My Mafia Boss Husband Laughed When They Called Me a Victim, Until He Found the Diary I Had Been Hiding for Five Years

Damian took the stairs two at a time. The house was unnervingly quiet. Usually, Martha was running vacuum cleaners down the carpeted galleries or kitchen staff were moving trays, but today the silence felt thick, almost hostile.

He pushed open the door to the master suite.

The bed was made with military precision. The storm had darkened the room to a dull pewter, rain lashing against the floor-to-ceiling glass that overlooked the crashing Pacific.

Damian crossed to his dressing room, pulled the portfolio from his locked credenza, and was turning toward the exit when his eyes snagged on the nightstand beside Emma’s side of the bed.

Emma never left things out.

She lived in his house like a long-term guest terrified of leaving fingerprints. Her perfume bottles were always aligned; her shoes were always sequestered in their assigned cubbies; her clothes never touched his in the cedar walk-in closet. Over the years, Damian had considered this the mark of an ideal wife—disciplined, quiet, unburdened by the manic hysteria that plagued the wives of his captains.

On the mahogany table lay a thick, faded book bound in scuffed blue leather.

Its corners were frayed down to the pressed cardboard beneath. An elastic band, stretched out and limp with age, hung loosely over the spine.

Beside it lay her wedding ring. The platinum band with the five-carat emerald-cut diamond seemed almost vulgar next to the quiet decay of the book.

Damian frowned. He checked his watch. He had twenty minutes before the harbor authority meeting began in downtown Seattle. He should have left.

Instead, he stepped toward the table.

He picked up the diary.

The leather was soft, warmed by years of human touch. He turned it over. On the inside cover, written in Emma’s neat, sloping cursive, was a single date: *October 14, five years ago.* The week of their wedding.

Damian smiled faintly, a fleeting touch of patronizing affection crossing his features. *A girl’s diary.* Probably full of adolescent anxieties about entering a crime family, romantic daydreams about him, or tearful vents about how sharp-tongued his mother could be.

He flipped the pages forward, searching for the end, curious to see what petty grievances she had documented about Olivia’s comment last night.

His thumb caught on an entry near the back, dated three nights ago.

*March 17.*

*My chest hurt again after dinner. Twenty-three minutes this time.*

*I told Martha it was indigestion.*

*Damian was arguing with Victor about the harbor contract. He already has enough problems.*

*I am beginning to understand that keeping someone from worrying about you is not the same as being loved by them.*

Damian stopped.

His eyes scanned the words again. *Chest hurt again? Twenty-three minutes?*

He felt a sudden, cold prickle at the nape of his neck. Indigestion? Emma ate almost nothing. For months, he had watched her push food around her plate, assuming she was maintaining her figure the way high-society wives did.

Then his eyes dropped to the final line, written in ink that was darker, the handwriting pressed so hard into the paper that it had deformed the texture of the page:

*Tonight he laughed.*

Damian stood frozen in the middle of the bedroom. The Pacific roared outside, a violent swell crashing against the jagged rocks below the bluff.

He didn't close the diary.