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Chapter 3

Autor: Helen
Less than a year into the three-year deadline, we were deep in the Pennsylvania mountains.

These mountains were neutral ground where European arms dealers did business with the New York mafia. Snow blanketed the forest, and the mountain roads were iced over.

Luca brought me and a small team along, and we closed a fifty-million-dollar arms deal with a group of Italian dealers.

Our convoy had just started down the winding mountain road when everything went wrong.

Boom!

A rocket turned the lead escort car into a fireball.

"Ambush! It's the Messina family!" I yelled.

Bullets poured into our armored SUV, and the windows cracked. They'd sent more than 100 gunmen into these mountains to hunt down the Bellandi family's future Don.

"Mr. Bellandi, they've cut off our retreat!" the bodyguard at the wheel shouted.

A bullet punched through the windshield and tore through the driver's neck.

The SUV spun out of control and careened toward the cliff.

Ignoring the old wound in my shoulder, I lunged from the back seat into the driver's seat, grabbed the wheel, and stomped on the brake.

The tires screeched across the ice, and the SUV stopped less than two feet from the edge.

The enemy convoy had already closed in. More than 12 gun barrels were trained on us.

"Luca Bellandi! Get out and surrender!" the enemy leader shouted. "Don Messina wants the heir alive! Shoot everyone else to pieces!"

I looked at Luca in the rearview mirror.

Luca gripped his pistol. I could see in his eyes that his mind was made up.

In the mafia, an heir who was taken alive by his enemies faced torture and humiliation, and his family's holdings would be carved up.

Luca could never let himself be taken alive. He would rather die.

He didn't say a word, but I could see the despair in him as clearly as if he had.

"Mr. Bellandi, hold on to me."

Luca looked at me. "Mara, what are you doing?!"

I didn't answer. I pulled Luca against me and cradled his head with one arm. Then I floored the gas.

Boom!

The black SUV smashed through the guardrail and plunged into the ravine below.

"Mara!"

I wrapped my whole body around Luca. The SUV rolled over and over, slamming into rocks and pine trees, and every impact hammered into my back.

Crack!

Bone snapped.

The pain almost sent me into shock. Two of my ribs had snapped, their jagged ends digging into the surrounding muscle. Every breath tasted like blood.

Crash!

The SUV hit the bottom of the ravine and was wrecked beyond repair.

I had no idea how much time had passed before I opened my eyes inside the wreck. Apart from a scrape on his forehead and a leg pinned by twisted metal, Luca had no life-threatening injuries.

"Mara... are you okay?!" Luca touched my face with shaking hands.

I swallowed the blood and forced a smile.

"Mr. Bellandi... don't worry, I'm fine. It's just a scratch."

Pressing one hand against my broken ribs, I used a crowbar to pry off the metal plate pinning Luca's left leg. Then I dragged him out of the wreckage.

His left leg had been sliced open, and blood was pouring out.

Up in the mountains, the temperature had dropped to four below zero. If we stayed there, we'd freeze to death, or the men hunting us would find us.

Our radios had been smashed in the fall, and there was no signal out here.

"Come on... we have to get out of here."

I held Luca up, and we waded through snow that came up past our knees.

I used every painkiller injection and dose of antibiotics we had to treat Luca's leg. As the needle went into his skin, he looked at my face. "Mara, are you really not hurt?"

"Really, Mr. Bellandi." I looked at him. "I'm tougher than a bear."

Luca believed me. Or rather, he wanted me to be invincible, because he needed me to go on being his protector.

We followed the ravine for three hours. Right before dark, we finally found a ranger's cabin.

The windows let in drafts, but the cabin could keep out the blizzard.

I helped Luca onto the wooden bed and got a fire going.

The helicopters and search teams hunting us roared along the ridge above. We had no radio and no rescue coming. All we had left was one ration bar and half a canteen of water.

Late that night, between his infected wound and the cold, Luca came down with a high fever. He lay on the wooden bed, shivering.

I sat by the fire, and I couldn't pretend anymore.

My broken ribs had caused internal bleeding. Pain burned through my chest.

I curled up in a corner with my hand clamped over my mouth, afraid to make a sound.

Cough... Cough, cough!

The coughs slipped out between my fingers.

I spat out a clot of blood that stained the snow red.

Right then, Luca opened his eyes.

He saw the blood at the corner of my mouth. He saw my face twisted with pain. And he saw the last ration bar.

