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The Mafia Husband Fell for a Bar Hostess

Novelix Completed

打脸、追悔莫及、追妻火葬场、背叛、情妇、恶魔丈夫、大女主、女性力量/大女主、剧情/戏剧、现代/都市、黑手党/黑帮

Chapters (3)

第1章

The officer told me my husband had been brought into the station during a vice raid in Chicago. For a moment, I could not process it. By the time I arrived at the downtown precinct and saw the tear-streaked woman Ethan was holding in his arms, something inside me went quiet. Suddenly, none of it felt worth it anymore. I walked up to him. Ethan instinctively stepped in front of the woman, as if to shield her, and opened his mouth to explain. I slapped him across the face. "Ethan." "You disgust me." The sound of the slap cracked through the reception area. Even the officer who had been explaining the situation to me froze. Ethan stood there with one hand pressed to his face, still too stunned to react. I raised my hand again, but the woman in his arms rushed forward to block him. The slap landed on her face instead. She cried even harder. "What gives you the right to hit people?" She was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe. "What gives you the right to hit Ethan?" Her eyes were red, but she stared at me stubbornly. "You don't ask what happened. You don't care who's right or wrong. You just come in and start hitting people. How can you do that?" Looking at her, I almost laughed. It was so ridiculous I did not even want to waste another sentence on her. I lifted my hand again. This time, Ethan finally came back to himself and grabbed my wrist. "Enough." "Olivia." His gaze went cold, and so did his voice. "This is not the place for you to throw a tantrum." "Can you stop making a scene every time you feel like it?" He shoved my hand away. I was not ready for it. I stumbled back and hit my lower back against the corner of a desk. A dull pain spread through me, sharp enough to make my brows knot. Guilt flashed through Ethan's eyes. He moved as if he wanted to help me, but the woman stepped forward first. She cried as she explained, "Olivia, there is nothing between Ethan and me. He only felt sorry for me and wanted to help. Someone set us up and made it look like we were involved in sex work. You've been with Ethan for so many years. Don't you know what kind of man he is?" The louder she cried, the more pitiful she made herself seem, as if she had suffered some terrible injustice. "If I were you, I would never embarrass my own husband in public. Even if something happened, couldn't you talk about it at home? Why make him lose face out here? Don't you know men care most about their dignity?" Her tears moved Ethan. The pain and hesitation that had flickered in his eyes vanished, replaced by coldness. He steadied Vanessa and looked at me with blame written all over his face. "There was never anything between Vanessa and me." "I've explained this to you so many times." He held Vanessa protectively. "Your own thoughts are dirty, so everything looks dirty to you." Before I came here, I had thought Ethan might truly be in trouble. I had even considered the possibility that someone had set him up and dragged him into a sex scandal, and I had already started thinking about how to handle it. I had wondered whether a competitor had designed a trap to shake the stability of the company. But I had never thought it would be because of Vanessa. Vanessa again. She was the nightclub hostess Ethan had met half a year ago. The poor, damaged woman he could not stop mentioning. The woman who made him see himself as the savior in some redemption romance, determined to rescue her from her miserable life. Because of her, we had fought countless times. Ethan always defended Vanessa without thinking. He always decided I was being harsh, that I was the one in the wrong. Later, I finally could not take it anymore and brought up divorce. Only then did Ethan calm down. He said, "I promise. There will never be a Vanessa between us." He said, "Do you really think I don't know whether to choose you or Vanessa?" He cried and told me he loved me. He begged me to give him another chance. I softened. I thought we had made it through. I thought the days had finally settled into peace, and Vanessa had truly been pushed out of our lives. But only a month later, that poor, damaged woman returned in full force. And she returned like this. I looked at Ethan, at the way he had completely taken Vanessa's side, and exhaustion spread through my limbs all at once. It dragged at me until even the air felt suffocating. "Forget it."

第2章

My voice was very soft. So soft that Ethan froze. He asked again, "What did you say?" "Olivia." He stared at me. "What did you just say?" "I said forget it." I tried my best to stay calm. I did not want to keep letting this kind of thing control my mood. "I can sign your bail papers. I can let you keep playing the savior in your redemption story. I can let you keep being Vanessa's hero." "But..." I ignored Vanessa, who was already secretly pleased beside him, and met Ethan's stunned eyes with a smile. "We are done." "Ethan." "Let's get divorced." When we left the precinct, the Chicago night wind was cold. The atmosphere stayed heavy. Ethan refused to agree to the divorce, so he forced his way into my car. Vanessa, still playing the wounded woman, squeezed into the back seat as well. She remained silent while Ethan sat in the passenger seat and explained. "There really is nothing between Vanessa and me." "Tonight, I had a business dinner with Martin and the others." Ethan held back his temper. "After dinner, a few of us said we would go to a bar and keep talking. I didn't expect to run into Vanessa." "You know Vanessa has it hard. She has an elderly mother and a young child depending on her. I saw that man dragging her into his car and followed them to the hotel. If I hadn't..." His voice was cut off. From the back seat came Vanessa's sobs. "Olivia." "I never meant to take anything from you." Vanessa was crying so hard she was hiccupping, but she kept talking. "It hasn't been easy for me either. My ex-husband abused me and my child. That's why I divorced him." "If I didn't have that burden..." "If I were clean and free..." Vanessa suddenly stopped crying and looked at Ethan with deep emotion. "I would fight for him. I would fight with everything I had." "Because he's Ethan." "Because he's a good man." "Because he..." I slammed on the brake. The Porsche jerked to a stop in the street. I turned and looked at Vanessa's frozen expression, then at Ethan, who was visibly moved. I smiled. "Since that's how you feel." I unlocked the doors and lowered the window. "Perfect. We're right in front of a hotel." "Why don't I make it easy for you?" "You can afford a room, can't you?" I said with a sneer, meeting Ethan's dark expression. "This time, you can do it openly. Your legal wife has given permission." "Go." "No one will call the police and send you back to the station." "As for whether you want to make another burden together..." My gaze swept over Vanessa's abdomen. "That is your business." Inside the car, the smell of cheap perfume mixed with the cold wind was sharp and suffocating. It felt like a wild vine had grown around my heart and sealed off all the air around me. My tone was not kind. I had already tried my best to hold back, but I still struck Vanessa's pride. As she got out of the car, she yelled at me. "Olivia!" "You've gone too far!" The moment Vanessa stepped out, Ethan turned on me. "I never knew your mind could be this cruel!" He grabbed my wrist. "Vanessa has no family or friends in Chicago. Where is she supposed to go alone this late at night?"

第3章

"What gives you the right to hurt an innocent person like this?" "Olivia, get out and apologize." His grip on my wrist hurt. I looked at this man who had once had eyes only for me, and my heart went cold inch by inch. Then I slapped him again. "You want me to apologize?" I looked at his stunned face. "Dream on." I unbuckled his seat belt for him, pointed at the door, and said, "Get out." He looked at me as if I were completely unreasonable and threw down one last sentence. "Don't regret this." Then he slammed the door and left. Through the window, I watched him catch up to Vanessa. He grabbed her hand, and after she struggled a few times, she collapsed into his arms and cried as if her heart were breaking. It felt as if something had split open inside me. A cold wind blew straight through the crack. It hurt so much my hands trembled on the steering wheel. When I drove past the two of them embracing in the cold, I clearly saw Vanessa look at me with a small, triumphant smile. Without a word, she told me the result. She had won. Ethan and I fell into a cold war. His friends came one after another to persuade me to make peace. "Olivia, Ethan just feels sorry for her. It's not love. Don't overthink it." Our mutual friends all said the same thing. "It wasn't easy for you two to get where you are. Last time Ethan got drunk, he was still calling your name. He said Vanessa reminds him of the old you. He just wants to make up for what you suffered back then." I listened as they brought up our past. I remembered how Ethan and I had built everything from nothing. I remembered how, as children, we lined up outside shelters for charity meals. I remembered the day our parents died in the same car accident. We became children without parents. The relatives who were supposed to be our guardians took everything our parents left us, and then we became children passed from foster home to foster home, abandoned again and again. It was Ethan who held me tightly and told me, "Olivia, I will give you a home." Back then, home was a distant word. Among thousands of lit windows, not one belonged to us. Every apartment in the city was impossibly expensive, yet Ethan put me in one of the most luxurious lakefront penthouses in Chicago. He filled that place with memories that belonged to the two of us. He was even afraid I would bump into the corners of the furniture, so he covered every sharp edge with soft padding. Ethan always said, "Olivia, in my heart, you will always be a child." "I want Olivia to be the happiest princess in the world." "My little princess." And now, our friends were telling me, "What man doesn't mess up sometimes? Ethan is already better than most. He doesn't gamble, he doesn't keep mistresses, and his whole heart is still with you. Olivia, stop making trouble." I understood. They were Ethan's mediators. He had sent them to give me a reason to lower my head. If I took the step they offered, we could pretend, like we always had after every fight, that nothing had happened and move on. But this time, I suddenly did not want to. I was stubborn. So stubborn that when I saw Vanessa's newly updated Instagram story, I could not look away. In it, she was sitting with her child on the Ferris wheel, and the caption read: [Noah says a father doesn't have to be related by blood. As long as there is love, we are family.] In one corner of the photo was a hand with long, defined fingers. I knew that hand. I had looked at it for nearly thirty years. The ring on that hand was one I had designed myself and Ethan had custom-made. It was our wedding ring.