gone soft in a way that terrified me. “The staff are airing out the east suite as we speak. I thought you knew. I thought-” Another breath. “My son is moving Bianca Russo into your home. And the last person he told, apparently, is his wife.”

The phone slipped from my fingers.

Down the hall, I could hear it, the sounds I’d ignored when I first woke up, written off as normal brownstone noise. Footsteps. Furniture being moved. The creak of doors that hadn’t been opened in months.

Someone was preparing a room.

And my husband hadn’t said a word.