Jackie Gonzalez Grace Facebook ad: “Can't wait to read more”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

1329201405889527

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger and Threads

Relaunches

2

Niche

Gifts & Crafts

How we count

Ad text

Chapter 1 The cage was golden — a penthouse on the forty-seventh floor — and I never called it a prison until I found the receipt for my coffin in my husband's desk drawer, dated three weeks from today. Not a metaphor. An actual coffin. Italian mahogany. Custom-sized. Already paid in full. My name was on the delivery order: Valentina Marchetti. Wife of Dominic Marchetti. Donna of the Marchetti family. The woman who had smiled beside him at charity galas, who had worn his diamond choker like a crown, who had signed every document he slid across the breakfast table without reading because he told me trust is what wives give. I had trusted him for two years. Now I was holding the invoice for my burial. My hands didn't shake. Not yet. I stood in his private study — the room I was never allowed to enter, the room with the biometric lock he said was for "family business" — and read every line. The coffin. The burial plot in a cemetery I'd never heard of. A death certificate template, pre-filled, listing cause of death as cardiac arrest. I was twenty-six years old. My heart was perfect. The sound that came from my throat wasn't a scream. It was the noise a lock makes when it finally breaks — quiet, metallic, final. I kept searching. Behind the coffin receipt: a life insurance policy. Forty million dollars. Taken out six months after our wedding. Beneficiary: Dominic Marchetti. Below that: a medical file with my name, my blood type, a list of every medication I'd been given by Dr. Fausto — the family physician who visited me every week for "vitamin injections" that left me dizzy and nauseous and too weak to leave the penthouse. The injections weren't vitamins. The file listed them as a slow-acting anticoagulant — a blood thinner used in hospitals, administered at triple the therapeutic dose. Over months, it would cause internal hemorrhaging. Organ failure. A death that looked natural to any coroner who wasn't looking too hard. He was poisoning me. Slowly. Methodically. On a schedule. Every Thursday at ten A.M., when Dr. Fausto rolled up my sleeve and slid the needle in and told me, "Just your vitamins, Mrs. Marchetti. You'll feel better soon." I never felt better. I felt less. Every week, a little less. Less energy. Less appetite. Less of the woman I'd been before I married into this family and became something ornamental and disposable. I put the file down. My reflection stared back at me from the glass desktop — hollow cheeks, dark circles, the gaunt architecture of a woman being erased from the inside out. Two years. Two years of Thursday injections. Two years of being told my fatigue was anxiety, my bruising was anemia, my isolation was protection. "The family has enemies, Valentina. You're safest here. With me." Safe. In a penthouse that was a kill room with a view. I photographed everything. Every document. Every receipt. Every page of the medical file. My phone's camera clicked in the silence like a heartbeat counting down. Then I found the last folder. It was labeled "Sokolov." Inside: photographs of a woman. Dark hair. Sharp jaw. Eyes like a wolf in winter. She was standing beside Dominic in what looked like a private villa — his hand on her waist, her head on his shoulder, the body language of people who had been touching each other for years. Behind the photos: a contract. A marriage agreement between the Marchetti family and the Sokolov Bratva, dated four months from now. Dominic's signature at the bottom. And next to the bride's name — Irina Sokolov — a handwritten note in Dominic's precise script: "After V. is buried. Spring wedding. Merge the territories." V. That was me. Reduced to an initial. A scheduling obstacle between my husband and his next bride. He didn't marry me for love. He married me for my father's shipping routes — the Calabrese ports that came as my dowry. And now that the routes were secured, the contracts signed, the territory absorbed — I was a line item to be closed out. I put the folder back. Exactly where I found it. Aligned the edges. Then I walked to the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the cold marble floor. Three weeks. I had three weeks before the coffin was delivered and my husband staged my death. I could run. I could call the police — but the police in this city answered to Marchetti money, and the ones who didn't answered to Marchetti bullets. I could call my father. But my father had sold me to this family for a port deal, and the last time I'd begged him for help, he'd said, "You're a Marchetti now. Act like one." There was one person. One person Dominic feared. One person whose name made the soldiers go quiet and the consigliere check the locks. His brother. Luca Marchetti. The firstborn. The one Dominic had exiled five years ago. The one the family called dead. The one who, according to the whispers I'd overheard through walls I wasn't