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Chapter 4

Autor: Helen
On our second day trapped in the ranger's cabin, hunger gnawed at my stomach.

I looked at the last ration bar and swallowed. Fighting through the pain in my ribs, I broke it apart and held the biggest piece to Luca's lips.

"Mr. Bellandi, you need to eat something." I tried to keep my voice steady.

Luca stared at the crumbs left in my hand. His voice was hoarse. "What about you? Mara, you can't make it on just that."

"When I went out for firewood earlier, I found some wild berries under the snow," I lied, forcing myself to smile. "They were really sour, but they filled me up. I'm still stuffed."

Luca knew there was no way berries could be growing in all that ice and snow. He knew my face had lost its color because I was bleeding inside. But he was too weak, so he chose to believe my lie. He ate the piece I'd given him, and I turned my head away to wipe off the blood seeping from the corner of my mouth.

On the fourth day, Luca took a turn for the worse. His wound was infected, and he was burning up.

"Cold... Mara, I'm so cold..." He curled up on the wooden bed, his teeth chattering.

The fire was dying. I took off my coat and wrapped it around him. Then, ignoring the stabbing pain of my broken ribs, I held him in my arms and warmed him with my own body heat.

"Luca, stay awake. Look at me!" I patted his cheeks, and my tears dropped onto the tip of his nose. "Remember? When I was ten, you shoved that jerk who was bad-mouthing me into the fountain. You were so tough back then. How could you die in a place like this?"

Half-conscious, Luca managed a weak smile. He buried his face in the curve of my neck, soaking up my warmth.

On the sixth day, the blizzard still hadn't let up. Luca's fever had come down a little, but despair had settled over him.

"Mara, maybe we really aren't getting out of here." He leaned against me, staring up at the roof. "You know... ever since I was a kid, death has never been what scares me most."

I stroked his black hair and said nothing.

"What scares me most is turning into my father." There was a bitter edge to his voice. "A heartless Don who climbed to the top over dead bodies. If the price of getting out of here alive is becoming a monster like that, I'd rather die in the snow with you."

My heart clenched. In that cabin, he'd dropped the heir's mask. He wasn't Mr. Bellandi. He was just my Luca.

By the eighth day, I couldn't hold on much longer. It was getting hard to breathe, and every breath came with a wet, bubbling sound.

I thought we were both going to die there.

I looked at the man lying beside me, and I finally crossed the one line I'd never let myself cross.

I leaned down and pressed my lips to his.

Luca opened his eyes.

"I love you, Luca." I looked at him as the tears fell. "I've loved you since I was ten, since the day you pressed half of that medal into my hand. I've kept it inside all these years. I don't want to die with this secret."

Luca froze. Then he rolled over, pinned me beneath him, and kissed me back wildly. His kiss tasted of blood and desperation.

"If we make it out of here alive..." Luca cupped my face. "Mara, listen to me. Once we get off this mountain, I'm going to take over the family and break every one of those rules! I'll marry you, and I'll make sure all of New York knows that you, Mara Quinn, are the only wife Luca Bellandi will ever have!"

I closed my eyes and let the tears come. That one promise made up for every scar I'd collected over ten years.

On the morning of the tenth day, the snow finally stopped. But with the quiet came the frantic barking of search dogs.

They were closing in.

I took one look at Luca, still asleep, grabbed the only gun we had left, and walked outside. I left a trail of footprints in the snow on purpose and ran away from the cabin as fast as I could.

"Over there! Open fire!"

Gunfire exploded through the snowy valley.

The moment a bullet hit me and I fell into the river, I heard the roar of the Bellandi family's rescue helicopter.

Luca, you're saved. Remember your promise.
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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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