Empire of Ashes — A Dark Mafia Arranged-Marriage Romance

The letter began the way only Nico could have begun it, and I heard his voice in it so clearly that I had to stop after the first line and press the heel of my hand to my mouth.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I have planned my way through a hundred rooms full of people who wanted me dead. I did not have the first idea what to do with a room full of people who only wanted me to dance.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Someone stood up, and the room went to ice, and my hand — my traitor hand, trained by a war I had just finished promising to stop fighting — moved an inch toward a hip where no weapon was. I'd come to my own wedding unarmed for the first time in my adult life, and my body had not yet received the news.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I have stood in rooms that were built to kill me and felt my pulse stay exactly where I left it. I have read a man his own murder off a ledger in a steady voice. I once talked a Don off a fire with my husband three feet from the man's soldiers and never let my hand shake.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I had the war built again by noon. I am, if nothing else, consistent.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I carried Greco's gift for a day and a half before I understood that the carrying was the whole trap.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I built the war in a single night, the old way, before I caught myself.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

We did get new windows.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I was already moving when the consigliere turned the gun on my husband, and I want to tell you I crossed the table in time — that I was the one who saved him — because it would make a cleaner story, and God knows I'd earned a clean story by then.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

The Commission met for the second time in two weeks, which had not happened in thirty years, and everyone in the room knew it, the way you know weather. The city was changing fast enough now that even the families who ran it couldn't keep up, and the thing they were all afraid of and couldn't name was that the speed was coming from a girl.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I took the half-second the consigliere gave me, and I used it the way my father taught me to use the worst seconds: stop solving the problem they handed you, and start solving the one they didn't think you'd see.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I found the door at hour six, which is fast even for me — and I found it the way I find all of them: by refusing the two I was offered until a third was forced to exist.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

There were five of them in my kitchen, and one of me that mattered — and the one that mattered was the only weapon in the room the guns couldn't out-argue. The thing in my head.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I went to Falcone's that night the way I'd gone to Greco's a week before — alone, wired, my husband three streets out, a plan held together by a single idea I wasn't sure would carry weight.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

We buried Nico three days after the war ended, in the rain, the way this city buries everyone who matters — as if the weather keeps a list.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Greco pointed the gun at me, and the car came up the drive, and for one held second the most dangerous man in the city and I sat inside the oldest math there is — the math of a trigger, which has only two outcomes and no third door. The one kind of arithmetic my father could never solve, and neither can I.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Greco took me to a house I didn't know the city had — and I know this city; I've audited half of it; I'd never once heard of this one. Which told me what it was: the kind of place a man keeps for the night his whole life ends. A bolt-hole, bought under a name even his own people don't know.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

The gun came up at me off the wall, and I did the thing I'd promised Lena I'd do, which was nothing — because moving was how you died, and staying was how she'd planned it. I had just enough time to think that I'd kept my promise and it was going to kill me, and that I was glad, in a strange flat way, that the last thing I'd ever do was trust my wife.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

"Where would you like me to begin?" I asked.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

She came home from the gutter at two in the morning, smelling of someone else's expensive house and her own sickness, and I had heard all of it on the wire — every word — and I did not know how to stand in our kitchen with the thing I'd learned.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I have done a lot of hard things in this city. I buried a father I hated and a mother I couldn't save. I've ordered men hurt. I've sat at tables where my own death was the next item on the agenda.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

We had until nightfall and a sister we suddenly weren't sure of, and I want to say we handled it with grace. But this is an honest account, so: we handled it the way frightened people handle the people they love. Badly. Fast. With apologies owed in every direction before we'd even finished the sentences that earned them.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

The worst three hours of my life were the ones I spent not knowing whether I'd just handed Vittorio Greco the weapon that would kill us all.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I sat across from the man who killed my father, and I did the hardest arithmetic of my life: deciding whether to have him killed.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

"It's Nico," I said.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I didn't sleep after Greco's dinner. Neither did Dario.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Greco's house made the Marchetti glass house look like a confession.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I'd spent eight months building a wall around one name, and my wife took it apart with a bank statement in four days.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I agreed to save the empire over breakfast, the way other couples agree to repaint a room.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I read my father's second book at the kitchen table at three in the morning, alone — because some things you have to learn the way he learned them. By yourself. In the dark. With the city asleep and no one left to perform for.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

My father taught me that everything a man loves is a door someone will eventually walk through to gut him. I spent thirty-three years deciding he was wrong, one careful brick at a time. My wife unbuilt it in a cannery in under a minute.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

My father said the Marchettis built everything out of heat and force, and then they owned you. He meant it as a warning. He never lived to learn that a warning, in this city, is just a recipe — and that his honest daughter had been paying attention.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

My father used to say that there are only ever two moves on the board — you can give them what they want, or you can become something they want more — and that the whole art of staying alive in this city was knowing which game you were in before you opened your mouth. I had eleven days, two families who wanted a dead man's ledger, and a husband I'd decided to keep alive, and so I did the thing my father had trained me for since before I understood I was being trained.

Empire of Ashes is a se...

There is a particular exhaustion to living in a house where one man wants to kill you for what you know and another is falling in love with you for what he doesn't, and I wore it, that week, like a second dress under the first.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Tomas Vela died with a name on his lips, and the name was not the one I had built three months of hatred around, and I knelt on the floor of my father's old harbor office holding a dead man's hand and felt the entire architecture of my revenge come down around me like a building with its keystone pulled.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

The Marchettis kept a box at the opera, and on my eleventh night as a married woman I learned what the box was really for, which was not music.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

A marriage, I learned in my first week, is mostly a matter of breakfasts. You can learn more about a man across a breakfast table than across a bed, because at breakfast no one is performing; they are only tired, and hungry, and briefly, accidentally, themselves.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

They dressed me like a queen for a wedding that was really a transfer of property, and I let them, because a woman learns early that the costume you are put in tells you exactly what role you are expected to play — and the moment you understand the role, you can decide how to ruin it.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

They came to collect on the morning we buried my father, which tells you everything you need to know about the Marchetti family and the kind of mercy they keep.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

They came to collect on the morning she buried her father. She married the heir to make them pay. Lena Russo knows exactly who ruined her family: the Marchettis. So when the debt comes due and Dario Marchetti — the cold, dangerous heir to the crime dynasty — offers marriage to settle it, she says yes, and walks into the lion's house carrying the one secret that could burn it to the ground.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.