Chapter 1

The wedding hymn was solemn and grave, like a requiem composed for the death of the past.

My hand rested on Victor’s arm as I walked down the red carpet step by step beside him, the Don of this city’s underground empire, my aging husband in name.

His gray eyes held a calm so deep it seemed bottomless, as if he was not marrying a woman forty years younger than him, but simply closing an ordinary business deal.

Among the guests, I spotted him at once.

My ex-husband, Ethan.

And beside him stood Chloe, my former best friend, the woman I had once treated like a little sister.

Three years ago, it had been the two of them who stood with me on the family’s private cliff. They spoke to me of love and friendship while joining hands to push me over the edge.

Today, Ethan wore a perfectly tailored black suit, but his handsome face was ashen.

Chloe clung tightly to his arm. The color had drained from her pretty face, and her body trembled slightly.

The way they looked at me, it was as if they were staring at a ghost that had crawled out of hell.

No. Something far more terrifying than a ghost.

Because I wore a face they knew too well, a face carved into their bloodline, Ethan’s late mother, the former Donna, Lila.

The priest’s blessing was long and boring.

I did not listen. I simply smiled as I watched the man and woman below the altar.

I watched their expressions shift from shock, to fear, and finally to humiliation.

“Do you take Mr. Victor to be your husband, in sickness and in...”

“I do.”

I cut the priest off impatiently, my voice clear and bright.

Victor glanced at me. The corner of his mouth curved into an unreadable smile, and his aged hand patted the back of mine lightly.

The rings were exchanged. The kiss was given.

Once every step of the ceremony was complete, I officially became the new Donna of the Kolya family.

Ethan’s stepmother.

At the wedding reception, I held a glass of wine and accepted the guests’ congratulations with Victor at my side.

At last, I walked over to them.

Ethan’s lips were pressed into a hard line, his jaw tense as stone.

Chloe did not even dare to look up at me. She looked like she wanted to dig a hole in the floor and disappear inside it.

“What’s wrong?” I said with a soft laugh. My voice was not loud, but it reached their ears clearly. “You see an elder and don’t even know how to greet her?”

Ethan’s body went rigid.

Chloe’s nails dug so hard into Ethan’s arm they were almost piercing his flesh.

The guests around us sensed the strange tension and began casting curious looks our way.

Victor, my newly wedded husband, merely stood beside me and watched in silence. He had no intention of stepping in.

If anything, he seemed perfectly happy to enjoy the show.

“Ethan,” I said, swirling the red wine in my glass.

The crimson liquid looked so much like the blood that had poured from my body when I fell from that cliff.

“Your father married you a new mother. Aren’t you going to congratulate him?”

Ethan finally lifted his head. Those blue eyes I had once drowned in were now filled with nothing but humiliation and overwhelming hatred.

He forced the word out through clenched teeth, one syllable at a time.

“Mother.”

The word twisted his handsome face.

I smiled in satisfaction, then turned my gaze to Chloe beside him.

“And you?” I asked. “My… dear daughter-in-law.”

Chloe’s face was white as paper. Her lips trembled, but she could not make a sound.

“What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue?”

My smile was gentle, but my tone was laced with poison. “Or do you think that just because you slept with my son, you’re qualified to skip calling me Mom?”

The words exploded through the crowd like a bomb.

Everyone turned to Chloe with the eager eyes of people waiting for a scandal to unfold.

In an old-school Mafia family like the Kolyas, where tradition and hierarchy meant everything, openly disrespecting the heir’s stepmother was not some small mistake.

It was a scandal.

Chloe’s face instantly flushed a dark, ugly red.

“I…”

“Call me Mom.”

My smile vanished. I spoke each word slowly, leaving no room for refusal.

Ethan clenched his fists so hard the veins stood out across the backs of his hands.

But he did not dare fight back.

Because the man standing beside me was Victor, the one and only Don of this family.

In the end, under the eyes of the entire room, Chloe bent forward in humiliation and whispered in a voice as thin as a mosquito’s buzz,

“…Mom.”

I smiled.

A deep, satisfying smile.

The flames of hell that had burned me for three long years had finally reached them.

I leaned close to her ear and spoke softly, in a voice only the three of us could hear.

“Good girl.”

“Don’t worry. This is only the beginning.”