"Seven bullets were still inside my body when Dominic Rossi married me, and I didn’t even know it was happening

The adrenaline from the dinner kept sleep at bay for days.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the silver knife puncturing bone, the blood blooming across the table, and the chilling calm in Dominic’s eyes. He was a predator, magnificent and lethal. Yet, in the quiet moments between the chaos, another side of him emerged that confused me even more.

He had doctors flown in from Switzerland to check the nerve damage in my shoulder. He personally brought me books from his vast, two-story private library, having remembered offhandedly that I mentioned enjoying historical biographies during one of my feverish ramblings in the ICU. When my incision sites flared with phantom nerve pain at three in the morning, it was Dominic who appeared at my door with ice packs, sitting silently in the armchair by the fire until I finally fell asleep.

He never touched me inappropriately. He never demanded a husband's rights. He treated me like a priceless, fragile relic that he was terrified of breaking.

And that terrified me most of all. Because a man like Dominic Rossi didn't show tenderness without a reason.

*The file.*

Enzo’s words from the hospital haunted every waking hour: *“If she survives and discovers why you already had a file on her, she’ll never forgive you.”*

Why had Dominic Rossi known who I was before the shooting? Why did he have a file on an ordinary twenty-six-year-old waitress from Cleveland who worked double shifts to pay for her mother’s heart pills?

By the fourth week, my mobility had drastically improved. The doctor cleared me for light walking around the estate, though I was strictly forbidden from going beyond the inner courtyards without an armed escort.

It was nearly midnight when I slipped out of my bedroom.

The manor was silent, illuminated only by low amber sconces mounted along the limestone walls. The guards were stationed at the exterior perimeters and entryways, leaving the private residential wings relatively quiet.

I was walking toward the kitchen to fetch a glass of water when I heard low, urgent voices drifting from the half-open door of Dominic’s private study at the end of the east corridor.

I froze, pressing my back against the cold stone wall, holding my breath.

“—cannot keep stalling, Dominic,” Enzo’s voice was sharp, laced with an anxiety I had never heard in the veteran soldier before. “The Commission is demanding to know why you went to war for a nobody. Victor Costa has been digging. He sent men to Ohio yesterday.”

My heart stopped. *Ohio.* Where Ellen and I had lived our entire lives.

“Costa can dig all he wants,” Dominic replied, his tone icy and resolute. “The records from the foster system and the Cleveland municipal archives were scrubbed three years ago. There’s nothing there for him to find.”

“You scrubbed them, yes, but you didn't scrub Marcus Brooks’s federal file!” Enzo snapped.

*Marcus Brooks.*

The name hit my chest like an eighth bullet.

Marcus Brooks was my father. The man who had supposedly died in a hit-and-run accident when I was four years old. The man whose absence had condemned my mother to poverty, working three cleaning jobs until her heart gave out.

“Enzo,” Dominic’s voice dropped, vibrating with lethal menace. “Do not say that name in this house.”

“Why? Because your saintly wife might hear it?” Enzo retorted, refusing to back down. “Dominic, you’re playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded cylinder! You married Marcus Brooks’s daughter! If Clara ever finds out what your father did to Marcus—if she finds out that the Rossi family is the reason her father is in an unmarked grave and her mother was left to starve—she will despise you until the day she dies!”

The floor seemed to tilt beneath my bare feet.

*What your father did to Marcus.*

*An unmarked grave.*

My hands flew to my mouth, stifling a ragged gasp. Tears burned behind my eyelids as the pieces of my shattered life began to collide with horrifying clarity. My father hadn't died in a random traffic accident.

“She will never find out,” Dominic whispered.

“You can’t control the universe!” Enzo argued. “You’ve been tracking this girl for six years. You paid her college tuition anonymously. You kept the landlords from evicting her mother. You orchestrated her hiring at the Aster Crown just so you could have eyes on her! You think that’s penance? You think marrying her absolves the blood on your family's hands?”

*He orchestrated my hiring.*

The catering job. The four-hundred-dollar shift I desperately took to pay for Ellen’s pills. It hadn't been a lucky break. It hadn't been an accident.

Dominic had put me there.

“I didn't marry her for penance, Enzo,” Dominic said. The fury in his voice had vanished, replaced by an agony so raw and desolate that it seemed to bleed through the crack in the door. “I married her because from the moment I first saw her photograph six years ago, I knew she was the only good thing connected to my wretched name. When she threw herself in front of my mother, she signed her own death warrant. Costa would have torn her apart just to hurt me. This was the only way to save her.”

“And what happens when she finds the file in your safe, Boss? What happens when she learns that Antonio Rossi ordered Marcus Brooks executed, and a sixteen-year-old Dominic Rossi was in the back of the car?”

A deafening silence fell over the study.

Inside my chest, something fundamental fractured. The gratitude I had begun to feel, the strange warmth that had bloomed when he held my hand at the dining table, the trust that had slowly started to take root—it all disintegrated into ashes.

The Rossi family had murdered my father.

Dominic had watched him die.

And for six years, Dominic had been watching me like a ghost, pulling the strings of my miserable life, treating my survival like a personal debt of honor.

I took a step backward, my bare foot scraping against the hardwood floor.

The sound was minuscule, but to men who lived and died by their reflexes, it was an explosion.

“Who’s there?” Enzo barked.

Panic seized my limbs. Ignoring the sharp, pulling pain in my scarred hip, I turned and ran down the darkened hallway, slipping silently back into my room just as the heavy study door flew open behind me.

I locked my bedroom door, leaned against the wood, and sank to the floor, wrapping my arms around my knees as silent, violent sobs tore through my chest.

I was married to the son of the man who destroyed my family.