He Replaced His Wife And Lost His Mafia Empire Chapter 24
Even after everything ended, Dominic kept believing Evelyn would come back.
She had loved him for ten years. Surely she couldn’t erase all of it over one winter night.
He refused to sell the apartment they had once shared in Chicago and kept the room she had used just as it was.
But the room grew stranger and stranger.
No one changed the water in the vases. The medicine in the drawers expired. When family members had birthdays, no one prepared gifts anymore.
Only then did Dominic realize that what he missed wasn’t just the woman who used to go mad with jealousy over him.
He missed coming home to lights already on. He missed every problem being handled before it ever reached his desk. He missed the way Evelyn remembered details he himself had never bothered to notice.
But none of those things came back just because he regretted losing them.
In the end, the Moretti family dissolved most of its businesses.
The captains who had once sworn loyalty to Dominic turned elsewhere. Allies stopped taking his calls. He sold the apartment and moved into a cramped rental, living on the last of the money Margaret had quietly set aside for him.
Sloane moved in, too.
She still wanted the life she had once expected.
She wanted expensive clothes, a private doctor, and the best things for the baby—and she still believed that once the child was born, the Moretti family would welcome her back.
Dominic told her there was no Moretti family anymore.
Sloane said, “Margaret has to be hiding money somewhere. Evelyn was the wife for five years and got so much. I’m carrying your heir. Why shouldn’t I get something?”
She had never understood that the wealth, the relationships, and the dignity Evelyn brought to the Moretti family had belonged to Evelyn all along.
The wife’s chair had never given her any of it.
One day, Dominic discovered his bank account had been emptied.
Sloane had used the rest of their money to buy jewelry, determined to secure an escape route for herself before the baby came.
The two of them had a vicious fight.
Dominic snatched away her phone. Sloane grabbed his clothes and threatened to send more internal records to his creditors and enemies.
In the middle of the struggle, Dominic shoved her hard.
Sloane hit the edge of a table and collapsed.
Blood quickly spread across her dress.
The baby did not survive.
Because of the severity of her injuries, she underwent emergency surgery and would never be able to get pregnant again.
When Sloane woke up, she didn’t cry.
She didn’t curse him, either.
She only stared at Dominic for a very long time.
He began to feel afraid, but there was nowhere left for him to go.
He was buried in debt. His friends had long since disappeared, and his Moretti relatives refused to answer his calls. Once he lost the boss’s ring and protection, no one was left to step in and handle things for him.
On the third night after Sloane’s discharge, she sat in the kitchen watching Dominic peel an apple.
“If it weren’t for you, I’d be the mother of a Moretti heir right now.”
Dominic said tiredly, “If it weren’t for you, Evelyn never would have left.”
That crossed the last line.
Sloane grabbed the knife from the table and drove it into his chest.
As Dominic fell, he saw the old Christmas portrait still hanging on the wall.
In it, Sloane sat in the wife’s seat, the pearl necklace bright at her throat.
Evelyn was nowhere in the frame.
That day, he had thought he had won their game again.
In truth, the moment he let someone else sit in that chair, he had already lost the one person who had truly held the Moretti family together.
Before he lost consciousness, Dominic remembered Evelyn on their college campus.
She had been carrying a stack of books. It started to rain, and she handed him her umbrella, letting her own shoulder get soaked.
He wanted, desperately, to go back to that day and tell her to stay away from him.
But life doesn’t offer a second chance.
Sloane never escaped Chicago.
The few who still held any loyalty to the Moretti name brought her before the internal council. Once witnesses confirmed she had killed Dominic, she was struck from every protection list and permanently exiled from the territories controlled by the allied families.
At that same moment, it was afternoon in California.
Evelyn had just finished a charity event with her family and was standing in the sun for a new portrait.
Later, she learned from an adviser that Dominic was dead and Sloane had been cast out.
She was silent for a moment, then only told the adviser to handle the remaining documents according to their agreement.
Before dinner began, her mother called her over to cut the cake.
Evelyn set down her phone and walked toward the people who were truly waiting for her.
From then on, no photograph would ever again require her to step out of the frame to prove she knew her place.