Luca went completely still.
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  • The Don Learned to Love Me After I Died   Chapter 20

    The night Mara died, a storm of blood swept through the entire New York underworld.Luca led the enforcers himself and wiped out every elder who'd taken part in the coup, along with Dante, the adopted brother who'd betrayed him. But in the end, he honored Mara's last request. When he stood with his gun in front of Dante's daughter, a trembling five-year-old, he closed his eyes and lowered the gun. He didn't take his revenge out on the traitor's innocent family.Three days later, Mara's funeral was held at a quiet cemetery on Long Island.A light rain was falling. Celeste, dressed all in black, came to the grave with her husband, Thomas, at her side. The white rose who had once been so proud and untouchable now stood at Mara's headstone, sobbing too hard to speak.When the funeral was over and the mourners had gone, Celeste walked up to Luca, who was standing in the rain like a stone statue.She stood there without an umbrella and let the rain soak her hair. Then she shoved a heavy wood

  • The Don Learned to Love Me After I Died   Chapter 19

    Midtown Manhattan. The hotel hosting the peace summit.The crystal chandeliers gave off a cold glow. By the time Celeste's warning came through, I was already inside the venue with Luca. I pressed a hand to my earpiece, about to order the sniper team outside to storm the building.But all I got in my earpiece was the harsh crackle of static.Someone on the inside had cut off every line of communication in the building!My head snapped up, and I scanned the room like a hawk. At the far end of the long table, I saw Dante Bellandi, Luca's adopted brother and the man he trusted most, giving Luca a strange, twisted smile. And less than ten feet behind Luca, a waiter pushing a service cart was already reaching for the compact submachine gun hidden under a tray!"Luca! Get down!"There was no time to draw my gun. Once again, instinct took over before my mind could. I tore through the crowd like a frenzied leopard as gunfire erupted all around us, and I threw myself at Luca, who was standing b

  • The Don Learned to Love Me After I Died   Chapter 18

    I knew I shouldn't go back. I'd sworn to myself more times than I could count that even if Luca died in the streets of New York, I would never set foot in that mess again.But when I heard his ragged, desperate breathing on the other end of the line, the instinct I'd suppressed for five years broke loose in an instant. I couldn't stop myself from wondering if he was shivering alone in the dark again, the way he had when we were kids.Three days later, I led 30 handpicked Corsican fighters loyal only to me into Brooklyn. The borough was under tight lockdown, and we slipped in like ghosts.The men behind the coup had cut off every route in and out of the Bellandi estate. In the pouring rain, I snapped the necks of three sentries myself and blew up the power room. Then, reeking of gunpowder and soaked in blood and rain, I kicked open the door of the underground bunker where they were holding Luca.In the corner of the bunker, Luca was tied to a chair with his hands behind his back. Five y

  • The Don Learned to Love Me After I Died   Chapter 17

    Time had cut deep. Five years had left permanent marks on all our lives.Over those five years, Celeste became a star in the European business world. In the end, she married a French aristocrat named Thomas Moreau. Thomas didn't have Luca's dangerous, lethal pull, but he was mature and steady. From the first time he met Celeste, he treated her as the only woman in his world, and he chose her and stood by her without ever wavering. Now Celeste was the chair of the most influential security and finance group in Europe.She didn't cut me out of her life because of the love triangle we'd once been caught in. Instead, we became the most unlikely friends.We wrote each other a letter every month. By unspoken agreement, we never once mentioned the name "Luca Bellandi." We wrote about the Corsican sunshine, the ski slopes in the Alps, and how our businesses were growing. We also wrote about the old injuries from our younger days that were finally starting to catch up with us."Mara, last night

  • The Don Learned to Love Me After I Died   Chapter 16

    In the two years after Celeste left, Luca acted like a man possessed. When the Laurent family pulled its money out, the Bellandi family was thrown into the worst crisis it had ever faced. Luca's father was so furious he had a stroke and ended up bedridden, and the Bellandi family was under attack from inside and out. But even so, Luca spent most of his energy trying to win me back.He'd drive straight into a firefight in the middle of one of my jobs, not caring if he died, just to take a bullet for me. He'd stand outside my apartment building late at night in the pouring rain like a stray dog, all night long. He even ignored death threats from the Bellandi elders and stood up at a joint meeting of the underworld to announce, in front of everyone, that I was Luca Bellandi's one and only love.He knew perfectly well that all of this would put me right in the line of fire. But he didn't care. All he knew how to do was drown out the panic inside him with grand gestures that moved no one bu

  • The Don Learned to Love Me After I Died   Chapter 15

    It was a late-autumn night in New York, with a bitter chill in the air, but inside the glass greenhouse on the Bellandi estate, it felt like spring. Tomorrow was Luca and Celeste's wedding, the wedding of the century that the whole city was waiting for.I leaned against the greenhouse doorframe and watched Celeste in a thin silk nightgown, quietly trimming the expensive white roses with a small pair of scissors. She knew that tomorrow she would become the most revered Donna in the entire North American underworld. But there was no bridal joy on her face. There was only cold, absolute clarity."You came, Mara." She didn't turn around. She just held out a trimmed white rose to me.I walked over and took the flower, and a thorn pricked my fingertip. I looked at her pale profile, and an ache I couldn't put into words rose in my chest. Luca knew how much pressure her family was putting on Celeste over this wedding. He knew she'd been lying awake every night for days. But he'd chosen to hide

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