My Husband Called Me Useless, Now a Mafia Don Owes Me His Life novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gate
Ada finds her husband in her bed with his associate, films it, takes his gun, drops her ring in the gutter and tells the most feared don in New York she can keep him alive. Her hand on his wrist finds his heart skipping every sixth beat.
Two weeks ago, my husband introduced me to his biggest client as "the decorative part of the marriage."
The client was Rocco Barsanti, the most feared man in New York, and he did not laugh.
Carson squeezed my hand under the table and steered the talk back to the quarterly numbers.
I smiled, because I always smiled at those dinners, and I watched Rocco Barsanti's hands.
His left hand shook when he lifted his glass.
There were pale bands across his nails.
His lips had a gray edge, and the pulse in his neck skipped every few beats.
Halfway through the main course he took two white pills from a silver case and swallowed them dry.
I knew exactly what that was.
I also knew that nobody at that table knew I knew.
To them I was Mrs. Carson Rensselaer, the quiet wife who couldn't follow a conversation about money.
I said nothing about it that night.
Tonight, Carson kissed my cheek at the door and told me to give my mother his love.
He had a late client dinner, he said, and he wasn't worth waiting up for.
At eight, my mother texted that she had a fever and didn't want me to catch it.
I turned the car around on the highway.
I got home at a quarter to ten and the bedroom light was on.
I stood in the doorway with my keys in my hand.
Carson was on my side of the bed.
His junior associate, Daphne Corley, sat beside him in my gray cashmere robe, the one my mother gave me.
Daphne laughed at something he said.
"When are you telling her?" she asked.
"When it suits me," Carson said. "She won't fight it. She has no money of her own, no friends and no name worth using."
He pulled a strand of Daphne's hair behind her ear.
"She'll walk out with her coat and nothing else."
I did not scream.
I raised my phone and filmed until he said my name in the same bored voice.
Then I went down the hall to his study.
He kept a pistol in the second drawer of his desk.
He had told me once that it was for my protection.
I took it because it was his, and because I wanted the men at Rocco Barsanti's gate to see exactly what I had brought.
I emailed the video to myself twice, and I drove over the bridge to Brooklyn.
In the glove box, under the registration, was a funeral program I had never been able to throw away.
I didn't open it.
The Barsanti house sat behind iron gates at the end of a street on the water.
It was raining hard when I stopped outside them.
My thin gold wedding ring was sitting heavy on my finger.
Carson had bought it on clearance.
"Marriage is a merger, Ada," he had said. "Not a romance."
I pulled it off and dropped it into the gutter.
The water carried it into the dark.
My phone buzzed with his name.
"Ada, where are you?" he said. "The couple from the firm are waiting on us."
"Are they?" I said. "That's funny. I just watched Daphne wear my robe on my side of the bed."
He didn't answer.
"I heard what you told her," I said. "About my coat."
When he spoke again, his voice was cold.
"You were supposed to be at your mother's."
"Lucky me," I said. "I wasn't."
He started to say something smooth.
I hung up and turned the phone off.
Two men in black coats came out of the gatehouse.
One of them held a flashlight in my face.
The other found the gun in my coat at once and pointed it at me.
"Who sent you?" he asked.
"Nobody sent me."
"You're Rensselaer's wife."
"Tell Mr. Barsanti I'm at the gate," I said. "Tell him I can keep him alive."
The guard laughed at me.
Then I told him the name of the pills in Rocco's pocket, and which hand he used to take them, and he stopped laughing.
They walked me up to the house at gunpoint.
Rocco Barsanti stood at the top of the stairs in his shirtsleeves.
He was thinner than he had been two weeks ago.
Six men stood around the hall, and every one of them stared at me.
"Mrs. Rensselaer," Rocco said. "My accountant's wife, at my door, with my accountant's gun."
"He doesn't know I'm here."
"Then you have one minute before I find out why."
"You stopped sleeping in March," I said. "Your stomach went first. Then your hands."
Nobody moved.
"Your doctor tells you it's your heart. It's partly your heart. It's also something that's being put in your food."
"Someone in this house is killing you slowly," I said. "I'm the only person in New York who knows."
He came down the stairs one step at a time.
When he reached the bottom, he held out his left hand, and the tremor was worse than it had been at dinner.
"Prove it," he said.
I took his wrist.
I timed it against the clock on the wall.
"Your heart skips every sixth beat," I said. "And whoever is doing this has been counting too."
He didn't take his hand back.
"Who taught you to read a pulse, Mrs. Rensselaer?"
"A lot of people," I said. "Once."
I didn't give him the name.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend