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Chapter 2

Aвтор: Shelley
I walked out of that hallway like something had been knocked loose inside me. The night air cut through my thin clothes, but it wasn't cold enough to touch what I was feeling.

I'd known since I was a little girl that I would become the Donna of the Fontaine Family, Dorian's wife. Two dynasties, bound by blood and business since before either of us were born. In our world, power alliances don't wait for love to catch up. Back then, I was just a girl who wanted love like anybody else.

I still remember the first time I saw Dorian at a family dinner.

He had just taken over the bloodiest end of the family's underground operations, and he wore a black custom suit, perfectly cut, moving through the room like he owned it because he did.

When a rival family's hit squad crashed the event, he covered me without thinking, put the shooters down clean, then turned around and held out a handkerchief with a bloodied hand.

"Don't be afraid," he said, the corner of his mouth pulling into a smile that was both predatory and oddly elegant. "I'll keep you safe."

That was all it took. I was seventeen and completely gone.

Even when rumors started before our engagement, that he spent his nights in the slums tangled up with some girl named Elena, I tried to walk away. I almost ended the engagement.

But then he showed up at the Morretti estate with every capo under his command, got down on one knee in front of every boss in the room, kissed my hand, and looked at me like I was the only thing in the world.

"Jessica. I swear. There will only ever be one Donna for me."

He signed over his most profitable port and two smuggling routes to my name. He was generous and attentive and everything I'd dreamed of, and I told myself that was love. So I walked straight into the trap he'd built for me.

My father had seen through it from the start. He knew what Dorian was, ambitious and ruthless, not the kind of man who would make me happy, and he was willing to break the alliance, to take whatever political fallout came from saying no.

But I begged. I refused to eat. I threatened and bargained and wore him down because I was so sure I was right.

After the wedding, I gave everything I had to his ambition. "I want to be the greatest Don in New York," he'd told me once, and I'd believed in it like it was my own dream.

I worked the politicians, cleaned up the dirty money, and ran the legitimate businesses, casinos and real estate and a dozen moving parts that kept his empire looking respectable. Under my hands, the Fontaine family's reach tripled.

And as his power grew, my place in his life shrank.

He stopped coming home. A string of women, one after another. Every time I confronted him, he'd light a cigar, look at me with that flat, dismissive contempt, and say, "I'm the Don. This is business. Know your place and stop making a scene."

Elena only had to cry and he'd drop a nine-figure arms deal to drive across the city to her.

But when I was sick from the fertility medications, vomiting through the night and barely holding myself together, he told me coldly that I was ruining his Persian rug.

"Seven years and you can't produce an heir," he'd said more than once, with that brutal precision he had. "You have no ground to stand on. You're an embarrassment."

For seven years, I kept the mask on. I went back to the Morretti estate with a smile on my face and nothing but good news, because I didn't want my father to worry, and because I was still protecting Dorian's reputation with the elders even while he was destroying me.

I'd even quietly neutralized the people who tried to report back to my father. I did that for him.

I thought love could fix anything. I was wrong.

Now I stood with nothing to show for it but shame, and I couldn't go back to my father and ask for help. Not after everything.

I wiped my face dry and pulled out my encrypted phone to dial my personal attorney.

"I need divorce papers. And I need you to start separating every Morretti asset from his holdings, cut every funding line to his legitimate operations." My voice was steady. I barely recognized it.

"That's a massive network. To do it cleanly, we're looking at three days minimum, filings, stock transfers, the works."

"Fine." I pressed my hand against my stomach. Three days was all I needed. Three days, and I was walking out of this for good, on my own terms.
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  • Leaving My Bastard Don Husband, Now He Regrets It   Chapter 10

    After that day, Don Fontaine disappeared from the story of New York entirely. The escape and the assault charge were added to the federal case against him, and he was sent to the deepest level of a maximum security federal facility, where he would spend the rest of his life.Mine kept opening up.In the years that followed, Dominic loved me with the kind of thoroughness and patience that I'd once believed didn't exist for people like me. When the grief of the past caught me in the night, he'd land his plane on whatever airstrip was closest, drive to wherever I was, and take me somewhere I liked for ice cream, just to sit with me.Under that care, the last of the seven years' damage finally healed. I stopped being the woman who had spent everything on a man who was poisoning her. I became someone else, a woman who ran a global foundation, who had built something real, who trusted her own judgment again.I adopted children through the foundation over those years, children with disabilit

