by SR Jones
THE SCANDAL
MAFIA VOWS
SR Jones
Copyright ©2020 The Scandal by SR Jones
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced or used without the written permission of the publisher.
All events depicted are fictional, and any resemblance to places and persons is coincidental.
Thanks go to my amazing editor, Silla Webb, and proofreader, Jessica Fraser.
Big, big thanks to Silla for organizing me!
Also thanks to the Addicted to Alphas girls! And big thanks in particular to:
Jessica Fraser, Kathi Soniat, Patricia-I Severson, Stephanie Ditmore, and Ana Rita Clemente. You girls are the best! I know I will have forgotten someone, so huge apologies to anyone I missed out.
Thanks to Isabella Starling for the sprints!! You helped me get this done!
Thanks to Obeithion Design for the absolutely gorgeous cover!
This book is for Dora, AKA the Floof – fluffiest dog that ever did live.
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
Stamatis
I can feel my wife’s hatred for me. It’s a heavy thing, which coats this house in a dark fog of bitterness. I swear it lives and breathes, or at least it feels like it at this time of night, in the so-called witching hours when everything seems at its bleakest.
I imagine it seeping through the walls from the marital room where she now sleeps, to the spare room I’ve made my own. If it could, that hate of hers would wrap itself around my throat and throttle the life out of me.
Do I hate her in return? No. I can’t, despite the way she treats me every day. Despite the bile she throws my way.
I can’t hate her because all of this is my fault, and I know it.
I was the one who cheated with my brother’s wife.
I was the one who let down our children.
I was the one who fathered a child with my sister-in-law and destroyed our family.
Me.
I did all those things.
And Helena hates me for it. She spends her time thinking of ways to make my life hell, and I let her. I take my punishment because, frankly, I deserve it. I’ve ruined her life, so now I let her ruin mine.
Until tonight.
Until her.
Rhea.
I say her name out loud, liking the way it sounds in the room.
“Rhea.”
The mother of a young woman we helped save from a cult, she’s someone I expected to seriously dislike.
Her daughter, Star, is now happily in love with one of my foot soldiers, Markos.
It’s strange to see all those big, hard men so happy. Damen is with my daughter, Maya. Alesso is with her friend, Stella, and Markos met his match in Star.
The men who work for me are happy, and I'm living in hell, taking my punishment like the good Orthodox Christian I am. I would have happily let Lena punish me forever because I had nothing better to do.
Now, though? Now I have met Rhea, and I want her. More than I’ve wanted anything for years. More than I can remember wanting another woman in my whole life. I’ve only spoken with her for mere moments, and I’m unable to stop thinking about her.
It’s not only her beauty, though; she is an unusually beautiful woman, but it’s her aura. There’s an otherworldly air to Rhea, as if she’s not really of this earth. Like some angel who has decided to come and play amongst the mortals for a while, but still has her head in the clouds. I want to shake her awake, make her fully aware of this realm. I want to see if she’s more present when she’s being fucked to within an inch of her life.
I bet she’s naïve in many ways, innocent even. Yeah, she’s clearly had sex, the woman has kids for God’s sake, but I doubt she’s had my kind of sex. She certainly won’t while living in that freaky cult, and married to that useless piece of shit she calls a husband.
Unable to sleep, I sigh and put my lamp on, taking out a thick, leather-bound Hermes organizer from my bedside drawer. I have my iPhone, but I prefer to organize my life the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper. I also like luxury; why have plain old chain store products when you can afford Hermes?
One of the many trappings of my wealth. Sadly, I’ve paid for my power and wealth with blood, both my own and that of my child.
My stomach does the usual swan dive when I think of Costas. My son. I let him be murdered by that Russian bastard, Andrius. I had little choice. Costas threatened everything. He threatened his brother, Mikhalis, he’d already harmed Maya and wanted her dead, and he’d degraded and tortured Marina, my sister-in-law, to a degree that could not be forgiven. Furthermore, he threatened all of this—my home, my empire, everything I have built. He was so full of hate that nothing would save him, but ultimately that was my fault. I failed him as a child, and he became a weak and wicked man, a perfect combination of depravity and pathetic neediness.
I’m not a stupid man. I know one of the reasons he did so much, pushed so far, was to test my love for him, to see if he could finally push me away enough for me to disown him, abandon him. Well, he succeeded, and sadly for him, he’d made so many enemies in the process that he lost his life.
At first, I purely blamed myself, but over time, I’ve come to realize his mother, Helena, my wife, is also to blame. From the time he was a baby, she mollycoddled Costas. Whereas Mikhalis had to work hard and get good grades. Costas had to do nothing more than flash his cheeky smile, and she’d coo over him.
Not wanting to think about the fucking mess that is my life, I take the piece of paper by my bedside lamp and read Rhea’s small handwritten note with her name and number on there. Then I methodically copy it into the contacts section of my organizer.
Putting the pen, notebook, and piece of paper in the drawer, and sliding it shut, I close my eyes and pray for sleep.
