The Don's Perfect Forgery

To repay Victor for saving my life, I gave up a brilliant career as one of America's finest neurosurgeons and willingly became his trophy wife. For seven years, Victor lavished money on me and treated me with bone-deep tenderness. Yet his obsessive rules suffocated me. Every other week, I had to subject my scalp to agonizing bleach treatments to keep my hair icy platinum. I had to bathe in a discontinued Venetian white iris perfume. And I had to wear a fake beauty mark at the corner of my right eye. I once mistook it all for the obsessive devotion of a Mafia Don. Then, on the eve of our wedding of the century, I found a wall covered with portraits of another woman. The measurements of my gown, the carat weight of my ring, even the beauty mark Victor had tattooed beside my eye, all came from a dead woman's final wishes. After seven years of consuming passion, I was never his salvation. I was a living specimen, crafted to harbor the ghost of a dead woman. Chapter 1 Eight elite stylists knelt around my feet, their faces as white as if they were preparing a corpse for burial. "Donna, please don't move. Just a little longer. Don personally inspected the last batch of test strands and said they weren't good enough." The head stylist trembled as she begged me. "His orders were absolute. Not even a fraction of an inch of your natural dark brown roots can show before the wedding. Please. We don't want to die." I stared blankly into the full-length mirror. A beautiful, exquisitely made wax figure stared back, with no soul behind her eyes. Seven years ago, I had been America's youngest neurosurgical prodigy. Now Victor Moretti, the Don of New York, kept me caged in a Manhattan penthouse. Victor could not live without me, yet he treated me like a pet stripped of all personal dignity. Three tiny fragments from an explosion seven years ago remained lodged deep in his brain, pressing against nerves near his brainstem. Whenever a storm rolled in, they triggered migraines and hallucinations. Last night, drunk and delirious with pain, he had pinned me hard against the floor-to-ceiling window. He bit the corner of my mouth until it bled. What left his lips was not a declaration of love but this: "Don't leave. You have to wear that wedding gown. I miss you so much, Isabella..." After the stylists left, I crossed the marble floor barefoot and approached the concealed door at the end of the hall, the one Victor had expressly forbidden me to go near. That name, Isabella, punctured the illusion I had spent seven years building for myself. I forced down my hammering heart, clung to one last sliver of hope, and typed my birthday into the keypad. A tone sounded. The light flashed red. Wrong code. I tried our anniversary. Wrong again. That last pathetic sliver of hope drained away, replaced by fear. With trembling fingers, I entered 0917, the date Victor had been attacked and wounded in the head seven years ago. The door slid open. A heavy wave of Venetian white iris perfume washed over me, followed by a blast of cold air. The four walls were covered with enormous oil paintings and intimate photographs of the same woman. She was blonde and blue-eyed, with a distinct beauty mark beside her right eye. Beside every image hung a photograph of me taken in secret sometime during the past seven years. In one portrait, the woman wore a dark red gown and held a wineglass. Victor had forced me into an identical dress on my birthday last year. In another, she lay on her side across a bed in a seductive pose. During sex, Victor had forced me into precisely the same position. As I studied the comparisons, matched down to every fold of fabric, ice flooded my veins. He had been checking how closely his forgery resembled the original. In the center of the room, a display case held the design sketches for the gown I was supposed to wear at our wedding of the century, just two days away. They were dated eight years earlier and dedicated: For my one true love, Isabella Cartelli. A yellowed diary lay beside the sketches. The last page bore a frantic scrawl: Victor, if I die, I want the woman who wears my gown to dye her hair blonde, wear my iris perfume, and marry you in my place. I braced myself against the wall and retched violently. Seven years. More than twenty-five hundred days and nights. With the same hands that wielded a scalpel, I had eased his neurological agony and stitched his wounds after every Mafia shootout. Every time he gazed lovingly into my eyes, every time he possessed my body in bed, it had served a single purpose. He had merely been pouring his twisted longing and lust into a living specimen built to resemble a dead