  • Leaving My Bastard Don Husband, Now He Regrets It   Chapter 9

    My foundation made international headlines in less than a year.Former crime family princess turned global humanitarian. Jessica Morretti builds world's largest children's relief fund. Angel of the Mediterranean. Morretti heir gives thousands of orphans a second chance.Every major outlet in the world ran the story. I stopped reading the coverage after a while because the work was the point, the children were the point, and every day I had more than enough of both to fill my life completely.Through all of it, Dominic was there.He was nothing like Dorian. Where Dorian had used me as an instrument, something to manage his image and run his operations and then discard when convenient, Dominic treated my judgment with a reverence that still startled me sometimes. He was wealthier than most governments and could have controlled everything. Instead, he handed decisions to me and made himself my resource, my support structure, my partner in everything that mattered.He told a reporter once

  • Leaving My Bastard Don Husband, Now He Regrets It   Chapter 8

    Six months passed.Every property, every car, every casino, all of it sold off to cover the debts. The man who had once been untouchable was completely stripped. Don Fontaine had nothing left.To hide from the loan sharks and the rivals who wanted him dead, Dorian had taken Elena, nine months pregnant, enormous, and furious, back to the slums she'd come from. They were living in a cramped, leaking shack that smelled of rot and mold, exactly like his life.One night, during a thunderstorm, Elena gave birth on a filthy mattress in that shack. When the baby's crying filled the room and Dorian finally got a look at the child he had burned everything for, the air in the shack went still.The baby had dark skin, tight curls, and full lips. He was not Dorian's.The truth arrived like something inevitable. Elena, his beloved, his obsession, the pure and delicate creature he had given up everything to protect, had been sleeping with half the slum for years, with dealers and low-level gangsters

  • Leaving My Bastard Don Husband, Now He Regrets It   Chapter 7

    While I was gone, New York changed around Dorian Fontaine like the tide going out.Without the Morretti backing, the FBI moved fast. His two largest weapons-smuggling ports were raided and shut down in a single night, and millions in contraband were intercepted at sea. His drug distribution network collapsed without cash flow, and rivals picked through the inventory like vultures. The bosses who had once deferred to him now said his name with contempt.The banks, all of whom had received very quiet pressure from the Morretti Family, came calling at once, freezing his personal and family accounts and demanding repayment on loans he hadn't considered urgent. Every side of his operation was being dismantled simultaneously, and every piece of territory he'd built was carved up and absorbed.Meanwhile, Elena sat in the master suite of what remained of the estate and understood none of it. She'd become more demanding since moving in, not less, and the pregnancy had given her a sense of unt

  • Leaving My Bastard Don Husband, Now He Regrets It   Chapter 6

    After spending days shopping with Elena and bleeding money through every luxury store in the city, Dorian found, to his own confusion, that he felt none of the satisfaction he'd expected.In the past, any sign of distance from him would have sent me spiraling. I would have shown up at his door, called his phone, found some way to make myself useful and visible and impossible to ignore. But I'd gone completely quiet, and he told himself it was a tactic, playing hard to get, my latest move in some game I was running."You think this silence impresses me, Jessica?" he thought, with the cold amusement of a man who had never been kept waiting. She loves me too much to actually leave. A few days, a small gesture, and she'll be back.That thought was interrupted by a call from one of his white-collar operatives, a man so shaken he could barely finish his sentences."Boss. It's bad. The FBI somehow got their hands on five years of the family's complete underground arms ledgers and every money

  • Leaving My Bastard Don Husband, Now He Regrets It   Chapter 5

    I woke up in a small private clinic in Queens. A young nurse was changing out my IV bag.She saw my eyes open and something crossed her face, pity and something she was trying to hold back."You're awake." Her voice was quiet. "I'm so sorry. We did everything we could. But the baby didn't make it."The words hit like a building falling on me. I grabbed the bedsheet with both fists, and the sound that came out of my throat wasn't anything human.The nurse didn't know who I was. She sighed softly and tried to find something kind to say. "You're young. There'll be another chance. And honestly, based on your health, if you'd received treatment even a few hours earlier, the baby could have been saved. It was close."I stopped crying."What do you mean? Earlier treatment would have saved the baby?"She hesitated, then lowered her voice."Last night, Don Fontaine put out a hard order. He pulled every ambulance and medical crew in the surrounding neighborhoods and redirected them all to his pr

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