**
Sinners should never pray and expect their prayers to be answered, but last night mine were. I actually slept, and now I feel like a new man. After grabbing a quick shower and dressing in a Hugo Boss suit, I head downstairs. I have a wardrobe full of tailor-made suits, but this one I bought off the rack because I liked the color, and it suits my build.
When I walk into the kitchen, my heart sinks. Lena is already sitting at the table. She looks up at me and smiles, and I swear it’s so cold her teeth must be made of ice not bone. Finding any warmth remaining in this woman before me would be like the fabled expeditions of old to find the edge of the world, nigh on impossible. The blood in her veins has turned to a hate-filled slurry, and it moves slowly as she becomes nothing more than a vessel for bitterness and her dreams of revenge.
“Morning, my love,” she says with sarcasm. “I understand you were at your child’s house yesterday?”
I sigh and ignore her as I head to the coffee machine.
“Not my child’s house, no, because of the whore of a daughter you had with that bitch you knocked up.”
We do this every day, and each day, I ignore her. It’s a game, a well-worn dance between us.
Today, though, I turn to her, smile warmly, and say. “Shut your fucking mouth, Lena.”
She startles, bu
t then her eyes gleam. They go from dead to full of life, and I know suddenly why I ignored her for so long. This is what she wants. This is what she has always wanted. A response. An argument. A reason.
One reason to do it, to act out what she’s been dreaming of every damn day and night for months now. My death at her hands.
It might sound melodramatic, but I know my wife wants me dead, and she wants to be the one to do it. Problem for her is she’s no cold-blooded killer, but if she was angry enough at me? If we let things get nasty and heated enough … could she do it then?
I often thought I might wake to a knife in my chest, or maybe find myself poisoned when I accepted a drink from her, but now I know with chilling clarity that she wouldn’t do that …couldn’t do that. She needed this. Fire. Impetus. Lena needed fuel to be poured onto her cold hatred to make it alive enough that she could use it against me in the ultimate act of violence.
The sick thing is any other morning I’d have probably let her gut me like a fish. Today, though, all bets are off because I’ve suddenly found something I want more than I want oblivion.
Something, or rather someone, with honey eyes, and the face of an old-school movie star. A woman who is a mystery wrapped in a desperately sad outer shell, and who seems so removed from the life around her I wonder if she experiences normal emotions? I want to find out. I want to crack Rhea wide open and see what’s inside. Is she messy like me? Or is she a serene ice queen? For some unknown reason, I need to understand her.
Sadly for Lena, this means today is not a good day for me to die. It also means I need to bring this down, or I’ll end up on the wrong end of a knife, or having to kill Helena, which would frankly be a ball ache I don’t need.
“Sorry,” I say with as much sincerity as I can muster.
“It’s fine,” she replies, her eyes sparkling and her mouth twitching. “It must be hard to keep a check on your temper when I remind you daily of how you’ve failed every single person in your life you are supposed to care about or protect. It can’t be easy to have the truth pushed in front of you regularly, can it? I mean … what kind of man lets his son be murdered by a Russian piece of shit?”
She pushes her chair back, takes her plate to the sink and throws it in, water splashing all over the work surface. “Stamatis … the legendary Stamatis, cartel boss, mob leader. Don’t make me laugh. You couldn’t even stop that Russian fucker murdering your own son; that’s how little influence you have these days. That’s how much fear you instill.”
I know I should shut the bitch up, I should de-escalate because God knows I don’t need this, but her words today are too much.
“No, I didn’t stop Andrius from getting rid of Costas,” I say. “I gave him the fucking green light.”
Her slap is swift and hard, and my cheek stings from it. I don’t give in to the urge to rub the skin there; instead, I glare at Lena as she glowers at me.
“You let your own son be killed. What kind of father does that?”
“The kind who is protecting his other son, his daughter, and his empire. Costas threatened to bring it all down, but you couldn’t see it … can’t see it because you always were fucking gone over that boy. He could have murdered Mikhalis right in front of you, and you’d have found an excuse for his behavior. Doesn’t your other child deserve your love?”
“Mikhalis left,” she says, her voice softer suddenly. “He left and went to America, and before that he left in every other way. You left too. You screwed around, and even after you stopped you didn’t care about me. Not really. You weren’t really here, Stamatis. Costas was here. Costas was mine, and you took him away from me.”
She hits me again, this time with her fist, and the punch lands on my cheek. Fuck me, that’s going to bruise. I clench my fists and grit my teeth. I won’t give in to the overwhelming urge to punch her right back.
“Go on,” she sneers, “I can see you want to do it. Go on; hit me, you piece of shit.”
On the word shit, she spits at me and then storms out of the room, pausing at the table to pick up her coffee cup and throw it at my head. It misses, so she screams and kicks the door on her way out.
Fucking hell, she’s unraveling more every day. I need to get out of here. If I don’t leave, I really am at risk of her doing something completely unhinged, or worse—losing it myself and hurting her.
