FUCKING MY CHEATING EX'S MAFIA DAD (🌶️ 🌶️ 🌶️ 🌶️ 🌶️ SPICY AGE GAP FORBIDDEN ROMANCE

RHEA

“You forgot to put makeup on the hickeys properly,” he said, his voice flat and unbothered by the accusation.

The pale blue satin dress Mateo had chosen for me felt like a costume, a gorgeous, suffocating armour. Beautiful, I could admit that much. The fabric caught the light like the surface of the Mediterranean at dawn, the cut modest but the drape deliberate, engineered to make me look expensive. Engineered to make me look kept. I stood in front of the vanity mirror in our Hôtel de Paris suite and watched my reflection in the glass, wondering when exactly I had become a girl who let her boyfriend dress her like a showroom mannequin.

Mateo had been inside me all afternoon, pinning my wrists above my head until my shoulders burned, grinding his weight into me until I forgot my own name. Now, standing under the bright bulbs of the bathroom, he was buttoning his crisp cuffs, looking at my reflection with a sharp, disappointed pinch between his dark brows.

I reached up automatically, my fingers pressing into the tender, purplish shadow blooming along the side of my throat. “I’m sorry. I thought I covered it. It must be the light in here...”

“Fix it,” he cut in, grabbing his gold watch off the nightstand without a second glance. “My mother is downstairs, Rhea. I don’t need you looking like a mess before we even step into the lounge.”

He walked out, leaving the suite door ajar. I turned back to the glass, pulling the collar of the blue dress lower to inspect the damage. As I dabbed heavy beige concealer over the bruises, my mind drifted back eighteen months, searching for the exact moment I had surrendered control of my own skin.

...

I am sitting at a heavy oak table in the dark corners of the university library, surrounded by towers of leather-bound volumes I could never afford to buy. My shoulder blades are aching. I am hunching over a massive textbook on luxury brand management, my thumb tracing the line between haute couture and prêt-à-porter over and over until the ink blurs before my eyes.

Around me, the campus of the International University of Monaco is gleaming, all floor-to-ceiling glass, pristine sea air, and parking lots packed with sports cars that cost more than my childhood home in Lyon. Eighteen years old, a fresher fresh off the plane with a scholarship in hand and a suitcase full of clothes that suddenly seemed embarrassingly wrong, I had spent weeks feeling like an absolute fraud who snuck through a side door. I knew the theory of luxury, but I couldn’t speak the dialect.

Then a shadow falls across my page.

I look up, my fingers stalling on the corner of the paper.

A boy is leaning against the edge of my table. Dark eyes. Easy, slow smile. White linen shirt unbuttoned just enough to reveal his collarbone. He isn’t holding a single notebook or pen. He clearly doesn’t belong in the quiet section, but no one in the room is daring to tell him to leave.

“You look like you’re trying to memorize the entire library,” he says, his low, warm voice dropping easily into the quiet space between us.

I swallow hard, adjusting my glasses. “Just the parts I can’t afford.”

He laughs, a genuine, unbothered sound that loosens the tight, anxious knot in my chest. Reaching out, he slides his long fingers over the edge of my textbook, closing it with a soft, decisive thud.

“Come on,” he says, extending a hand toward me, his gold watch catching the ambient light of the reading room. “I’ll take you somewhere better than the library.”

...

I smoothed the final layer of powder over my skin, checking my reflection one last time. The bruises were gone, hidden beneath a seamless layer of beige, though the skin beneath still throbbed with a dull heat.

Downstairs, the grand lounge of the Vescari family’s Monte Carlo residence was already humming with the quiet, terrifying power of old money. Gilded moldings framed the high ceilings, crystal chandeliers dripped light like liquid diamonds, and silk wallpaper the color of champagne wrapped around a United Nations of wealth murmuring in French, Italian, English, and Russian. A string quartet was playing Ravel near the floor-to-ceiling windows, the delicate violin notes floating out into the night air and bleeding into the soft, rhythmic thunder of the Mediterranean crashing against the rocks below.

Outside, the Casino de Monte-Carlo glowed under amber floodlights, its Belle Époque towers rising above the dark harbor where multi-million-dollar superyachts bobbed gently on the tide. Down on the street, workers were still dismantling the steel Formula 1 barriers from last month’s Grand Prix, a subtle, constant reminder that in this city, everything was staged, every surface was polished, and every luxury came with a hidden price tag attached.

