He Broke Her Heart, She Broke His Bank

I was the architect of my husband's legitimate empire, the queen to his throne as the Don of a powerful crime family. Our home was our sanctuary, our bed the one sacred place he always returned to.

But in the middle of the night, I woke to a woman's moan coming from a guest room that was supposed to be empty. The space beside me was cold; my husband, Brendan, was gone.

The woman's voice belonged to Kiya, my protégée-a girl I'd mentored like a sister. Through the door, I heard him call me "a piece of furniture that sleeps soundly." I heard him tell her she possessed something I didn't. Then, a video confirmed the ultimate betrayal: a four-year affair, a pregnancy, and his casual dismissal of me as a business arrangement.

He called me a title, but he called another woman's child his heir. He had broken the one rule that held our world together, turning my life's work into ash.

He thought I was just a fixture in his grand design, a brilliant mind he could control and discard. He was wrong.

There was only one way to escape this agony. I would have every memory of him surgically cut from my mind, erase him from my soul like a cancer, and disappear so completely that not even a ghost of me remained.

Chapter 1

Elara POV:

At 2:14 AM, the profound silence that can only settle over a house this large was pierced by a sound that had no right to be there.

A woman's moan, low and muffled, slithered down the marble corridor from one of the guest rooms.

It wasn't supposed to be occupied.

The space beside me in our king-sized bed was cold. Brendan was gone.

A knot of ice formed in my stomach. Brendan, for all his sins, had rules.

He was the Don of the Wiggins Crime Family-a man who'd built an empire on violence and control, and the same man who'd saved me from a car bomb planted by a rival family years ago.

He had made me his wife, his Queen, the architect of his legitimate businesses.

Our bed was his throne room, our sanctuary. He always, always came back to it. That was the unspoken law of our domain.

Then I heard it again, sharper this time.

A laugh.

A woman's laugh, slicing through the enforced quiet of our estate.

My heart started hammering against my ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage.

I slipped out from under the silk sheets, my bare feet making no sound on the cold floor.

I moved through the darkness of our suite, a ghost in the home I had designed and decorated down to the last gilded mirror.

The sounds grew clearer as I neared the heavy oak door of the guest suite at the end of the hall.

Through the wood, I recognized the voices.

His, deep and dismissive.

And hers... hers was the voice of my protégée.

Kiya.

The girl I had personally sponsored, plucked from obscurity and brought into our inner circle. The girl in whom I'd seen a younger, hungrier version of myself.

"She's a piece of furniture that sleeps soundly," Brendan said, his voice laced with the contempt he usually reserved for his enemies.

The words were a physical blow, knocking the air from my lungs. I was a fixture. An object in his grand design.

"Is she really as brilliant as they say?" Kiya's voice was syrupy sweet, dripping with a faux innocence that made my skin crawl.

"Her mind built half of what I own," Brendan admitted, a note of pride in his voice that twisted the knife already in my gut. "But you, my dear," he murmured, his voice dropping lower, "you have something my wife doesn't."

The world tilted on its axis. The betrayal wasn't just the affair; it was the violation of our home, of my trust in him, and of my trust in her.

He was my Don, the man I had built an empire with, the man who held my entire world in his hands.

And she was the woman I had mentored, the one I'd treated like a younger sister.

It felt like a death sentence. Everything I had built, everything I was, turned to ash in that single moment.

My decision was instant. Absolute.

There was only one way out of this agony.

I would contact Dr. Evans Calderon, the disgraced neuroscientist from my university days. I would have the memory of Brendan Wiggins-of Brendan Ricci, the name he took when he married me-cut out of my mind like a cancer.

I would erase him.

And then, I would disappear.