supposed to be listening through, had built something in the shadows that made the Marchetti empire look like a corner store. I picked up my phone. The number was buried in a file I'd memorized two months ago — back when I was still naive enough to think I was being paranoid. It rang. A voice answered. Low. Cold. Controlled. "Who is this?" "Valentina Marchetti. Your brother's wife." My voice cracked on the last word. "He's going to kill me in three weeks. I have proof. And I need you to come get me before I'm buried in a coffin he's already bought." Silence. Two seconds. Three. "Where are you?" "The penthouse. Forty-seventh floor. I can't leave — the elevators require his code after nine P.M." "Can you get to the service stairwell on the north side?" I blinked. "How do you know about the service stairwell?" "I grew up in that building, Valentina. I know every exit he thinks he's sealed." A pause. His voice dropped. "I'll be there in twenty minutes. Pack nothing. Bring the proof. And when I knock — three times, then two — you open that door and you don't look back." "Why would you help me? You don't know me." "Because my brother has killed two women before you. And I was too late for both of them." The line went dead. I stood. My legs were water. My veins were full of poison. My husband was asleep in our bed, thirty feet away, dreaming of his next wedding. Twenty minutes. I started counting. Chapter 2 Eighteen minutes. That's how long I had to dismantle two years of captivity. I moved through the penthouse like a ghost — which, in three weeks, was exactly what Dominic intended me to become. The hallway was dark. His breathing carried from the master bedroom — deep, even, the sleep of a man with no conscience and excellent thread count. The service stairwell. North side. Behind the panel in the laundry room that I'd discovered six months ago when I was so bored and lonely I'd started mapping the walls like a prisoner scratching tallies. I'd never used it. Never had a reason to. The penthouse was comfortable. The penthouse had everything — except a door I could open from the inside. I grabbed my phone. The photos of every document. My only weapon. Fourteen minutes. The laundry room panel was flush with the wall — no handle, no seam visible unless you knew where to press. I pressed. It clicked open, revealing a narrow concrete stairwell that smelled like dust and old money. I stepped through. The panel closed behind me. The darkness was total. My legs nearly buckled on the third step. The anticoagulant — tonight's dose was still in my system. Dr. Fausto had been here at the usual time, the usual needle, the usual lie. My body was a crime scene that hadn't been discovered yet. I gripped the railing. Descended. Forty-seven floors. In heels I kicked off at floor forty. In a silk robe I'd thrown on over my nightgown. In a body that was being chemically dismantled one Thursday at a time. By floor thirty, my vision was spotting. By floor twenty, I was sitting on the steps every two flights, pressing my forehead against the cold railing, counting breaths. By floor ten, I heard the knocks. Three. Then two. I made it to the ground-floor door. Pushed it open. He was standing in the alley. Tall. Dark-haired. A face that was Dominic's architecture — the same jaw, the same cheekbones — but stripped of the performance. Where Dominic's face was a mask designed to charm, this face was bare. Scarred. A thin line from his left eyebrow to his temple. Eyes that assessed me in two seconds and reached a conclusion that made his entire body go rigid. Luca Marchetti looked at my arms — the bruises from the injections, the pallor of a woman running on depleted blood. He looked at my bare feet, bleeding from forty floors of concrete stairs. He looked at my face. His jaw locked. A muscle pulsed beneath the scar. "Can you walk?" "I just walked forty-seven floors." "Can you walk more?" "I can do whatever I need to do." Something shifted in his expression. Not pity. Assessment. Like he was recalculating something he'd assumed about me. A black car idled at the alley's mouth. No plates. Tinted windows. He opened the passenger door and I got in. He got in the driver's side. We were moving before my door fully closed. "The proof," he said. Eyes on the road. I handed him my phone. He glanced at the screen. Swiped through the photos. His driving didn't change — steady, precise — but his grip on the steering wheel went white. "The anticoagulant," he said. "How long?" "Two years. Every Thursday." "And the coffin order?" "Three weeks out. He has a death certificate template ready. Cardiac arrest." "The Sokolov marriage contract?" "You know about that?" "I know Irina Sokolov. She's not a bride. She's a merger. The Sokolov Bratva controls the eastern seaboard — drugs, weapons, human trafficking. Dominic marries her, he doubles his territory overnight." "And I'm the obstacle." "You're the loose end." He turned onto a highway I didn't recognize. "Your father's shipping routes — the Calabrese ports. Those transferred to Marchetti control upon your marriage?" "Yes." "Irrevocable?" "Yes. My father made sure