I’ve never hated Helena. Hatred implies feeling something deep and abiding, like the flip side of love. For Helena, I felt only respect for the mother of my children, and then when everything went so wrong, I felt sorrow and guilt when I looked at her. Now, though? Now I know without a shadow of a doubt she’s as much to blame as me. All these months I’ve taken the burden of all that happened on my shoulders and let it all be apportioned to me. Fuck, I’ve apportioned all the blame to myself, haven’t I? Never mind her doing it. Now, though, now I know she’s responsible too. The love she had for Costas eclipsed any love she held for me, or her other child. It made her turn a blind eye to everything he did, and why? Not because of anything other than the fact that Costas gave her attention. He filled the big hole she had in her with his affection, and she sucked it up like a sponge and could never get enough.
Mikhalis committed the cardinal sin of wanting his own life. As far as Helena was concerned, he wasn’t worth half of Costas, despite Mikhalis being ten times the man Costas ever was. As for me? I did screw around at first, yes, but I stopped. I made it up to her over and over again. I put her first, even though I didn’t love her, and I did so out of a sense of duty. I gave her prestige, power, money, all by association. She lived like a fucking queen because of the risks I took, and she wasn’t remotely grateful. In fact, she resented me for it. The more money and power I accumulated, the closer she and Costas became, as if they somehow hated me for making them rich and untouchable.
If Costas was a spoiled, weak, man-baby with zero moral compass, a fair portion of the blame lies on Lena’s shoulders.
I’ve never hated my wife, but today I do.
Today she represents a woman who stands in the way of all I want. A woman who has spent months tormenting me because she thinks she’s somehow superior despite her many wrong doings.
For the first time in many years, I find myself feeling something other than mere indifference for my wife. Today I feel … no, not hatred. It’s more visceral—it is disgust. She disgusts me, and I want her gone from my life, from this house. Why should I leave when I built all this? I can afford to buy her a very comfortable home, and I will see she’s financially looked after, but that’s where any commitment to her ends.
I take my cell out of my pocket and place a call to my lawyer.
Lena wanted me to wake up from the daze I’d been in; well, she’s finally got what she wanted, but she won’t enjoy the consequences.
CHAPTER TWO
Rhea
I stare at myself in the mirror, shocked beyond belief. I look so different.
“Wow, you look amazing,” Maya says to me.
The girl is strange. She’s lovely, but she’s a real contradiction. In many ways she’s very sinful, with her tight clothes, all her make-up, and her frivolity, but in others, she’s kind and caring.
I shouldn’t use the word sinful, I tell myself. I’m trying hard not to always think in the ways of our community, the way I was trained, but it’s hard to get rid of years of conditioning. It’s not fair of me to think of the girl as a sinner. Today, Maya and Star have taken me for a haircut and color, a manicure, and a pedicure. The salon also gave me a free makeover, encouraged by the two giggling girls who keep telling me how beautiful I am, and that I need to show it more.
Most of the time I don’t feel beautiful. I’m getting older, and I see the passage of time on my face and my body too. Still, I must admit, these girls in the salon have done wonders.
I blink at the reflection in front of me and stare some more. My hair is now a cloud around my shoulders instead of a lanky mess. It’s got lowlights of red and hi
ghlights of gold in there, and it shines. My fingernails are a pale pink, but my toenails are a shocking pink, which both Maya and Star begged me to try. It’s my face that’s freaking me out, though. I look … wanton. My eyes are lined, and my lips are glossy, and it makes me appear so different.
They’ve put something on my cheekbones to make them shimmer, and I keep turning my head, loving how the skin looks when it catches the light. This is why we were taught vanity is sinful. It’s strangely addicting watching myself as I turn my head one way and another and see the different ways the make-up highlights my face.
“You’re such a bombshell, Mother,” Star says with a warm smile.
Am I? I’ve honestly never considered how I look most days. Not really. We were too busy at the commune doing the work of keeping things going there. I know I’m decent enough because over the years there were times I had to ward off the advances of some of the men in our commune, but I’ve never really stopped to consider if I’m beautiful. Yet, everyone tells me I am.
Stamatis seemed to think I was. The face in the mirror changes as a secret smile tugs her mouth to one side, so I compose myself and grow serious once more, not wanting the girls to see a glimpse of my thoughts.
“You need to forget the past now, Mother. You’re free.” Star squeezes my hand, a rare act of physical affection from her.
I know she’s right. It took me a long time to come to terms with, but now I understand it was wrong. How we lived, what we did. Some days I can’t bear to look at Star because the guilt is so strong. How could I have let that happen to my daughter? How could she forgive me?
It would be easier, I think, if Star hated me and wanted me dead, but instead she is offering me her home as a safe haven to me and Gus. Yes, that might be purely for Gus, but she’s here today, taking me shopping and getting manicures with me. I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve anything but contempt and hatred from her.
Now her lovely, if somewhat naughty, friend Maya is also being kind to me.
At least Markos seems to dislike me. He’s not rude enough to say it, but I see it in his gaze. He doesn’t approve of me or like me very much, but he doesn’t know that I like that. I welcome his disdain because I deserve it. I deserve so much worse.