The Mafia’s Scapegoat Bride: A Stolen Life Chapter 02
I stumbled through the door, coughing so hard it felt like my lungs would tear apart.
A two-cent painkiller lasted four hours.
Three pills a day were enough to get me by until I paid the final installment for the plot next to my foster father Jonathan’s grave.
I’d ridden too hard today, and a dull knife twisted inside my stomach. I reached weakly for the pill bottle.
The door swung open.
Matthew stood in the doorway. No knock, no warning, acting as if he still ruled this place as its Don.
He scanned the tiny room, his brows drawn tight.
The metal shack was barely ten square meters. Cardboard boxes I’d collected piled in the corners. The overhead bulb flickered dimly, like the last glimmers in the eyes of those marked for execution within the families.
“You don’t have to ruin yourself just to put on an act.”
“We all had our reasons back then. I had no other choice.”
“Grace saved my life. She donated a kidney to me.”
I snapped my head up, as if I’d just heard the funniest joke in the world.
Within the families, a life debt was the heaviest obligation of all, one you repaid for a lifetime.
But he didn’t even know who had truly saved him.
I was about to speak when a small face peeked out from behind him.
My heart lurched violently.
It was Evan.
Five years had passed.
The day he was born, his breath had been shallow and faint.
I’d knelt all the way from the hospital gates to the church, my knees raw down to the bone. Snow covered the ground on Christmas Eve, stained red with my blood.
That was the first time I’d begged God for mercy—not with a gun, but on my knees.
My throat tightened as I struggled to find words.
Evan glanced around the cramped metal hut and frowned. The look on his face mirrored Matthew’s expression when interrogating traitors.
Cold, distant, born with an air of superiority.
“Father, first you transferred me to her old school just to find this woman. Now you drag me into the slums after class for a tour?”
Matthew clapped a hand over his son’s mouth.
“Evan, we’ve found your mother.”
Evan shot me a glance. It was the look of a young heir staring down a stray begging on the street.
I pushed myself up with a bitter smile, forcing back the metallic taste rising in my throat.
I rummaged inside an iron box and pulled out a few crumpled bills, holding them out.
“You gave me a hundred. Here’s seventy-eight in change. We’re even. Now leave.”
Matthew swatted my hand away and kicked over a nearby plastic stool. It slammed into the wall and split in two, just like our marriage.
“Olivia, it’s been five years! The second you see me, all you talk about is petty cash? Why keep score?”
I sighed and turned back to Evan, extending the money toward him again.
He stared at the grease-stained bills and slapped my hand away hard. His nails scraped across an old scar on my wrist, left by a cigarette burn back in prison.
“You may not have had Grace’s privileged upbringing, but you were a fireworks designer once. Not respectable, but at least decent work.”
His gaze swept over the plastic bags strung up to dry, the stacked boxes in the corner, and the half-empty pill bottle on the rickety table.
“Picking up discarded pill bottles for your little act. How disgusting.”
Matthew raised his hand and struck Evan across the face.
The crack echoed through the metal room.
I knew that strike well. It was not the discipline of a father, but a defense of me.
Back at family banquets, anyone who spoke disrespectfully to me ended up going “fishing”—their body dumped into the Hudson River, a quiet death.
Shortly after I’d joined the Lucchese family, I’d grown homesick.
I’d snuck up to the rooftop and huddled in the corner, sketching fireworks designs. I cried over every drawing, too afraid to call Jonathan.
I was eighteen when the gravely ill foster father told me the truth.
He was not my real father.
He’d been the driver for the old Don of the Lucchese family.
Back during a brutal internal power struggle, Jonathan swapped his newborn daughter for the Don’s to protect her. He’d fled the family with me and raised me hidden away in the slums.
That baby was me.
Olivia Lucchese, the true blood heir of the Lucchese family.
After I returned to the family, Jonathan finally breathed easy, but his health worsened rapidly.
Grief weighed heavy on me. Even at the family gala, I stayed isolated in the corner.
I pulled a loaf of bread from my coat and took big, ragged bites.
Well-dressed made men walked past, each wearing a gold family emblem pinned to their chest. They snickered at my awkwardness and whispered behind their hands.
Then a hand stretched out from the shadows beside me.
No ring adorned the finger, but the cuff bore the emblem of the Gambino family.
“I’ve grown tired of the banquet food.”
“Share half with me. A change of pace.”
I learned later he was Matthew Gambino, then the Underboss of the Gambino family—and my arranged husband.
The fireworks bursting over the rooftop that night, and him, were burned forever into my memory.
We married in the family church.
Three hundred made men bore witness as I kissed his ring.
“You are mine,” he’d said.
“Anyone who touches you sleeps with the fishes.”
When Evan was born, he’d held our son high and declared to every capo present, “This is the future Don of the Gambino family.”
Everything shattered the day Grace Lucchese, the adopted impostor raised by the Luccheses, returned home after graduating overseas.
Matthew went to pick her up and got into a car crash.
I rushed to his side at the hospital, only to find the two of them lying together in the same bed.
“Olivia, I’m bored. I just wanted something new.”
He spoke casually, as if ordering his men to dispose of a body.
I left everything behind and filed for divorce.
When Jonathan’s medical bills piled up, Matthew offered to remarry me.
I agreed. I told myself it would be the last time.
For Jonathan, I would endure anything.
He covered his villa with my fireworks designs. He even promised to arrange a meeting between Jonathan and Grace—after all, Jonathan was her real father.
I’d foolishly thought the affair had been nothing more than a mistake.
Then that night, Grace burned every last shred of my happiness to the ground.
When I woke, I was lying on Matthew’s operating table. He was operating on me, remolding my face to look exactly like Grace’s.
“You’ll serve three years in prison in her place,” he said.
“She’ll look after Jonathan while you’re gone. A fair trade for everyone.”
A fair trade.
That was the mafia way to fix problems—sacrifice one person to keep the peace within the family.
By the time I walked free, Jonathan was nothing but a cold grave.
The bitter metallic taste in my throat could no longer be held back.
I coughed up blood onto the floor.
It was thick and black, as if seeping straight from my bones.
Matthew’s face paled. He stepped forward to help me, but Evan tugged hard at his sleeve.
“Crying, throwing fits, now coughing up blood. You haven’t even stepped foot in the house and you’re already trying to upset Grace.”
He tilted his head and smirked.
“Please. If you’re going to fake a hemorrhage, at least bleed enough to die. Then Grace can finally be my mother.”
He turned and walked out without a single glance back.
Matthew opened his mouth to speak, when another small figure burst through the door.
“Mom! The cops are coming! I left school early because I was worried about you.”
It was Mark.
He was the son of my old cellmate.
Before her execution, she’d begged me to take care of him.
Her final words still echoed in my mind.
“Olivia, make sure this boy lives a decent life. Don’t let him end up like us.”
