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Chapter 6

Autor: Helen
Celeste was like a white rose blooming at the very peak of power. She wasn't just beautiful. She had a sharp, savvy mind that no one could ignore.

She'd only been in New York for three days when she got the Bellandi family's overseas accounts unfrozen. The FBI had kept them locked for three months. She pulled it off through the Laurent family's connections at Swiss banks. A full five hundred million dollars flowed back into the Bellandi coffers, and the elders who'd been reserving judgment on her started looking at her with something close to worship.

Luca had told his father to his face that he was against the match. But I knew how ambitious he was. Faced with Celeste's vast resources and her head for finance, he had no choice but to take her seriously.

I'd assumed that a high-and-mighty aristocrat like Celeste would pick up on what was going on between Luca and me, and then do whatever it took to humiliate me and put me in my place.

But I was wrong.

That afternoon, I was on duty in the hallway when Celeste walked up to me in her high heels. She didn't look at me the way everyone else in the Bellandi family did, like I was the help. She stopped, looked me in the eye, and spoke in English with a French accent.

"You're Mara, right? I heard about what happened to you two in the Pennsylvania mountains."

I tensed up, ready to hit back. "Yes, Ms. Laurent."

Then, out of nowhere, Celeste dipped her head in a small bow, and she sounded completely sincere. "Thank you. Thank you for protecting Luca all these years. Without you, he wouldn't be alive today."

I stood there, stunned. I had no idea how to respond to such unexpected kindness.

What caught me even more off guard came the next day. The Bellandi family's security team received a shipment of the best tactical gear in the world, including brand-new bulletproof vests and tactical boots.

Aldo, who was handing out the gear, grumbled that Ms. Laurent had insisted on it.

I looked down at my own leather boots, cracked from years of hard wear. Suddenly I understood. In the hallway, Celeste's eyes had lingered on my feet a second longer than they needed to. She'd seen how hard up I was, and she'd quietly taken care of it in a way that let me keep my pride.

She was too perfect. So perfect that even being jealous of her made me feel ugly and small.

Meanwhile, something shifted in the way Luca treated me. He still held me late at night and swore he would never agree to the marriage. But during the day, he was spending more and more time in the study with Celeste, talking over Bellandi business.

They talked about European shipping law, offshore trusts, and political lobbying, none of which I understood. Whenever Luca was with Celeste, I could see it in his eyes: the thrill of finally meeting his match, and the sheer satisfaction of having someone who understood his ambitions completely. Watching it felt like 1,000 needles stabbing into my heart.

Luca knew I was on duty right outside the study. He knew it hurt me to listen to them talking and laughing. But he didn't care. Or rather, he was too caught up in the rush of having power and a brilliant mind on his side.

That lasted until the afternoon I carried a cup of coffee to the study door.

I heard Don Bellandi ask, "Luca, do you still think the Laurent woman isn't good enough for you?"

There was a silence, and then I heard Luca's voice.

"No, Father. I have to admit, Celeste... really is the woman best suited to be Donna."

The cup rattled violently in my hand. Scalding coffee splashed onto the back of my hand, but I couldn't feel the heat at all.
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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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