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Chapter 1
Las Vegas, Nevada
Mancini Mafia
GUILIA
Busy finalizing the guest list for the next celebritycharitypoker tournament, I'm not paying attention when the car stops.
All proceeds will go to funding research for heart disease in women. Byall, I mean what is left after the mafia takes its cut.
As the wife to the Las Vegas Cosa Nostra underboss, it is my responsibility to organize four events like this every year. Not only does the mafia take its cut, but the events launder less legitimate income from the Mancini mafia businesses.
My father, who was a don in New York would never have allowed my mother to materially participate in mafia business. My father-in-law has different expectations. While I am not allowed to know anything else about the business, I am given a dollar amount for each event I am supposed towash.
My husband shows his appreciation for me organizing each event. Sometimes with a piece of jewelry. Sometimes with a short trip abroad. Which I go on alone. Naturally.
Raffaele Mancini is too busy with his position in his family's mafia empire to accompany me. It's not as if we love each other. Well, not as if he loves me.
I stupidly fell for Raff soon after our engagement was announced when I was sixteen. All right, at first, it was probably just a crush on the gorgeous, charismatic man I had been promised to since I was twelve.
However, those feelings matured as the years went on. First, because he treated me with respect every time we were together. Then because he fought his father so that I could attend university before the wedding. It helped that my own father insisted on it as well.
But the Mancinis could have pushed for the marriage to take place as soon as I turned 18, and for me to attend university online. However, Raff understood how important it was to me to have the full college experience. Or so I thought.
I also didn't want to be a teenage bride, and looking back, I realize he had no more interest in having a teenager for a wife.
When I got married, I thought it was a fairytale. I was a mafia princess, and he was my prince.
Unlike other arranged marriages in the mafia, we were going to be happy. We were going to love each other.
Like my parents.
My bubble burst on the second day of our honeymoon when he left me with bodyguards in Paris to return to Las Vegas to deal with something that to this day remains a mystery to me. I soon learned that no matter what, mafia business took precedence over our marriage.
Over me.
I figured out that Raff hadn't supported me attending university because heunderstoodme. He was happy to put off the wedding because work always came first and not having a wife was even more convenient than having one. Even one that cemented the alliance between the strongest of the Five Families in New York and the Mancini mafia in Las Vegas.
Lara opens my door and waits for me to step out of the car.
Six feet tall with a musculature many men would envy and the beauty of a cover model, Lara could have gone to college on a basketball scholarship. Instead, she joined the Marines, but delisted after making it into MARSOC. One of less than a hundred women in the Marines' elite special forces, she was stuck in support job because she is a woman.
Returning to Vegas, she requested the opportunity to follow in her father's footsteps as a Cosa Nostra soldier in the Mancini mafia. Though her mother is a schoolteacher from Nigeria, her father is the descendant of one of the original Sicilian Cosa Nostra families.
My father-in-law has many faults, but an inability to recognize talent for the life because of gender isn't one of them.
He has a higher percentage of female soldiers working in his ranks than MARSOC and he doesn't keep them in support positions.
My head bodyguard, Lara is in charge of my security team.
I unclip my seatbelt, slip my tablet into my Balenciaga hourglass tote and climb out of the back of the luxury sedan. It's black, just like all the other luxury sedans in Las Vegas.
I could be the head of a casino, a celebrity, a high roller, or what I am…a mafia wife.
Looking up, I see that we are at a medical facility. Unsurprising. My husband put this appointment on my calendar. I assume I'm here to meet with one of the doctors involved in the heart disease research associated with the event I'm working on.
Raff isn't always great at communicating, but I was raised in the life, and I'm quick on the uptake. My mother trained me well for my role as wife to the future don.