woman. I was no salvation. I was a pathetic substitute. "Darling." At that moment, a pistol pressed against the back of my head without warning. Victor stood in the doorway, rain dripping from his black coat. "Who gave you permission to defile this place with those hands? "Turn around." Victor's voice was terrifyingly low. I turned slowly. The moment his gaze landed on the open diary, his face darkened and twisted. He did not bother asking a single question. In an instant, he seized me by the throat, lifted me clear off the floor, and slammed me into the display case behind me. "Isabella... who is she?" I forced out through his grip on my throat. "After seven years... what am I to you?" Chapter 2 "She is the only woman I have ever loved." Victor bent over me and roughly stroked the false beauty mark beside my eye, cruelty filling his gaze. "All you have to do is play her properly, and your position as Donna will remain secure." "Play her? Victor, you make me sick." Something inside me shattered. I snatched a letter opener from the display case and slashed at the false beauty mark beside my right eye without hesitation. I would rather be disfigured than live with a dead woman's mark on me. "Have you lost your mind?" Victor snatched the blade from my hand and backhanded me to the floor. As he stared at the blood seeping from the corner of my eye, I saw no trace of concern, only the fury of a man whose property had been damaged. He pulled out his phone and made a call. "Bring your equipment and get to the study. Now!" Ten minutes later, a terrified tattooist entered carrying a case. Victor's bodyguards pinned me to a chair, leaving me unable to move. "Tattoo that beauty mark into her flesh. Make it permanent." Victor towered over me. "Victor, I'm Elena! I'm a living, breathing person!" I fought them desperately, but the needle pierced the skin beside my eye anyway. Victor's icy words echoed in my ears. "Not one inch of this body belongs to you. You don't even have the right to damage it." At that moment, thunder exploded outside. Victor clutched his head in agony. Seven years of habit took hold. Instinctively, I reached out to massage the base of his skull and ease the pain. "Get away from me!" Victor struck my hand aside. "Do you think I keep you here for those pathetic medical skills of yours?" As he stared at my hand suspended between us, something sick flickered in his eyes. "Isabella was a gentle painter. She hated the smell of blood and butchers who used knives." At a wave from him, the bodyguards brought over a metal basin and a stack of papers. On top lay my medical license and a custom-made scalpel. Seven years ago, that same blade had removed a deadly fragment lodged beside his brainstem in a squalid back-alley clinic. "Burn this filth. All of it." Victor tossed a lighter at my feet. "As of today, Dr. Elena no longer exists." "You can't do this..." Trembling all over, I clutched everything to my chest. This was all I had left. "Burn it." Victor fisted a hand in my blonde hair and leaned close to whisper in my ear like the devil himself. "Or I'll have someone chop off your medical mentor's hands. You know I can do it." Tears spilled beyond my control. I set fire to it all with my own hands, and the flames consumed the last of my hope piece by piece. He flung a box containing a diamond ring in front of me, then brutally shoved the ring onto my finger. "Tomorrow, you will go to your final fitting without complaint and get your hair colour sorted. "If anything goes wrong at the wedding, I promise you'll learn what real hell feels like." I touched the permanent beauty mark beside my eye, then looked down at the diamond ring that weighed like a shackle. Nothing remained inside me but ash. At that moment, the entire building shook violently as an explosion thundered through it. A sixty-five-foot wall of bulletproof glass exploded inward. Wind and shards of glass tore through the hall. In the darkness, dozens of heavily armed men in black and wearing skull masks rappelled into the room. "They're from the Bruno Family! We're under attack!" A sniper's round blew the captain of the guard's head apart before he could finish the warning. The alarm shrilled as a barrage of submachine-gun fire shredded the living room's priceless antiques and furniture. Victor dove out of the way the instant the explosion hit. "Elena, find cover!" He drew his weapon, returned fire, and dropped four attackers with perfect headshots. He laid down suppressing fire with one hand, seized my wrist with the other, and tried to drag me to safety. Then a burst of gunfire tore into the study. The concealed door blew apart, exposing Isabella's portraits and