I stepped off the lift, my heels sinking into the plush carpet as I searched the crowd. Over the last year and a half, I had learned how to identify a Patek Philippe from across a room, how to speak to concierges, and how to curtsy to old money without ever quite touching it. But knowing the language and speaking it fluently were two vastly different things. I was still learning, and tonight, the stakes felt dangerously high. I was still only a second-year student myself—Mateo had been a junior when we met in that library, already two years ahead of me—and the gap between us had never felt wider than it did tonight, standing in his family’s world while my own degree still stretched years ahead.

Near the center of the lounge, Isadora Vescari moved through the party like a blade through silk. Severe, polished beauty. Dark hair pinned in an elegant chignon. Dior gown in deep burgundy that matched her lipstick with surgical precision. At forty-three, she could pass for thirty-five if you didn’t look too closely at the tightness around her eyes, eyes that had been cutting into me all evening with surgical accuracy.

I took a glass of champagne from a passing silver tray, wrapping my fingers around the crystal just to give my hands something to do. I watched the bubbles rise in lazy spirals instead of scanning the room, because watching the room meant watching her. Isadora was too well-bred for obvious hostility, but I had spent my childhood being overlooked by a father who wanted sons; I knew the exact micro-expression someone made when they decided you weren’t worth their attention. Isadora had decided six months ago.

“So you’re Mateo’s little friend from the university,” she had said back then. Friend. A knife wrapped in velvet.

Tonight, it was a cool nod, a quick scan of my pale blue dress, up, down, dismissed, and then a warm, possessive smile turned onto her son as she placed a hand on his arm, dropping her voice to a private register that shut everyone else out.

Mateo always smiled back.

“She’s just protective,” he had insisted once when I brought up her coldness back at the apartment. “You know how mothers are.”

I didn’t know. But I had nodded, because that was what you did with Mateo. You nodded. You smiled. You didn’t push.

His hand found my waist as I approached them, his thumb tracing absent circles against the satin while he continued talking property portfolios with a business associate of his father’s. I stood beside him, decorative and silent, fulfilling my implicit brief: look pretty, don’t embarrass him, and be the polished accessory his mother clearly thought I wasn’t good enough to be.

But I’m good enough to warm his bed, I thought, and the sudden bitterness of the realization surprised me.

Across the room, Mateo’s friend Nina, strawberry blonde, bright smile, floating in head-to-toe Chanel, caught his eye and mouthed something across the crowd. Mateo glanced at me, then back, answering her with a half-shrug that managed to be both apologetic and dismissive at once.

She’s fine, the gesture said. She’s just Rhea.

I felt the familiar, cold drop in my stomach and took a sip of champagne I couldn’t taste.

Then the grand oak doors to the lounge opened, and the entire room recalibrated.

No announcement was made. No drama was staged. It was simply a subtle, violent drop in air pressure, like the atmospheric shift right before a thunderstorm. I felt it before I understood it. My skin prickled, and my breath caught in my throat. I looked up.

Lucian Vescari walked into the room like he owned the ground beneath our feet, precisely because he did. Taller than Mateo, broader through the shoulders, his dark hair streaked with silver at the temples catching the light of the chandeliers. His face was all sharp angles and controlled lines, his dark eyes seeming to absorb light rather than reflect it. He wore a black bespoke suit, a crisp white shirt left open at the collar without a tie, and a watch worth more than my entire four-year education. Two men in darker suits trailed a step behind him, armed, I realized instantly, from the slight bulge beneath their jackets and the mechanical way their eyes swept the crowd. Below his open collar, the faint edge of old ink showed against his skin.

Lucian Vescari had not always been a don. He was one now, and every powerful person in the room adjusted their posture accordingly.

“Dad.”

Mateo’s voice was warm, almost eager. He released my waist immediately and crossed the room in long strides, embracing his father with a boyish familiarity that caught me off guard. Lucian clapped him on the back with genuine affection, a soft smile reaching his dark eyes.

“Congratulations,” Lucian said, his voice deep and resonant. “Graduation suits you.”

“Thanks, Dad. Can’t believe it’s over. Four years of pretending to study, finally paying off.”

Lucian’s laugh was soft. “Your mother tells me you’ve been offered a position at the firm. Something in asset management?”

“Something like that.” Mateo waved an indifferent hand. “I’ll figure it out. I’ve got time.”

Time. The word hung heavily between them. Something flickered in Lucian’s eyes, a brief, dark shadow that was suppressed almost before it appeared. He nodded slowly and said nothing.

Isadora appeared at Mateo’s elbow, her smile bright, tight, and brittle. “Lucian. So good of you to come.”

“Wouldn’t miss it.” His tone was neutral, perfectly polite. “The party is lovely, as always.”