of that." Bitterness coated the word. "He wanted the alliance permanent." "Then Dominic has no further use for you. The ports are his. The routes are locked. You're an expense with a forty-million-dollar payout." Luca's voice was clinical. "He'll stage the cardiac arrest. Collect the insurance. Marry Irina within the year. And no one will ask questions because Marchetti wives don't last, and everyone in this city knows it but no one says it." "Two women," I said. "You said he killed two women before me." His hands tightened on the wheel. "His first wife. Elena. Drowned in the bathtub. Ruled accidental. His fiancée before you — Mara. Car accident. Single vehicle. No witnesses." A pause. "I tried to warn them both. I was too slow." "But you're here now." "I've been watching that building for four months." He glanced at me. "Intercepting Dr. Fausto's pharmaceutical orders. Tracking the insurance policy modifications. Waiting for confirmation that he'd set a date." "The coffin order." "The coffin order." He exhaled. "I needed you to find the proof yourself. If I'd approached you cold — wife of the Don, no evidence, just the word of an exiled brother — would you have believed me?" No. I wouldn't have. Two months ago, I still thought the injections were vitamins. Two weeks ago, I still flinched when anyone spoke against Dominic in my presence, because loyalty was the only currency I had left. "Where are we going?" I asked. "Somewhere he can't reach. I have a safehouse outside his territory — federal land, no Marchetti jurisdiction, no bought judges." "And then what?" "Then you tell me everything. Every injection. Every document. Every conversation you overheard through those walls." He looked at me again. Longer this time. "And then we burn his empire down." "I don't want to burn anything. I want to survive." "Surviving is step one. But Dominic won't stop at losing you. He'll send people. Professionals. The kind who make problems disappear without coffins or death certificates." His voice dropped. "The only way you survive long-term is if he can't. That's the math, Valentina. It's ugly. But it's real." I stared out the window. The city lights blurred past — a world I'd watched from forty-seven floors up for two years, never touching it, never being part of it. "Valentina," I said quietly. "What?" "That's not my real name. Dominic chose it. After the wedding. He said Valentina sounded better for a Marchetti wife." I swallowed. "My name is Nina. Nina Calabrese." Luca was quiet for a moment. Then: "Nina." Just that. My name. In a voice that didn't reshape it into something more useful. "Hold on, Nina," he said. "We have a long night ahead." I held on. To the seat. To my phone. To the fragile, furious thing growing in my chest that felt less like hope and more like a blade being sharpened. Three weeks until my scheduled death. I intended to be very much alive for it. Chapter 3 The safehouse was a concrete bunker disguised as a farmhouse — three hours outside the city, down roads that didn't appear on any GPS. Inside: steel-reinforced walls, a communications setup that looked military-grade, and a woman with cropped silver hair and a shoulder holster who took one look at me and said, "Jesus Christ, Luca. She's gray." "She's poisoned," Luca said. "Two years of anticoagulant at triple dose. She needs a full blood panel and chelation therapy. Tonight." The woman — Gia, no last name offered, no questions about mine — sat me on a medical cot and drew blood with hands that were steady and scarred. Former military. Or former something that required both medical training and the ability to kill. I watched the blood fill the vial. Dark. Sluggish. Wrong. "Your clotting factor is almost nonexistent," Gia said, reading a portable analyzer. "One bad fall, one minor cut — you'd bleed out before anyone could stop it. He wasn't just killing you slowly. He was making you fragile enough that anything could finish the job." She looked at Luca. "If she'd stayed another month—" "She didn't." "If she'd bumped her head. Tripped on a stair. Cut herself cooking—" "She didn't." Luca's voice was a closed door. Gia started an IV. Real medicine. I could feel the difference immediately — not the fog of Dr. Fausto's injections, but clarity. Warmth. My fingers tingled. My vision sharpened. "The reversal will take weeks," Gia said. "The anticoagulant has damaged her liver function. She needs daily monitoring, iron therapy, and absolutely no stress." Luca and I looked at each other. "No stress," I repeated. "I know," Gia sighed. "I said it for the record." Luca pulled up a chair across from my cot. In the bare fluorescent light, the scar on his face looked deeper. His suit jacket was off. Shoulder holster visible. A gun I hadn't noticed before sat against his ribs like it had always been there. "Tell me about the penthouse," he said. "Everything. Start from the beginning." So I did. I told him about the wedding — the cathedral, the five hundred guests, my father walking me down the aisle with the satisfied expression of a man closing a business deal. I told him about the first night, when Dominic had been charming and gentle and everything a new bride hopes for. I told him about the second week, when the charm calcified into control. "He chose my clothes. My meals. My schedule. He dismissed my phone — said a Donna doesn't need social media, doesn't need contacts outside the family. He moved me into the penthouse and removed the elevator code from my access. 