The first time they met, it wasn’t love. It was a deal sealed in blood and power. James Moretti — the infamous mafia boss feared across the underworld — stood in front of her, black suit crisp, expression unreadable. The world seemed to bow under his presence.

“You’ll be my wife,” he said, as if dictating her fate. Not a proposal — a command. And like a fool, she said yes.

Their marriage began like that — silent, calculated, cold. Their marriage was nothing short of a transaction.

Four years. Four years of being Mrs. Moretti in name, not in heart. Four years of her voice echoing through halls he rarely walked in. Four years of waking up beside a man whose eyes never softened, whose touch was always cold, whose heart belonged to another — his partner in crime, Celeste.

Every morning, she tried. She made his coffee the way he liked it. Waited for him late at night even when the hours bled into dawn. Dressed up in gowns she hoped he’d notice. Smiled when he came home, even if the air reeked of gunpowder and someone else’s perfume.

He never looked her way.

And when she got desperate — when love turned into a battlefield she was always losing — she started taking risks. Dangerous ones.

Once, she threw herself into one of his missions, thinking maybe if she helped him, he’d see her. She ended up with a bullet wound in her shoulder. He didn’t visit her in the hospital. He never came. The nurse handed her flowers the next morning — no note, no signature. But she knew they weren’t from him. He was in another city with Celeste.

The next time, she tried to stop Celeste from joining him on a deal gone bad. It ended with her car in a ditch and two broken ribs. James came, but not for her — for Celeste. He barely looked at his wife’s bloodied face.

That was the day something in her broke.

The soft woman who once whispered his name with trembling affection no longer existed. When she came home from the hospital, her eyes no longer begged. Her voice no longer wavered. She stopped waiting for him at night. Stopped asking where he’d been. Stopped caring.

She sat across the dining table one night, silence stretching like a knife between them. He glanced at her — maybe out of habit, maybe curiosity. But the woman in front of him wasn’t the one he married.

“You’re quiet,” he said.

She didn’t look up. Didn’t speak. Just set her glass down gently — the faint click of crystal against marble echoing in the empty room.

That silence unnerved him more than her tears ever had.

From that night on, she moved like a ghost in his mansion — beautiful, untouchable, and cold. No tears. No questions. No warmth. The sweet, desperate warmth that once filled the mansion had vanished. And for the first time, James noticed her — not the loving wife who once reached for him, but the woman who no longer cared whether he breathed or bled.