The Vendetta Clause

Six years of marriage. One file that says it was never a marriage at all. Elena Okafor-Marchetti found the proof on a Tuesday. Her husband's signature on a document that put her father in prison. Her wedding dress sketch in the same folder, dated three weeks before the proposal. Dominic Marchetti didn't marry her. He bought her — and signed her father as the down payment. Elena doesn't leave. Not yet. She stays, plays the perfect wife for eleven more months, and quietly moves half of Marchetti Holdings into a shell company built under her mother's maiden name. When Dominic finds out, he doesn't throw her out. He sits down at the kitchen table and tells her every lie he's ever told. Then he asks her to tell him hers. A betrayal romance about a wife who stops being collateral and a husband who learns, late and loudly, how to be worth keeping.