Chapter 1 - THE WOMAN IN MY BED
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I came home eleven hours early and found another woman sleeping in my marriage bed. My mafia boss husband stood shirtless beside the window, watching me like I was the intruder. But when I saw what his mistress was wearing, I realized his betrayal went far deeper than infidelity.
And before I could leave, our housekeeper revealed something that made the most feared man on the East Coast turn pale.
My name is Audra Whitcomb Kincaid.
For seventeen years, I'd been married to Dorian Kincaid, a forty-one-year-old mafia boss whose name could silence an entire room.
At six-foot-four, with tattooed arms and a scar along his jaw, Dorian commanded an empire stretching from Providence to Boston. Shipping companies, luxury hotels, construction firms, and criminal operations all answered to him.
To everyone else, he was Don Kincaid.
To me, he was the man I'd loved before he became powerful.
I'd held him through injuries, waited through dangerous nights, and stood beside him when enemies threatened everything we owned.
I thought seventeen years meant something.
Until that afternoon.
My business meetings had ended unexpectedly, so I decided to surprise him. I didn't call. I simply drove home.
The mansion was unusually silent.
When I opened our bedroom door, I found champagne glasses beside our bed, a black dress abandoned on the carpet, and Blythe Sorrell, Dorian's communications director, sleeping beneath my ivory sheets.
Dorian stood near the window wearing only dark trousers.
But my eyes were fixed on Blythe's throat.
Around it hung a pale blue sapphire necklace.
My mother's necklace.
The one she'd given me while dying of cancer.
"Some things should belong to you before they belong to anybody else," she'd whispered.
I'd worn that necklace to her funeral. I'd clutched it through my miscarriage.
And now another woman was wearing it in my bed.
Dorian turned.
His expression changed instantly.
"You weren't supposed to be home."
Not an apology. Not an explanation. Just irritation that I'd arrived before he expected me.
Blythe woke, pulling the sheets against her chest.
"Audra, I—"
I walked toward her.
Dorian stepped forward.
"Don't," I whispered.
He stopped.
Without another word, I unclasped my mother's necklace from Blythe's neck.
"I didn't know," she murmured.
"Yes, you did."
I entered my dressing room and pulled down a suitcase.
Dorian followed.
"What are you doing?"
"How long?"
"Audra, let's discuss this later."
"How long, Dorian?"
He sighed.
"Ten months."
My fingers froze.
Ten months of anniversary dinners, family gatherings, goodbye kisses, and carefully rehearsed lies.
"Did you take her on your business trips?"
He looked away.
"Did our staff know?"
"That's not important."
I stared at him.
"You humiliated me in my own home, and you're deciding what's important?"
"You're upset. You're not thinking clearly."
I folded another sweater.
"Because I'm not screaming, you think I'm confused?"
He said nothing.
I packed my passport, medication, documents, my mother's photograph, and the sapphire necklace.
When I closed the suitcase, Dorian frowned.
"You're really leaving over this?"
"Over this?"
"Seventeen years, Audra. You're throwing that away?"
"You gave your mistress my dead mother's necklace."
His jaw tightened.
"It was jewelry."
Those three words hurt worse than discovering the affair.
He'd fastened that necklace around my neck on our tenth anniversary. He knew every memory attached to it.
"You knew what it meant," I whispered. "And you gave it away anyway."
For once, he couldn't answer.
I carried my suitcase past Blythe.
"Audra, please," she began.
I stopped.
"I'm not fighting you for my husband. But you slept in my bed wearing my mother's necklace. Think about that."
Downstairs, Dorian followed me toward the entrance.
"You can't just walk out!"
I turned.
"Watch me."
His face darkened.
"This is your home!"
"Then why did I have to return unexpectedly to discover nothing here was mine?"
I reached for the door.
"Mrs. Kincaid?"
Margaret, our longtime housekeeper, stood in the hallway.
Her hands trembled. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
"I'm so sorry, ma'am."
My stomach tightened.
"Sorry for what?"
She glanced toward Dorian.
His expression changed.
"Margaret. Not another word."
I'd heard him threaten dangerous men before. But I'd never heard that particular fear in his voice.
I slowly approached her.
"Margaret, what else has been happening in my home?"
She wiped her eyes.
Then whispered something that made my blood run cold.
"Mrs. Kincaid... the necklace wasn't the first thing he gave her."
Dorian lunged forward.
"MARGARET!"
But it was too late.
Because suddenly I understood.
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My husband's affair wasn't the worst secret inside that mansion.
It was only the beginning.
