SUBSTITUTE BRIDE FOR THE MAFIA DON のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 391 - チャプター 400

Dante's POVSo when her mother stood in that garden and asked me point-blank if I loved her daughter, I couldn't say it. Couldn't get the word out. I stood there mute like a coward, and my silence was its own kind of lie, and I hated myself for that on top of everything else.Then she told me why she was here.That I had to end it. That I couldn't give Andrea what she deserves—love said out loud, a safe life, an ordinary one. Not this. Not a man who carries a gun to work. Not a man who comes home some nights with someone else's blood dried under his nails. Not a man who can't say a four-letter word without his whole body locking up.And then she told me about Luca's mother.I didn't know. That's the thing that keeps snagging in me. Luca has never talked about her. Not once, in all the years, has he said more than a handful of words about the woman who bore him. I always figured grief. Now I understand it was something with more teeth than gri

Andrea's POV Because I knew that story. Or I'd always believed I did. Luca's parents, both gone on the same terrible day. A car accident, that's what everyone had always said. Sudden and tragic and over in a heartbeat. "Mum," I said slowly, the ground shifting under me. "Luca's mum and dad died in a car crash. That's what I've always been told. That's what everyone—" And my mother's face crumpled. She started to cry—really cry, the kind that rises up from somewhere ancient and buried, the kind she'd clearly been holding down under lock and key for more years than I'd been alive. "That's the story we tell," she said. "That's the kind one. The one that lets people sleep." She sank down onto the edge of the bed like her legs wouldn't hold her, and finally I moved. I crossed the room and sat down beside her, close, because whatever was coming I could see it was tearing something open in her that had been sealed shut for a very long time, and she shouldn't have to open it alone.

Andrea's POVAnd it turned out that was exactly what I needed. Not to be repaired. Just to not be alone in the wreckage.Luca had asked her to marry him again.A real wedding this time, out in the open, with vows and witnesses and all the light and beauty they'd been cheated out of the first time around. And they were doing it in Paris, because of course they were—because Luca would give that woman the whole world on a plate if she so much as glanced at it.Their love was almost hard to look at up close. Almost too bright. These two people who had walked through actual hell for each other—the kidnapping, the coma, the amnesia that had stolen her from his memory, the bomb that had nearly stolen him from the world entirely—and had come out the far side of all of it still reaching for each other's hands in the dark. It was beautiful in a way that made my own chest throb, because I could see so plainly what it looked like when two people fought for each other and won. When love was en

Andrea's POVHe was right. It was beautiful. Out here, away from the music and the golden light and all that happiness I couldn't seem to feel no matter how hard I tried, the sky was enormous and ancient and utterly indifferent to any of it. It made everything down here feel a little smaller. My broken heart included. There was a strange mercy in that—in standing under something so vast that it shrank your own pain down to a size you could almost carry.We stood in silence for a long while.It wasn't an uncomfortable silence. It was the particular kind that only two people carrying the same weight can share—where nothing needs to be filled, nothing needs to be explained, and the quiet itself is a kind of company.After a while, he spoke. Low, almost to himself, his eyes still on the stars."Attending a wedding with a broken heart," he murmured. "Such a recipe for disaster."I turned my head to look at him.And he must have felt it, or seen it in his side vision—the answering thing in

Dante's POVI left the reception and had a car take me back to the hotel.The room was dark and silent when I let myself in, only the city coming through the window, all those cold gold lights of Paris laid out below. I didn't turn on a single lamp. The dark suited me. I crossed straight to the bottle on the sideboard—went to it the way you go to the one thing in a room you can count on to do what it promises.I poured a glass. Sat down heavy in the chair by the window with it. Looked out at the city, at all those lights, at all those strangers out there living their small ordinary uncomplicated lives, not one of them knowing or caring that a man was sitting alone in a dark hotel room having just watched the only good thing that ever happened to him rest her head on somebody else's shoulder and look, for the first time in weeks, like she might be alright.The first glass didn't touch it. The second didn't either.After a while I gave up on the glass. I know exactly whose habit that is