All Chapters of REBORN AS THE BILLIONAIRE’S LITTLE FAIRY: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

ElettraThe rain had followed me all the way from Milan.By the time the taxi turned up the gravel road to Villa Vesperi, the wipers were losing the fight, and the driver kept glancing at me in the mirror as if I might ask him to turn around. I didn't. I was twenty-eight, I was wearing the green dress Dario liked, and in six weeks I was supposed to be married in the garden I was about to walk through.I paid the driver and ran for the porch with my shoes in my hand.The front hall was dark, and that was the first thing that felt wrong. My mother never let the hall go dark. Mirella Vesperi believed a house told strangers who you were, and hers always said wealthy and welcome. Tonight it said nothing. One lamp glowed at the far end of the corridor, down by my father's study, and a thin line of yellow light slid out from under a door that should have been shut.It was open a hand's width.Upstairs, the old clock on the landing struck nine. The sound rolled through the empty rooms and set

ElettraEnzo came with the bandage, as promised.He didn't look at me when he knelt on the marble, and he didn't speak. He pressed a folded towel against my side and wound a strip of gauze around my ribs so tightly that I gasped. His hands were shaking."Uncle," I whispered. "Please.""Don't.""You taught me to ride a bicycle.""I know what I did." His voice broke on the last word. He tied off the gauze and stood, still not meeting my eyes. "Can you walk?""I think so.""Then walk. Your old room. Quietly."He took my elbow, and I leaned on him because I had no choice. The stairs seemed to go on forever. Every step pulled a thread of pain through my side, and the blood from my palm left small dark prints on the bannister.My old room was at the end of the upstairs hall. Mirella had kept it exactly as I left it at nineteen. The yellow curtains, the shelf of paperbacks, the stuffed rabbit on the pillow that I was too embarrassed to throw away. Enzo helped me onto the bed. I looked at the

ElettraI got as far as the stairwell before I understood what I was doing.I'd dressed in a hurry, jeans and a grey sweater and the first shoes I found, and my keys were already in my fist. I only knew that Dario lived across the city in a flat I'd never liked, and that if I took the metro I could be at his door in thirty minutes. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to grab the front of his shirt and say it to him, all of it, every word I'd heard through that vent.I had one hand on the bannister when a tram rumbled past outside, and the whole building trembled, and I stopped.What would I say?I stood on the third step with my heart slamming and tried to picture it honestly. A twenty-three-year-old girl with swollen eyes turns up at her boyfriend's door at eight in the morning. She tells him that in the future he and her mother will forge her signature and leave her to bleed on a bedroom floor. He'd look at me with those tender, worried eyebrows. He'd put his hand on my arm. He'd say