My Husband Called Me a Trophy Wife, So I Saved the Mafia Don Instead novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Five Words
Audrey finds her husband in bed with his partner, steals his gun and a vial of poison, and offers the most feared don in New York her life's work; Franklin's text lands first.
The night I found my husband in bed with his partner, I did not scream.
I took his gun out of the nightstand and drove across the bridge.
Four hours earlier, Franklin had stood at the head of our dinner table with a glass in his hand.
Eight guests from his firm were laughing before he finished the joke.
"My wife is the best thing I ever won," he said. "She picked the house, the wine, and me, and I'm the one she had to settle for."
I smiled and poured the wine.
I had once cut open a man's chest and held his heart in my hands.
Nobody at that table knew it, and I had stopped telling them.
His junior partner squeezed my arm on her way to the coat closet.
She had been my friend for two years.
"Go lie down, Audrey," she said. "You look worn out. I'll see everyone out."
"Franklin worries about you, you know," she added. "We all do."
It was the kindest thing anyone had said to me all week.
I went upstairs at ten.
At midnight I came down for water, and our bedroom door was open a hand's width.
Her laugh came through it, low and sleepy, and I knew it was Whitney's.
"She never suspects anything," Franklin said. "She doesn't even open her own mail."
That was true.
Franklin had collected the mail from the box himself every morning for four years.
He said it spared me stress.
I pushed the door open.
They looked up together, and neither of them moved fast enough to cover anything.
"Audrey," Franklin said. "It's not what it looks like."
It was exactly what it looked like.
Whitney pulled the sheet to her chin and started to cry, and I understood she was crying because she'd been caught.
I walked to his side of the bed.
I opened the nightstand drawer.
His pistol lay on top, and under it was a small brown glass vial with a rubber cap.
I knew that vial.
I had seen the same bottle, in the same size, on a pharmacy shelf in a life I no longer had.
"Don't touch that," Franklin said, and for the first time all night his voice was not smooth.
I took the gun and the vial.
"Audrey, put it down. You're not well."
I walked out of my own house with both of them in my coat pockets.
I did not call a lawyer, because my lawyer was in that bed.
I did not call my mother, because I had no one left to call.
I drove across the Brooklyn Bridge at one in the morning with my hands steady on the wheel.
They are always steady.
That was the only thing the last six years had not taken.
The Fontana compound stood at the end of a quiet street in Bay Ridge, behind a black iron fence.
Two men stepped out of the dark before I had the engine off.
"Mrs. Penhurst?" the bigger one said, and frowned.
His name was Teo Ricci, and he had watched me pour wine behind my husband's chair at three of his boss's dinners.
"I need to see Luca Fontana," I said. "Now."
"He doesn't see anyone at this hour."
"He'll see me."
They searched me and took the gun.
I told them the vial in my other pocket was for their boss and nobody else.
They walked me through a dark hall into a study that smelled of leather and cold coffee.
Luca Fontana sat behind a desk with one lamp on.
A covered bowl of soup sat cold at his elbow, with a note tucked under the saucer in round handwriting: *Eat this, you're too thin. Giulia*
He was thirty-eight, with black hair, grey eyes and a scar that cut through his left eyebrow.
Half of New York was afraid to say his name aloud.
He looked at me for a long time without speaking.
"You're Penhurst's wife," he said. "The one who doesn't talk."
"I'm going to talk now."
His hand moved toward the drawer in front of him.
I said it plainly.
"I can keep you alive."
The room went quiet.
One of the guards laughed once, softly, and stopped when his boss did not.
"My doctors say I have a bad heart," Luca said. "They say it's slow, and there's nothing to be done."
"Your doctors are wrong."
I did not look away from him.
"You see yellow rings around lamps, and you haven't told anyone."
"You feel sick after every Sunday dinner."
"Your pulse skips in pairs, and your right hand shakes when you lift a glass, so you hold it with both."
Nobody moved.
Luca's hand came off the drawer.
"Who told you that?"
"Your body did. Three weeks ago, at the St. Brigid's fundraiser, while you shook my hand."
I laid the vial on his blotter.
"Somebody is poisoning you, Mr. Fontana. Slowly, on purpose, and it's working."
"And you know this because...?"
"Because I know exactly what that is, and what it does to a heart."
I had seen that rhythm once before, on a monitor, years ago.
I did not tell him that.
He picked up the vial, turned it in the lamplight, and set it down.
His phone buzzed on the desk.
He read the screen and slid it across to me with one finger.
*Luca, forgive the hour. My wife is unwell and has taken my gun. Please call me before you let her near you. Franklin.*
Everything Franklin knew about me fit in that message.
Unwell. Useless. Harmless.
"Your husband sounds very worried," Luca said.
"He should be," I said.
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