Send the Ugly One, He'll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!

Adelaide Jones heard her own family laughing as they decided which daughter they were willing to sacrifice to a mafia boss.

Rockford Jones was already pouring his third scotch before noon.

Twenty minutes earlier, an attorney had explained that no legitimate bank in Boston could erase the fifteen-million-dollar hole Rockford had created with Moretti money. He had poured it into aggressive technology trades and lost it—or at least that was the story everyone in the room believed.

Now, money was no longer enough.

“He wants a daughter,” Rockford said, his voice trembling as the ice clinked against his glass. “Marriage. Access to Jones Financial. It’s the only way he spares my life.”

Her glamorous older sister, Chloe, refused immediately, crossing her long legs and inspecting her manicure.

Then their stepmother, Evelyn, smiled. A cold, calculating stretch of her lips.

“He didn’t specify which daughter.”

Chloe’s nail file stopped. Then she smiled too.

“Adelaide.”

Adelaide stood outside the partly open drawing-room doors with a stack of household mail pressed against her chest. She was twenty-four. She had dark brown hair, heavy black glasses, and a pale, jagged scar running from her left temple to her jaw—the permanent mark left by the car crash that killed her mother when Adelaide was nine.

Inside the room, Chloe laughed, a sharp, ringing sound.

“Send the ugly one.”

Their stepmother joined her, pouring herself a glass of wine. “He expects a trophy wife. Instead, he gets a scar, terrible glasses, and a shapeless little librarian.”

“He’ll think Daddy is mocking him,” Chloe shrugged. “Or kill her.”

Adelaide waited for her father to object. To say something, anything, to defend his youngest child.

Rockford simply whispered her name. But not in protest. Only in desperate fear for his own life.

Then Evelyn rested one manicured hand on his shoulder. “What value does Adelaide bring us, Rock?”

Adelaide closed her eyes. There it was. The sentence she had spent fifteen years pretending she didn’t already know.

She pushed the doors open.

The room went dead silent. Her father looked away first.

“I’ll go,” Adelaide said.

“Adelaide—” Rockford stammered.

“No.” Her hands trembled, but her voice stayed calm. “You owe fifteen million dollars. I know because I’m the person who tried to rebuild the books after your trades collapsed. I will go so your employees are not dragged into whatever happens next.”