Chapter 4

All I could see was black after suffering a slap from an enraged mafia Don. My ears started ringing, and I started to bleed from the corner of my mouth.

"Vile woman!" Salvatori's voice sounded far away. "How could you do something like that to a pregnant woman and a child?"

A committee member spoke up coldly. "The punishment dealt the last time was not heavy enough. Drag her to the basement and teach her a lesson with the gunstock!"

Adrian clenched his fists as he came forward, "Don…"

"Are you still trying to protect her?" Salvatori's stern voice stopped him. "She is trying to harm your flesh and blood! Even if you marry Ella, you can't change the fact that this child is your blood! Moreover, Cecelia's father will be arriving in Neopolis tomorrow. You know the consequences if he finds out that his granddaughter almost died in another's hands."

I turned to look at Adrian as I trembled. He stood still as his knuckles turned white. He looked at me with pain in his eyes as he struggled with a decision, and in the end, a despairing calm eventually took over him when he met Salvatori's determined eyes.

Adrian gradually turned his face away as if to agree silently to the punishment. I stood in a daze as I watched him look away, and it felt like my heart had just been torn apart, but the next second, I suddenly smiled, and I burst out laughing.

I laughed at how stupid I was to believe that he would protect me. I smiled at how naive I was to even hope that he would choose me at the very end.

Down in the basement, the Colombo family's bodyguards pressed me down as they forced me to kneel on a stone slab in the middle of the room. When I suffered from the first strike of the gunstock, I saw black in front of me, and a memory suddenly came to me.

On the day Adrian decided to go against his family to be with me, I initiated a breakup. There was a storm that night, and Adrian stood outside my apartment for the entire night in the rain. He ended up with a high fever of 104 degrees Fahrenheit the next day, and he was completely out of it when I went to visit him.

He grabbed my hand then and said, "Remember, Ella. I want you to be my only wife, even if I have to fight against the world."

When the second strike came, I bit my lip until it bled, and I could taste the blood in my mouth. I was reminded of the time when he flew across the globe overnight just because I sounded scared over a phone call I accidentally made to him in the middle of the night.

Then came the third strike, and the fourth…

Every strike was like a beating to my soul, and it hurt more than the flesh wounds on my back. By the 15th strike, I could almost hear Adrian saying tenderly to me whenever I got hurt, "How did you hurt yourself again? Let me have a look. It won't hurt for long…"

By the 19th strike, I was almost losing consciousness as I heard ringing in my ear. I thought I could hear someone calling out my name while in a daze, but I could no longer tell if it was reality or just a hallucination.

When the final strike came down on me, I could no longer take it, and I passed out. Right before I lost consciousness, I saw Adrian holding me anxiously in his arms.