After the Silent Bride Walked Away, the Mafia Twins Went Mad

The doctor told me my voice might return in seven days.

He was not one of Elias’s doctors.

He was the first doctor I had secretly visited in three years.

After reading my old records, Dr. Marlowe looked at me and said, “Your vocal cords were damaged, but they were not beyond repair. Your recovery should have started long ago.”

My hand froze around the pen.

For three years, Elias’s doctors had told me I would never speak again.

Now this doctor was telling me someone had stopped me from healing.

“If treatment continues,” he said, “you may be able to speak within a week.”

A week.

In one week, I might have my voice back.

In one week, I was supposed to marry Elias Falcone.

The thought should have made me happy. Once, it would have. Elias was the man who had pulled me out of the wreckage after the crash that killed my father and left my mother bound to a hospital bed. He had paid for my surgeries, learned sign language for me, and brought me into the Falcone estate when the Moretti family collapsed.

Everyone said he loved me.

I believed them because I wanted to.

When I left the clinic, rain had begun to fall. The driver was waiting outside, but I told him to take me to the Falcone chapel instead of the estate.

The wedding planner had messaged me that morning about a rehearsal. Elias said he was busy with family business, but I thought I could at least look at the chapel alone.

I wanted to stand there once before the ceremony.

I wanted to imagine walking toward him.

That was my first mistake.

Adriana Hale was Elias’s stepsister, though no one in the Falcone estate treated her like an ordinary sister.

She was the family’s precious songbird, the girl Elias protected in public and indulged in private. She had a soft voice, a harmless smile, and the kind of fragile beauty that made men lower their guard before they realized she had already taken what she wanted.

For three years, I had written songs for her.

At first, I did it willingly. Elias said Adriana needed a chance, and I believed that giving her my music was another way of repaying him for saving my mother and me. Since I could no longer sing, I told myself it was enough that my songs still lived somewhere.

But I never gave her everything.

I never gave her Nocturne.

And I never gave her the song I had written as my private wedding vow.

That was why I froze when I heard her voice inside the chapel.

She was singing my vow.

The chapel doors were half open. Music drifted out, soft and haunting. Adriana stood at the altar in a white satin rehearsal dress, singing words I knew better than my own heartbeat.

Elias sat in the first row, watching her.

His expression was gentle in a way that made my chest ache.

Beside him, Julian Falcone leaned against the pew with his arms crossed. Elias’s twin brother had the same face, but his eyes were darker, his smile slower, his presence more dangerous. Julian was the underboss, the man Elias sent when negotiation failed.

Adriana finished the last note and turned to Elias.

“Was it good?” she asked.

Elias stood and walked toward her. “Perfect.”

She smiled. “Then I’ll sing it at the ceremony?”

“At the ceremony,” Elias said. “And at your debut as Nocturne.”

My fingers went cold.

Nocturne.

That name was mine.

Before the crash, I had composed under that name in London’s underground music scene. Nocturne was anonymous, but the songs had gone everywhere — clubs, private auctions, masked galas, even Mafia-owned lounges that paid too much money for music no one could trace.

After I lost my voice, Elias persuaded me to let Adriana sing some of my songs. He said it was temporary. He said Adriana needed a chance. He said I could still create, even if I could no longer perform.

I agreed because I loved him.

But I had never agreed to give Adriana my name.

Adriana looked down at the wedding program in her hand. “Will the old families accept it? Me standing beside you?”

Elias took the program from her and smoothed the paper. “They’ll accept what I tell them to accept.”

The planner hurried forward with a box of printed cards. One slipped from the top and landed near the doorway.

I bent down and picked it up.

At the center, in black engraved letters, was the title:

Falcone-Moretti Alliance Ceremony

Below it were two names.

Elias Falcone

Adriana Hale

My own name appeared at the bottom in smaller print.

Lydia Moretti, legal representative of the Moretti estate.

Not bride.

Representative.

A legal signature.

A key.

My throat tightened until the scar there burned.

Inside the chapel, an older man spoke. I recognized him as Father Bellini, one of the priests trusted by the Falcone family.

“And Miss Moretti?” he asked carefully.

Elias’s voice turned flat. “Lydia signs the transfer papers before the vows. Once Moretti territory legally passes under Falcone protection, she no longer matters.”

Adriana’s voice softened. “She’ll be hurt.”

“She’ll live,” Elias said. “She always does.”

That was when my phone vibrated.

A message from an unknown number appeared on the screen.

Do not go to the clinic. Your mother has been moved. New guards. Falcone orders.

For a moment, the chapel blurred.

My mother.

The only family I had left.

Elias had moved her without telling me.

I looked at the program in my hand, then at Adriana standing at my altar, holding my song, wearing white.

The doctor had said my voice might return in seven days.

Elias had seven days left to enjoy my silence.

I folded the program, slipped it into my coat, and walked away before anyone saw me.