“Mm.” Her gaze flicked toward where I was standing alone, then back to him. “Mateo’s brought his little friend.”

My cheeks burned. I stepped forward, attempting to steady myself, extending my hand to properly introduce myself. But up close, Lucian Vescari was overwhelming in a quiet, terrifying way. He was the kind of man who never needed to raise his voice because the room naturally quieted itself to hear him speak.

His eyes swept over my face, my blue dress, and the rigid way I was holding myself, giving me the sudden, disorienting sensation of being seen. Not assessed like a piece of property. Seen.

“You must be Rhea.” His voice curled around my name like smoke, low and thick.

“Y-yes,” I cleared my throat, forcing my hands to remain steady. “It’s so nice to meet you, Mr. Vescari.”

He didn’t take my hand to shake it. Instead, his long, dry fingers wrapped around mine, lifting my hand to his lips to press a kiss to my knuckles, light, chaste, yet sending a sharp jolt straight up my forearm. He held my gaze over our joined hands a beat longer than necessary, his thumb brushing once across my pulse point before letting go.

“The pleasure is all mine,” he said quietly, something passing between us that I couldn’t name. “You’re keeping my boy in line, I hear. Doing very well.”

Isadora’s voice sliced through the air like a scalpel. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Burgundy lips thinned, her eyes darting between us with barely concealed fury. “She’s a guest, Lucian. Not a handler.”

Lucian’s jaw tightened, a barely perceptible twitch. He turned to his ex-wife with a smooth, empty smile. “Just a compliment, Isadora. Don’t read into it.”

“As if you ever say anything without meaning three other things.”

The tension between them was palpable, a long history of old wounds far too deep to ever heal. I stood frozen beside them, my hand still tingling where his skin had touched mine, my heart pounding against my ribs.

“Mom,” Mateo intervened, his voice tight with frustration. “Can we not do this right now? It’s my graduation.”

Isadora softened instantly, her expression shifting from venom to maternal tenderness. “Of course, darling. I’m sorry.” She touched his cheek, her fingers lingering. “You know I just want what’s best for you.”

Mateo leaned into the touch like a child seeking warmth, his shoulders relaxing as his familiar smile returned. “I know, Mom. Let’s just enjoy the party, yeah?”

Lucian watched the exchange with an unreadable expression. But when his eyes flicked back to me, just for a fraction of a second, I saw something dark, hungry, and completely ruthless lurking in their depths. Something that made me want to run out of the building and stay right where I was all at once.

A moment later, Mateo’s friends descended on him, a flock of gorgeous young heirlooms in designer silk. Nina threw her arms around his neck, pulling back to shoot me a sharp, predator-precise look. “You must be Rhea. I must say, you look so much better than the pictures. Mateo, darling, you really should have sent better ones.”

The implication landed like a slap. Pictures. So he had shown them photos of me—quietly, casually, the way you might pass around a snapshot of a new car. As if I were a piece of livestock to be evaluated in advance. Mateo merely laughed, a nervous, eager sound, saying something I couldn’t hear over the roaring of blood in my ears.

I looked down at my champagne glass. The bubbles had gone flat.

Slipping away through the crowd with the practiced ease of someone who had learned how to be invisible, I pushed through the heavy glass doors onto the terrace. The cool night air hit my flushed skin instantly. Monte Carlo stretched out below, money, power, and secrets glowing against the dark Mediterranean sea.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I turned quickly. Lucian was standing in the shadow of the doorway, backlit by the warm, golden glow of the party inside. He carried two fresh glasses of champagne, stepping out onto the stone tiles and offering one to me.

“Go on,” he said, his voice quiet against the wind. “You look like you need it.”

I took the glass, our fingers brushing again. Warm skin. “Thank you.”

He leaned against the stone balustrade, his dark eyes looking out over the harbor lights. “She doesn’t like you, you know.”

“I know.”

“Mmm.” He took a slow sip. “You’re not what she expected. You’re not what any of them expected.” He made a vague gesture back toward the party, toward his son, toward the glittering world I had been orbiting. “Someone who wanted something tangible. Money. Status. A piece of the Vescari name.” A faint, bitter smile touched his lips. “You don’t care about any of that. It confuses them.”

I swallowed, my throat dry despite the alcohol. “What do I want, then?”

Lucian turned fully toward me, stepping closer until his shadow completely engulfed mine. The air between us crackled, thick with a dark, dangerous heat.

“I don’t know yet,” he murmured, his dark eyes locking onto mine with ruthless clarity. “But I intend to find out.”