Betrayed on My Birthday, Crowned By A True Don Chapter 08

Betrayed on My Birthday, Crowned By A True Don Chapter 08

Raphael had just signaled his men forward when I stopped him. He looked at me, surprised.

I kissed him lightly on the cheek.

Then I turned and looked at Dante.

“Dante. We’ve been finished for a long time.”

He was shaking his head before I’d finished. “Those thirty minutes in that cage, all I could think

about was us. What we had-”

“What we had should never have existed.” No warmth. Not a degree of it. “Meeting you was the

worst luck of my life. If I could do it over, I would choose never to meet you.”

The last thing that had been alive in his eyes went out.

What he felt then was worse than the dog, worse than the cage. A pain that went deeper than the

physical, that had no location in the body because it had no body to belong to.

He sank to his knees on the cold floor, bloody and broken, mumbling into the concrete:

“Elena… how did it end up like this…”

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“We were going to get married… Elena… Elena…”

I didn’t look back.

I heard, later, what became of them.

Camilla was exiled to a lawless pocket of the city’s outskirts, a neighborhood the legitimate world had stopped pretending to govern. Without the Don’s protection, her entire playbook was useless. The men she found herself among weren’t charmed by soft hands or calculated tears. She had traded a palace for a place that would grind her down to nothing.

The Caruso family imploded. Their money-laundering operations and smuggling routes were

absorbed piece by piece into the Lucchesi empire, systematically, without mercy, without apology. Lorenzo left after delivering a single line: a Don who betrays the woman closest to him isn’t worth

following. He took the accounts with him when he went.

Dante was left with a name and no family to hold it up.

(Dante’s POV)

The last two weeks had been the cruelest stretch of my life.

I was hollowing out. The man in the mirror was a stranger: sunken eyes, no sleep, a jaw full of

unshaved stubble. I looked like someone who had stopped bothering.

When a man drowns in absolute despair, his mind commits its worst sabotage. It drags him back,

compulsively, relentlessly, to exactly the warmth he threw away.

Elena.

Before the lies. Before Camilla.

The weight of her curled against my chest. The particular brightness of her eyes when they hadn’t

yet learned what they’d have to learn. She’d asked me once, quietly, what I thought our future

would look like.

I had laughed and run my hand through her hair and painted her a whole empire.

“We’ll grow old together,” I’d told her. “Maybe one kid, maybe two. A girl with your face and a boy

with my temper. And Sunny, we’ll raise him until he’s the most feared and happiest Cane Corso in

Chicago.”

The private line rang.

Elena.

The thought hit me like a current. I lunged for the phone, hands shaking.

“Elena?!”

It wasn’t her voice. It was my father’s, my predecessor, the former Don, and he was incandescent

with fury.

“Dante, you animal. Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Because of you, because you made an enemy of Raphael Lucchesi, three of our Capos were executed in the street yesterday. Shot in the head on a public road. Their blood was on the pavement.”

“Do you know what Elena sacrificed for you? Her leg wasn’t an accident. That hit was meant for you.

The Marino family sent someone to take you out over that rail contract. She walked into the path of it and let them break her instead. She hid it from you for years because she didn’t want you carrying the guilt. And this is what you gave her in return.”

“You are a disgrace to everything this family ever stood for. As of this moment, you are no longer my son.”