Leaving My Bastard Don Husband, Now He Regrets It의 모든 챕터: 챕터 1 - 챕터 10

I walked out of that hallway like something had been knocked loose inside me. The night air cut through my thin clothes, but it wasn't cold enough to touch what I was feeling.I'd known since I was a little girl that I would become the Donna of the Fontaine Family, Dorian's wife. Two dynasties, bound by blood and business since before either of us were born. In our world, power alliances don't wait for love to catch up. Back then, I was just a girl who wanted love like anybody else.I still remember the first time I saw Dorian at a family dinner. He had just taken over the bloodiest end of the family's underground operations, and he wore a black custom suit, perfectly cut, moving through the room like he owned it because he did. When a rival family's hit squad crashed the event, he covered me without thinking, put the shooters down clean, then turned around and held out a handkerchief with a bloodied hand."Don't be afraid," he said, the corner of his mouth pulling into a smile that

When I pushed open the door to the basement guest room, the sight of it landed like a blow.Every piece of my life had been dumped there, my clothes, my books, everything I owned, thrown onto the cold, damp floor in no particular order. Several boxes had been deliberately broken in the move, their contents scattered everywhere.I crouched down and picked up a sterling silver dagger from the pile. He had given it to me on the day of our engagement, in front of both families, in the old tradition. It was supposed to mean something. Now it was lying in the mildew, the ruby missing from its sheath and lost somewhere in the mess. Next to it was my wedding veil, white lace now crushed under dirty boot prints and ruined beyond saving.He knew what these things meant to me. He'd always known. And he'd let this happen anyway.Jessica, you fool. You were the only one keeping those illusions alive. Seven years, and you were the only one.Footsteps landed above me. The basement had no insulation

After spending days shopping with Elena and bleeding money through every luxury store in the city, Dorian found, to his own confusion, that he felt none of the satisfaction he'd expected.In the past, any sign of distance from him would have sent me spiraling. I would have shown up at his door, called his phone, found some way to make myself useful and visible and impossible to ignore. But I'd gone completely quiet, and he told himself it was a tactic, playing hard to get, my latest move in some game I was running."You think this silence impresses me, Jessica?" he thought, with the cold amusement of a man who had never been kept waiting. She loves me too much to actually leave. A few days, a small gesture, and she'll be back.That thought was interrupted by a call from one of his white-collar operatives, a man so shaken he could barely finish his sentences."Boss. It's bad. The FBI somehow got their hands on five years of the family's complete underground arms ledgers and every money

Six months passed.Every property, every car, every casino, all of it sold off to cover the debts. The man who had once been untouchable was completely stripped. Don Fontaine had nothing left.To hide from the loan sharks and the rivals who wanted him dead, Dorian had taken Elena, nine months pregnant, enormous, and furious, back to the slums she'd come from. They were living in a cramped, leaking shack that smelled of rot and mold, exactly like his life.One night, during a thunderstorm, Elena gave birth on a filthy mattress in that shack. When the baby's crying filled the room and Dorian finally got a look at the child he had burned everything for, the air in the shack went still.The baby had dark skin, tight curls, and full lips. He was not Dorian's.The truth arrived like something inevitable. Elena, his beloved, his obsession, the pure and delicate creature he had given up everything to protect, had been sleeping with half the slum for years, with dealers and low-level gangsters

After that day, Don Fontaine disappeared from the story of New York entirely. The escape and the assault charge were added to the federal case against him, and he was sent to the deepest level of a maximum security federal facility, where he would spend the rest of his life.Mine kept opening up.In the years that followed, Dominic loved me with the kind of thoroughness and patience that I'd once believed didn't exist for people like me. When the grief of the past caught me in the night, he'd land his plane on whatever airstrip was closest, drive to wherever I was, and take me somewhere I liked for ice cream, just to sit with me.Under that care, the last of the seven years' damage finally healed. I stopped being the woman who had spent everything on a man who was poisoning her. I became someone else, a woman who ran a global foundation, who had built something real, who trusted her own judgment again.I adopted children through the foundation over those years, children with disabilit