All Chapters of SUBSTITUTE BRIDE FOR THE MAFIA DON: Chapter 401 - Chapter 410

Andrea's POVThe whole place smelled of whisky. Sharp and sweet and heavy, like it had been spilled and left there to soak down into the rug and the wood and the walls.I stepped inside. Something crunched under my shoe. My hands had gone completely cold and my heart was slamming so hard against my ribs I could feel it in my throat, my ears, the roots of my hair. Every instinct I owned was screaming at me and I couldn't have told you what it was screaming, only that it was screaming one word over and over.Wrong. Wrong. Wrong."Dante!" I was almost shouting now, moving further in, past the wreckage, past the overturned chair. "Dante, answer me!"Nothing answered.The bedroom door stood ajar.I pushed it open and went in, and it was the same. It was worse. The sheets had been dragged half off the bed and left trailing on the floor. A drawer had been yanked clean out of the dresser and upended, clothes flung everywhere. There was a hole in the wall beside the closet, about fist height,

Andrea's POVI stripped the rest of his wet clothes off him, moving fast and impersonal, refusing to let myself feel any of it. His skin was flushed hot from the shower and he swayed against me constantly and his breath was sour and thick with whisky. I found a towel and got it around his waist and knotted it.Then I got my shoulder under his arm again and walked him out.Out of that steam-filled bathroom with its shattered mirror. Through the wreckage of his bedroom, past the hole in the wall and the emptied drawer and the clothes strewn across the carpet. To the bed—our bed, the bed where he had held me all night and made me breakfast in the morning and called me baby into my hair while the sun came up over the city—and I pushed the tangled sheets back and I sat him down on the edge of it.He went straight over backward, sprawling onto the mattress, all his strength finally gone.I lifted his legs up onto the bed and pulled the blanket over him.And then I stood there and looked at

Dante’s POVI woke up in my bed with the sun coming through the window.It was too bright. Slanting in high and hard, the kind of light that means the morning's long gone. Almost midday, I figured, from the angle of it. My mouth was dry as sand and my head was splitting, a deep ugly pounding behind my eyes that made me squint against the light and immediately regret being awake at all.For a moment I just lay there, trying to figure out how I'd gotten here.Then the flashes started coming.The shower. I remembered the shower. Standing under the water with my clothes still on, letting it run and run because I couldn't make myself do anything else. The whisky before that. The mirror—I closed my eyes. The mirror.I lifted my hands and looked at them, and they were bandaged. Both of them. Clean white gauze wrapped careful and neat around my knuckles, the kind of job you can't do drunk and one-handed. I stared at them, trying to make sense of it, and I couldn't remember doing it.And then

Andrea's POVThe flight back was one of the longest of my life.I couldn't settle into it at all. I couldn't read, couldn't watch anything, couldn't make my mind go quiet for even a minute. There was a bad feeling lodged deep in my chest and it refused to shift no matter what I did — a heavy, cold, wrong feeling, sitting right in the center of me like a stone dropped into still water, sending out ripples I couldn't calm.I kept trying to talk myself out of it. It's just the leaving, I told myself. Just the grief of it, the finality, the goodbye I'd sent from the runway with my thumb shaking over the screen. Of course my chest hurt. I'd just wrenched myself away from the man I loved and confessed everything to him on my way out of his life. Anyone would ache after that. Anyone would feel hollow and strange and off-balance.But it didn't feel like grief. That was the thing I couldn't get past. I knew grief by now — I'd been living inside its walls for two whole months, I knew every corn

Andrea's POVHe's going to be okay, I told myself, and the words came in his voice — his exact voice, from a car speeding toward a different hospital on a different terrible night, when it had been my turn to fall apart and his turn to hold the two of us together. He has to be okay. You're going to get on a plane, and you're going to go to him, and you're going to be right there in that room when he opens his eyes.I would not let myself finish the other thought. The one waiting just behind it. The one about how I would go on, how I could possibly go on, if he wasn't okay. If the very last time I ever saw him was drunk and broken and asleep in the wreck of that apartment. If I never got to watch those dark eyes open one more time. If I never got the chance to tell him, out loud, to his face, awake — the thing I'd only ever been brave enough to text him from a runway.I couldn't go there. I wouldn't. Because I knew that if I let myself fall into that particular dark I would never get b