Married to the Monster They Said Was Dead Chapter 06

Married to the Monster They Said Was Dead Chapter 06

I didn’t sleep. I sat on the floor with my back against the cold wall, replaying every conversation, every cold smile, every “be useful for once” through a new and sickening lens.

My father hadn’t traded me to the Vitales to save the family name. He’d handed me to Ottavia as a tool. A Greco daughter, planted in Lorenzo’s bedroom, expected to either watch him die or help it along—keeping the family’s hands clean while Alessio and Ottavia split the spoils.

They’d counted on me being exactly what they’d always called me. Useless. Obedient. Too broken to ask questions.

They had no idea who they’d sent.

“You’re quiet,” Lorenzo said from the bed. He could sit up unassisted now, propped against the headboard, watching me through the dark.

“I’m recalibrating,” I said. “Your word.”

A low sound that might have been a laugh. “Welcome to my world. Everyone you trusted is a knife waiting for your back.”

“I didn’t trust them.” I stood, crossing to his bedside. “That’s the only reason I’m still standing. I learned a long time ago that the Grecos love conditionally—and only when you’re profitable.”

He studied me with an intensity that made my skin prickle. “Then we understand each other better than I thought.”

“Tell me how deep this goes. All of it.”

So he did. For an hour, in a voice growing stronger by the day, Lorenzo laid out the conspiracy he’d been forced to memorize from his prison of flesh. Ottavia controlled the money. Alessio controlled the muscle—the soldiers, the enforcers, the men who would follow whoever held the purse. Together they’d been bleeding the Vitale empire dry, rerouting everything into shell companies and Conti accounts.

But they had a problem. The inheritance locked to Lorenzo. Until his thirty-first birthday, they needed him alive but silent. After it, if they could prove him incompetent, control transferred to Ottavia as guardian—and from her, quietly, to Alessio.

“That’s why Alessio needed a wife from a family with no real power,” Lorenzo said. “Your father’s debts make him obedient. Giulia’s pregnancy locks Alessio’s bloodline into the Greco name. And you—” his eyes found mine in the dark, “—you were supposed to be the loose end they sent to die with me.”

“Instead they sent the one person who could read your scans.”

“Instead they sent a viper they mistook for a lamb.” He almost smiled. “Their first mistake. Not their last.”

A noise outside—the soft tread of a guard on the gravel below. We both went still.

“There’s something else you should know,” he said quietly.
“Ottavia keeps a record. Everything she’s done, everyone she’s bought, every wire she’s moved—she’s not stupid enough to trust Alessio completely. She’s built an insurance file in case he turns on her. If we find it, we don’t just free me. We bury both of them.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. But I know she’d keep it somewhere only she controls. Her private study. The one she keeps locked. The one even the staff aren’t allowed to clean.”

I memorized it. Filed it away with everything else I was learning in order to survive.

“Get some rest,” Lorenzo said. “Tomorrow we double the sessions.”

I helped him ease back against the pillows, adjusting the spoofed IV. As I turned to go, his hand caught my wrist—weak, but warm now, the cold finally leaving him.

“Adriana.” His voice dropped low. “When this is over—when I have my empire back and they’re all in the ground or in cells—I’m going to ask you a question. And I’d like an honest answer.”

My pulse jumped. “What question?”

“Why a woman this smart let a family this small make her feel this small.” His thumb brushed once across the inside of my wrist, then released me. “Goodnight, wife.”

I returned to my cot, but I didn’t lie down. I sat in the dark, listening to the steady rhythm of his breathing—a sound that, three weeks ago, had been a fraud, and was now the most honest thing in the house.

Don’t get attached, Ottavia had warned.

Too late.

And somewhere below us, in a locked study, sat a file that could end us all—or save us. I was going to find it.

Whatever it took.