The Blind Capo's Light

22-year-old Chloe never saw the brutal betrayal coming. Her degenerate, gambling-addicted stepfather sold her off like worthless chattel to the mafia to clear his crippling debts, throwing her into a pitch-black locked bedroom as nothing more than a sacrificial offering for the most feared legend across the entire underworld: Dante, the blind, disgraced ex-heir to the crime family throne. Rumors cast him as a feral beast lurking deep in the shadows, covered head to toe in old battle scars, volatile and unforgiving ever since the coup that cost him his sight and his birthright. The second they met, he coiled his cold, calloused hand tight around her throat, spitting a sharp death threat that promised she would beg for death within three days. But trembling Chloe did not cower — she reached out, her fingers shaking, and curled her small soft palm firmly around his bleeding wounded right hand. The thick layer of ice sealing off the broken monster’s heart shattered the second she touched him, completely out of his control. “She’s nothing but a lowly debt collateral!” When the arrogant housekeeper publicly humiliated and abused Chloe, the seemingly reclusive blind ex-godfather appeared like a bloodthirsty wraith straight out of hell, ordering his men to chop the offending woman’s hands off without a single flicker of hesitation: *“On this entire estate, no one but me is allowed to lay a finger on her.”* From a disposable scapegoat fated to be tossed away, Chloe soon became the only sliver of light in the dark, empty world of the once-all-powerful crime lord. On thunder-ripped storm nights when his old trauma nightmares dragged him back to the hell he barely survived, he would pin her tight against the sheets, refusing to let his only salvation slip away. When the old rivals who betrayed him years prior returned to try and tear Chloe from his arms, this half-injured, scar-covered beast rekindled the fires of hell just for her, cutting a path through the entire mafia under