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

*November 4, Year Two.*

*The specialist in Tacoma said it’s an arrhythmia brought on by prolonged autonomic stress. He asked if I felt safe at home. I almost laughed. I told him my home has twelve armed security guards and perimeter alarms that could stop a small army. He looked at me with that pathetic pity doctors have and said, ‘Mrs. Romano, the heart doesn’t care who holds the guns outside. It only cares about the pressure inside the room.’*

*He prescribed beta-blockers. I paid cash and used my mother’s maiden name. If Damian finds out, he’ll think it’s a weakness. He’ll think I’m trying to make his life harder.*

Damian’s chest tightened. He flipped back further, his hands moving with an urgency that bordered on panic.

*June 12, Year Three.*

*Olivia came to the garden house today crying hysterically. Marco found thirty thousand dollars missing from the casino vault, and she took it to cover her ex-husband’s gambling debt in Vancouver. She fell on her knees. She begged me not to let Damian know. She said Damian would exile her, that he would strip her allowances and tell their mother.*

*I transferred the thirty thousand from my personal savings account—the money my father left me for emergencies.*

*When Damian noticed the discrepancy in the ledger three weeks later, Olivia told him I had overspent on the conservatory renovations.*

*Damian didn’t yell. He just froze his card to my account and said, ‘I expected more restraint from a woman who came from nothing.’*

*I said nothing. Olivia looked at her shoes.*

*I took two pills tonight. The chest tightness didn't stop until 4:00 AM.*

Damian let out a sharp, ragged breath.

*No.* That was impossible. Olivia had sworn Emma was embezzling household funds for secret vanity projects. Damian had lectured Emma for forty-five minutes in his study about fiscal discipline, about how every penny in the family had to be accounted for so federal investigators couldn't find a foothold. Emma had sat there, hands folded in her lap, head down, whispering, *“I understand, Damian. I’m sorry.”*

He had taken her silence as guilt.

He flipped back another year.

*September 28, Year One.*

*Victor’s men came to the market today. They didn't know the plainclothes guard was twenty feet behind me. One of them cornered me by the florist stall and told me that if Damian didn't yield the south warehouse, they would deliver my fingers to his office in a velvet box.*

*I didn't tell Damian.*

*He was already sleeping two hours a night, burning through packs of cigarettes, trying to keep the family from tearing itself apart after his father died.*

*If I told him, he would have gone to war. People would have died. He might have died.*

*Instead, I met Victor’s sister at the cathedral. I traded the Romano family's private box seats at the opera and my grandmother’s diamond brooch—the only thing I had left of her—to get her to convince Victor to back off for sixty days.*

*It worked. Damian secured the warehouse without firing a shot. He came home boasting about his brilliant tactical patience.*

*I smiled and made him tea.*

*He said, ‘You’re lucky, Emma. You live in a palace and you never have to see how ugly the world really is.’*

The diary fell onto the bedspread.

Damian stumbled back a step, his hand hitting the mahogany post of the bed.

The air in the bedroom seemed to have vanished. The words burned behind his retinas like white phosphorus.

*You live in a palace and you never have to see how ugly the world really is.*

He had said that to her. He remembered saying it. He remembered the feeling of grand, magnanimous pride he had felt—the protector, the provider, the ruthless predator who kept the sheep safe in the fold.

She hadn't been a sheep.

She had been taking the blows meant for him, swallowing the poison meant for his sister, shielding him from his own family’s rotting insolence, and absorbing the shockwaves of his violent world into the valves of her own failing heart.

And last night, when his sister had called her a professional victim in front of sixty laughing sycophants...

Damian had joined them.

*“Leave her alone, Olivia. You know Emma always thinks she’s the victim.”*

A nausea so violent it doubled him over clawed at his stomach. Damian dropped his head into his hands, his breath coming in jagged, wheezing gasps.

“Martha!” he roared.