บททั้งหมดของ His Heart Was Never Mine: บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 8

The next morning I woke up and the other side of the bed had been cold for hours.Numb, I opened Instagram. Cecilia had posted ten minutes earlier: Craving a sandwich, so Don Moretti drove twenty-five miles to get me one, then dropped me at the office on his way back.I remembered all the nights I had stayed up until dawn handling Family business, then asked him to drop me at headquarters because he was going that way.He always refused, flat and cold. He never rearranged anything for me.Back then, I thought he was simply made that way, that he treated everyone with the same coldness. Now I understood. He had only ever refused to make room for me.I drove myself to Moretti Family headquarters.As I stepped into the elevator, I heard the people in front of me talking."Did you see Don Moretti just now? That was Cecilia Bellini getting out of his car, wasn't it? Everyone knows she's the one he's loved all these years.""I heard the whole residence was custom-built for Cecilia. Even the

The ambulance raced to the hospital with Lucy inside.I held her cold hand the entire ride, shaking so hard I could not stop.My parents died when I was small, and I entered the cold world of the Mafia while I was still a child, with no one to protect me and no one to favor me. I had learned to live with it long ago.Lucy was the only one who ever saw through everything I was pretending to be. In all the times I was cut down, she was the one who talked me through it and kept me whole.When the Family turned on itself, she was the one who put herself in front of me. I ended up the Donna and she ended up working for me, but to me she was family.By the time we reached the ER, my hands would not stop shaking. The old injury sent agony through every nerve in my body.Damian looked at how wrung out I was, and for once the coldness fell away. He pulled me into his arms."It's all right. I'm here."That faint warmth left me with one last sliver of hope.Maybe he was not entirely without a hea

(Grace’s POV)It was only when I met the director of the European program that I understood I had actually made a choice.The director brought out some of my earliest work. "Ms. Sterling, we loved the pieces you sent us all those years ago."I grew up in an orphanage, in days that were cramped and airless. What carried me through all those nights was an architecture and design show on television.I had never received any formal art training. Armed with only a few episodes of that show and sheer passion, I learned how to submit my work and mailed in my drawings.Maybe fate was being kind and giving me one chance. I was holding the ticket to Europe in my hand when Damian called.What I felt for him when I was young had gone in too deep. He was the one beam of light in a gray childhood. So when he asked me to marry him, I tore that ticket up without a second of hesitation and stayed in the dark for his sake.What I thought was two people running toward each other was, in the end, a one-wo

Time went fast. I had said goodbye to the past and settled fully into life in Europe.After finishing the program, I saved what I earned from my designs and opened a small independent studio specializing in adaptive reuse and architectural redesign. I built a real name for myself in Europe's architecture scene.I said yes when Julian proposed. He was the one who had been at my side through all of it, healing what had been torn in me with nothing but gentleness. We walked every street in Europe and watched more sunsets than I can count. When my hand flared up he would put warm compresses on it, and he could never stand to let me carry anything heavy. That steadiness was something I had never known.Because I trusted him that much, I told him about Lucy.That tragedy, born out of one man's favoritism, was the thing I had buried deepest and refused to speak about for so long.Julian wiped the tears from the corner of my eye, and his gaze was steady and sure. "Grace, if it hurts too much y