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Reborn：My Mafia Husband Is Now My Brother-in-Law
Novelix
Completed
My dying husband had my face scarred because he believed I'd stolen the life my sister deserved. Then I woke up thirteen years earlier, before he chose his bride. This time, she can marry him. I'm interested in his brother—the one who actually listens when I speak. But my former husband is starting to question why I'm so happy to let him go.
Chapters (2)
Chapter 1
I spent thirteen years beside Dominic Bellante. Ten as his wife.
His last order was to have my face cut.
I had been sitting by his bed for three nights when he finally opened his eyes. I leaned closer, thinking he wanted water.
“Ada,” he whispered.
My sister's name.
Then he looked at me, and the tenderness left him.
“Your father treated her like she was nothing. He wouldn't even pay the artist properly. That's why the portrait had that mark.”
A portrait. Thirteen years old. He'd kept it all that time.
“I lost years because of you, Clara.”
He told one of his men to make my face match the painted scar.
I begged the man to stop. Dominic watched, holding my sister's portrait against his chest.
When he died, his attorneys informed me I would be leaving the Bellante house. The family arrangements that were supposed to protect me had been changed. My father took me back under his roof and treated my presence as an embarrassment.
People called me the wife the Don sent home.
Ada came to visit with a hand resting on her pregnant belly.
“He gave me everything I needed,” she said. “You spent your life trying to earn what he wanted to give me.”
Her husband was one of Dominic's senior men. He'd known whose child she carried. There had been promises about inheritance, protection, a place at the center of the family.
I had no children. For years I'd been told it was stress. Now I understood the treatment Ada had encouraged me to take, the doctor my husband had chosen, the things they had never let me see.
When the fire broke out in the old guesthouse, neither of us reached the door. I had lunged at her; a lamp had fallen. Her screams stayed with me after the room disappeared.
I didn't get to call that justice. We died in a room full of things we'd done to each other.
Then I opened my eyes at twenty-four.
Two portraits lay drying on my father's dining table. One for each daughter, commissioned for the Bellante Foundation's charity gallery and the introductions that would follow it.
Ada and I looked almost alike. On her portrait, a dark line cut down one cheek.
The artist had gone to wash his brushes.
I picked up his pen.
On the back of the scarred portrait, where a name had not yet been entered, I wrote my own.
Chapter 2
Dominic requested an introduction to Ada three days later.
My father couldn't understand it.
Salvatore Valli had spent years preparing me for an alliance with the Bellantes. I knew the household, the accounts, the charitable boards, the names a respectable visitor wasn't supposed to recognize.
Ada had grown up largely outside that public life. Her mother had been my father's mistress before becoming his second wife. None of that made Ada less entitled to a future. But Dad had always kept two sets of rules, and he expected us to build our lives inside them.
“Did you pay the artist?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“Both fees?”
“Yes.”
Ada entered before he could question me again.
“Perhaps Dominic knows appearances aren't everything.” She looked at me, serene as a woman offering advice she hadn't arranged to profit from. “If he cares about someone, a portrait won't matter. Don't you agree, Clara?”
She'd paid the artist herself. I could hear it in the careful wording.
In my first life she'd wanted her portrait to look damaged. She thought a slighted daughter would interest him more than another beautifully dressed candidate for a family alliance. When his advisers steered him toward the supposedly uncomplicated daughter, he'd married me instead.
Then he'd met her in person and decided I'd stolen his life.
This time the undamaged portrait carried Ada's name. There was no wounded woman for him to rescue in secret. He could choose her openly.
I wished them both the pleasure of it.
Dad asked me to help her prepare. I knew what Dominic drank, what his mother disliked, which lawyer would be at the dinner. Thirteen years of knowledge made me a very useful older sister.
“You're taking this well,” Dad said.
“I want the introduction to go smoothly.”
He patted my hand. “We'll find the right place for you too.”
I smiled because I didn't intend to let him find it.
