The Barren Wife He Buried Came Back With The Donna Crown Chapter 01
The 300 Bucks Story
The day my husband got caught fucking my Nonna’s night nurse in a parking garage, all of Atlantic City was placing bets on how much I’d pay to bury the story.
For ten years, cleaning up Luca Fuselli’s messes was my job. Luca counted on it. So when the cameras closed in on him, he shouted across the concrete at me, easy and smug.
“She’s the closest thing to eighteen-year-old you I’ve ever seen, honey. Pay them extra. Buy me a couple years upfront.”
The tabloids didn’t stop there.
They dug up our wedding tape. Him, red-eyed, swearing on his blood that he’d love me till the day he died.
They spliced the two clips together and ran them side by side.
The caption read: “EXCLUSIVE: A DECADE IN, DON FUSELLI’S STILL IN LOVE. WITH THE 18-YEAR-OLD VERSION OF HIS WIFE.”
Every phone in the city rang mine.
The reporters asked my number.
I said, “I’m done paying. But I’ve got a bigger story for you. Three hundred dollars, flat.”
Three hundred dollars.
That was what my mother’s pocket watch bought me the night I smuggled a bleeding Luca out of Chicago, across a state line, and onto a boat that dumped us in Atlantic City with nothing but each other.
Now I was leaving.
The boat ticket back was on him.
…
“A big story, Mrs. Fuselli? Don’t tell me you’re pregnant. Barren womb, miracle baby. That would sell.”
They laughed. Light. Cruel.
My chest went cold.
My womb was gone because of Luca.
The first time he stepped on the wrong crew’s territory, they took me instead. Seven days, seven nights. When they finally dumped me at the corner of Pacific Avenue, my stomach was flat, my skin was carved up, and someone had cut two words into my hip.
FUSELLI’S DOG.
The photos reached the papers before the ambulance reached me.
When Luca took the Fuselli seat, the first order he ever gave as Boss was to burn every copy of that paper.
He shut down the magazine. He put the reporters in the hospital. The story of the Donna who couldn’t give him a son became the one thing nobody in Atlantic City was allowed to say out loud.
Until three years ago. When Luca broke that rule himself.
The first mistress was a showgirl.
He dropped a hundred grand on her in one week.
The ladies told me to send flowers to the tabloids. Told me to be smart. Told me a good Donna kept her mouth shut and her husband’s dick out of the papers.
I drew up divorce papers instead.
I found him on his knees in our bedroom, slapping his own face until his lip split. “Mia, it wasn’t real. It was a scene, baby. It wasn’t real.”
Then he saw the papers.
He wrecked the room. Broke every glass, every frame, every wedding photo. Grabbed me by the jaw.
“Ten years, Mia. Ten years, and I don’t get one mistake? You forget what your father said? You leave me, he puts you in the ground. That was the deal.”
Then he sat across from me and calmed his voice, like I was a child. “You can’t divorce me, honey. So stop it. It won’t happen again.”
I packed a bag. Moved into the guest wing. Slept alone.
That night, my old photos went up on every billboard from the boardwalk to the tunnel.
Every screen in the city.
My scars. My face. The word carved into my hip.
Men banged on my door at three in the morning, drunk, laughing, calling me by that name.
I still didn’t come back.
So Luca sent copies of the photos to my Nonna’s house.
He slid them under the door of the woman who raised me.
Nonna Rosa saw them, and her blood pressure blew a vessel in her brain. Stroke. Massive.
The only clinic that could save her was Sacred Heart, a private facility Luca half owned.
He came to pick me up in a black car, showgirl on his arm. Kissed my forehead like nothing had happened. “Are we a good couple again, Mia? Do you know how to behave now?”
I nodded.
He sent the showgirl home. He held me all night.
He whispered in my ear. “It’s for your own good, honey. Where would you even go? Every family in this city knows you belong to me. This was an accident. It won’t happen again.”
Six months later, he threw me a birthday party. Every family flew in. Ballroom on the boardwalk.
I went backstage to change, opened the dressing room door, and found him with my makeup girl bent over the vanity.
That time, I didn’t say a word. I closed the door. I paid the reporters outside myself.
The headline the next day was [VOWS BROKEN. MRS. FUSELLI TAKES THE HIT.]
After that, he stopped hiding.
Because he knew, no matter how deep he cut me, I couldn’t walk out that door.
Then, yesterday, Nonna’s night nurse crawled into his lap and told him she was scared I’d see her on the security feed.
So…
Luca cut the power to the whole floor.
Every camera went dark.
So did every ventilator.
By the time I got to Nonna’s room, she had one breath left in her.
Her last words to me was in Italian.
“Andiamo a casa.”
Let’s go home.
That was when I knew.
I had to go home.