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Chapter 7

Autor: Helen
Two months later, the Bellandi family held a charity gala at the InterContinental in Manhattan. It was the first time Luca and Celeste appeared in public as an engaged couple.

They stood in the glare of the camera flashes, the mafia heir and the European aristocrat. Everyone said they were a match made in heaven.

I wore a tactical suit and stood behind a support pillar on the ballroom's second level, doing my job as a bodyguard.

Suddenly, I caught a red glint on the glasses in the champagne tower across the room.

It was a sniper's laser sight! The red dot was moving toward the stage!

"We're under attack! Get down!"

I vaulted over the second-floor railing, charged at the podium, and tackled Luca and Celeste to the floor at the same time.

Bang!

The shot rang out through the ballroom, and a bullet blew apart the microphone on the podium.

"Mara, are you okay?!" Luca shouted over the chaos.

"Mr. Bellandi, get Ms. Laurent to the safe house! I'll take care of them!"

I drew both my guns and followed the line of fire toward the top floor of the hotel.

But I'd walked into a trap. When I kicked open the door to the roof, three hitmen were already waiting, and they pinned me down in the mechanical room. They laid down so much fire that I couldn't lift my head. Bullets whizzed past my cheek.

Just when I thought I was about to be shot to pieces, Celeste's voice came over the hotel's PA system.

"Security Team Two, the assassins are in the Section B stairwell. Hit it with everything you've got! Repeat, the assassins are in the Section B stairwell!"

She hadn't gone to the safe house with Luca. She'd doubled back to the control room and used the PA to throw my attackers off.

The hitmen froze for a split second, thinking they'd been surrounded.

That was the opening I needed. I sprang out from cover, firing both guns. A bullet grazed my stomach, but I took on all three of them alone and killed every one.

Holding my stomach, I made my way downstairs. In the emergency stairwell, I ran into Celeste on her way up.

When she saw I was covered in blood, the color drained from her face. She steadied me, not caring that the blood was ruining her gown. She tore off a strip of her skirt, crouched down, and pressed it against my wound.

"First aid kit! Bring me a first aid kit, now!" Celeste yelled at the bodyguards, her fingers trembling.

As she cleaned the wound, she also saw the 32 old scars on my body, the kind of marks high society would call ugly. Now they were laid bare in front of her.

Celeste's hands stopped. She looked up at me. "Mara... did you take all of these for him?"

I gritted my teeth and nodded.

"If I had half your courage," Celeste said with a bitter smile as she tied off the bandage, "I would never have let my family decide who I marry. I wouldn't have been shipped off to New York like a bargaining chip."

She finally understood that I wasn't just some underling clinging to the heir. Every scar on my body was a badge of honor I'd earned by putting my life on the line.

Just then, the stairwell door burst open.

Luca rushed in with his men. His first instinct was to go right past me to Celeste and look her over. "Celeste! Are you hurt? The control room was too dangerous. You shouldn't have run off like that!"

I leaned against the wall and watched him fuss over Celeste. The wound in my stomach hurt so badly I couldn't breathe.

Celeste shook off Luca's hand and pointed at me. "Luca, you should be checking on the person who just risked her life for you! Mara's stomach wound is still bleeding!"

That was when Luca finally turned around. When he saw my face and all the blood on the floor, regret and panic flashed in his eyes.

But the moment he stepped right past me had already crushed the last bit of hope I'd been clinging to.
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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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