'For security,' he said. 'The family has enemies.'" "The family is the enemy," Luca said. "I didn't know that then. I thought—" I stopped. Swallowed the humiliation. "I thought he loved me. I thought the control was protection. When the injections started, I was grateful. I was tired all the time, and he said Dr. Fausto would help. He held my hand during the first one." Luca's expression didn't change. But his hand — resting on his knee — closed into a fist so tight I heard his knuckles crack. "The isolation was total," I continued. "No phone. No visitors. No internet access — the penthouse Wi-Fi was filtered through his security system. I could access cooking websites and a curated news feed. Nothing else. If I asked to see my family, he said it wasn't safe. If I asked to go outside, he sent a guard to walk me around the building's private courtyard — thirty minutes, twice a week." "A yard," Luca said. "Like a prison." "Exactly like a prison. Except the food was better and the warden kissed me goodnight." The bitterness was acid on my tongue. "I started mapping the penthouse out of boredom. Every vent. Every panel. Every locked door. That's how I found the service stairwell. That's how I found the study — I watched him enter the biometric code reflected in the hallway mirror. Memorized it. Waited three months before I used it." "Smart." "Desperate. There's a difference." "Not always." He leaned forward. "The Sokolov contract — did you see any details about the merger? Territory lines? Distribution networks?" "I photographed everything. But Luca—" I met his eyes. "I'm not your intelligence asset. I'm not a weapon you can point at your brother. I came to you because I'm about to die and you were the only person who might care enough to stop it." "I care." "You care about taking down Dominic. I'm convenient evidence." His jaw worked. Through the silence, I heard the hum of the medical equipment, the distant sound of wind against the farmhouse walls, and the steady drip of the IV that was slowly undoing what Dominic's doctor had spent two years building. "You're right," Luca said finally. "I want to take him down. I've wanted it for five years — since he killed Elena and I couldn't prove it. Since our father chose him as successor and exiled me for asking questions." He paused. "But you're not convenient evidence, Nina. You're a person my brother is murdering. And I am not going to sit in another church, at another funeral, for another woman I failed to save." The rawness in his voice cut through my defenses. I looked away. "There's a federal prosecutor," he said. "RICO case. She's been building it for three years — racketeering, money laundering, murder. She needs an inside witness. Someone who's seen the documents, lived in the house, can testify to the operation from the inside." "You want me to testify. Against the Marchetti family. In federal court." "I want you to end them. Legally. Permanently. Not a gang war — a prosecution. The kind that puts Dominic in a cell for the rest of his life, seizes every asset, and dismantles the organization from the top down." "He'll kill me before I ever reach a courtroom." "That's why you have me." He said it simply. Like a fact. Like gravity. "The prosecutor's name is Adriana Torres. She's flying in tomorrow. She'll explain the witness protection options, the timeline, the risks." "And if I say no?" "Then I drive you anywhere you want to go. New city. New name. I have resources. You disappear." He held my gaze. "But he'll find you. Maybe not this year. Maybe not next. But Dominic doesn't leave loose ends, Nina. You know that. You found the coffin." I looked at my arms. The injection bruises — small, precise, clustered in the crook of my elbow like a constellation of betrayal. Two years of Thursdays. "I'll meet the prosecutor," I said. "Good." "But I have a condition." "Name it." "When this is over — when he's in a cell or in the ground — I walk away. From the Marchetti name. From the Calabrese name. From all of it. I become nobody. And nobody owns me again." Something flickered across his face. There and gone. "Done," he said. I lay back on the cot. The IV dripped. Gia checked my vitals and said nothing encouraging. Through the farmhouse walls, I could hear the night — crickets, wind, the vast empty silence of a world I hadn't been part of in two years. My phone buzzed. I looked at the screen. Unknown number. A text. One line. "The coffin has been moved up. You have ten days." Below it: a photo of my empty bed in the penthouse. The silk sheets pulled back. A single white lily on the pillow. Funeral flowers. Dominic knew I was gone. And he'd just cut my deadline in half.

Where the ad sends people

axisnovel.com

💖😍Can't wait to read more👉

💖😍Can't wait to read more👉