belongings inside. "Isabella!" The instant Victor saw the painting surrounded by flames, he lost control completely. At the same moment, a blood-soaked attacker charged from the smoke with a combat knife, heading straight for me where the blast had knocked me down. "Victor!" I screamed for help on instinct. Only three paces separated us. With Victor's aim and reflexes, a single shot could have killed the attacker cleanly. But in that life-or-death instant, Victor merely flicked a glance at me where I lay. Like a madman, he turned and charged into the hidden room, shielding Isabella's portrait with his body. "Isabella!" Victor's gut-wrenching roar echoed through the wreckage. As I watched him abandon me without hesitation, the last trace of love I had for him vanished. Chapter 3 Seven years of intimacy meant nothing beside Isabella's belongings. The combat knife was already at my throat. Its edge sliced through a lock of hair across my forehead. To keep it away from my carotid artery, I neither screamed nor waited to die. I had no choice but to dodge right. I raised the right hand that had saved countless lives and clamped my palm around the blade. Blood streamed between my fingers and soaked the front of my white dress, but I did not so much as flinch. Seizing the opening, I snatched a shard of glass from the floor and plunged it into the attacker's neck with all my strength. The gunfire beyond the room fell silent. Moretti reinforcements had arrived and quickly eliminated the remaining attackers. Still visibly shaken, Victor emerged from the hidden room clutching Isabella's portrait and belongings to his chest. Dust covered his suit, but he had kept the blonde woman in the painting pristine. "Elena..." Victor's voice died as his gaze fell to my right hand. The hand that had once been steady as stone, capable of removing the most dangerous lesions, now hung with its flesh split open and finger bones exposed. Blood struck the floor in heavy drops. It was the same hand that had pulled him back from agony countless times. There was not a trace of guilt in Victor's eyes for abandoning me to the blade, only the fury of a man whose property had been damaged. "Have you lost your mind? Who gave you permission to ruin that hand? "Medical team! Lock down every hospital in Manhattan and drag the finest neurosurgeons here, even if you have to tie them up!" "Don't touch me with your filthy hands." I leaned against the bloodstained ruins, my voice icy. Victor's outstretched hand froze in midair. "Now that your hand is ruined, you can finally give up any fantasy of returning to medicine. "Play her properly, and you will remain my one and only Donna. Even if you're crippled, I'll provide for you for the rest of your life." "You'll provide for me?" I laughed bitterly. I raised my uninjured left hand to the mangled ring finger of my right. Without expression, I pulled off the blood-soaked, fifty-million-dollar diamond ring and tossed it into the filthy pool of blood beside me. "Seven years ago, you shielded me from falling debris. I owed you my life." Using the wall for support, I stood and looked at the Don half-kneeling on the floor as if he were a piece of rotting garbage. "This ruined hand repays the life I owed you. From this moment on, we are even." Behind me, he roared that he would break my legs and lock me in a basement for the rest of my life. I did not look back. I raised my middle finger. Half an hour later, Victor's men found only two things in a trash can beside the ground-floor fire escape: A clump of roughly shorn platinum hair and a signed application to serve as a field doctor with an international relief organization. By then, a UN relief plane bound for a Middle Eastern war zone was already climbing into the night sky. My dark brown hair hacked short and uneven, I used my teeth to wrench open a bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured it without hesitation over the torn tendons of my mangled right hand. Suddenly, alarms screamed through the cabin, followed by the captain's panicked voice over the intercom. "Warning. We have entered contested airspace. Rebel surface-to-air missile radar has locked onto us from below. Brace for a crash landing." A missile struck one engine, pitching the cabin violently sideways. The plane plowed through half of a wall already shattered by shelling before finally grinding to a halt. I grabbed a field trauma kit from the floor, kicked open the warped emergency door, and climbed out. Outside, several rebels carrying assault rifles approached the wreckage, laughing. The moment I rolled into the sand, a rifle barrel pressed against my head. "Well, hello, pretty foreigner."