Betrayed on My Birthday, Crowned By A True Don Chapter 05

Betrayed on My Birthday, Crowned By A True Don Chapter 05

Raphael’s arrival dropped the temperature of the corridor to something approaching absolute zero.

His security detail came with him: Lucchesi family elite, fully armed, moving in the disciplined silence of men who had never needed to prove anything. As the supreme authority of the Lucchesi empire, his presence didn’t so much enter a room as consume it.

His eyes dropped to my shattered phone on the floor. He understood instantly why I hadn’t

answered.

He raised one hand, a barely perceptible flick of the fingers, and his men moved like water. Dante’s

crew were discarded like broken furniture.

Dante recognized him immediately.

Raphael Lucchesi. Undisputed heir to the Lucchesi family. The highest-ranked Don in the country. A man who governed both a legitimate business empire and the most feared criminal operation on the continent. He had assumed the throne at sixteen, when other boys were still figuring

themselves out, and cemented his power by wading through the blood of every challenger. His

name was spoken in reverence and in terror across every underground network from Chicago to

Miami.

He was also, objectively, the most striking man in any room he walked into, which tended to compound the problem of dealing with him.

No one here except me had been expecting him. They stood in petrified silence, trying to deduce

what this visit meant and failing.

Camilla stared at his face, cold and lethal and breathtaking, and felt color rise in her ears. “Mr.

Lucchesi, to what do we owe the pleasure?”

Dante elbowed her sharply. She caught herself. The underground clinic was Lucchesi property. Every square foot of it.

“Oh-” Camilla scrambled to recover. “Have we strayed into your territory? It’s her fault, she-”

She expected to find me huddled on the floor.

Instead I was standing behind Raphael, wrapped in his coat.

Raphael didn’t look at Camilla. He fixed his gaze on Dante and spoke.

“This isn’t the place. Bring them.”

The next moment, Dante and Camilla received exactly the treatment I’d received two hours before.

Black bags over their heads, zip ties at the wrists, shoved into the back of an unmarked SUV. Like

the lowest kind of street trash.

Dante had not expected to end up in a Lucchesi interrogation room.

Everyone in the underworld knew what that meant. The Lucchesi dynasty was built on a foundation

of bodies, and no one who had ever made an enemy of them had lived to describe the experience. Calling this space an interrogation room was generous; it was a dungeon. The only rival family that had ever moved openly against the Lucchesis had been erased overnight, every member, every bloodline, without a trace.

The smell of old iron soaked the damp air. Dante went white.

Then he saw me.

I was descending the concrete steps slowly, unhurried. I didn’t look at him. I walked directly to Raphael’s side.

Raphael looked at me with open concern and let out a quiet sigh. “I told you not to come down here.

It’s too cold.” He removed his suit jacket and settled it over my shoulders.

Dante’s expression broke.

He wasn’t stupid. Whatever existed between Elena and Raphael was not new. It was not nothing.

When had this started?

Camilla, meanwhile, had started to panic.

“Elena, when did you start throwing yourself at Mr. Lucchesi? You shameless, manipulative little — I feel so sorry for the Don. He actually believed you were a decent woman. You disgusting—”

Crack.

No command necessary. Raphael’s men knew their function. One stepped forward and backhanded Camilla across the face hard enough to put her on the floor. The bruise was immediate.

Dante looked at us, his eyes going cold with something lethal. “Elena. What is this?”

Raphael regarded him with the expression of a man who had just been told a joke too absurd to

dignify with a laugh.

“She,” Raphael said, “is my Donna.”