Betrayed on My Birthday, Crowned By A True Don Chapter 09

Betrayed on My Birthday, Crowned By A True Don Chapter 09

(Dante’s POV)

The curses kept coming until there was nothing left to say.

I had no voice.

Elena had given more than I’d ever let myself calculate.

By the time the call ended, every number I had was dead. Former allies, lieutenants, family friends:

I was blocked on all of them. I had been cut free.

I hadn’t eaten in nearly two days. I didn’t notice.

Chicago winter came through the cracked floor-to-ceiling window in continuous waves, cold and indifferent, and somewhere below the numbness something manic and desperate was trying to

climb.

Even if everyone else was gone, I still had the family itself. The organization Elena and I had built from nothing. She wouldn’t abandon that entirely, would she?

I went to the family’s underground headquarters for the first time in weeks.

On the mahogany table: dozens of family crests, set down with deliberate finality. My oldest

lieutenants. My senior staff. They were returning their territories. They were leaving.

I heard the sound my knuckles made when I clenched my fists. Bone against bone. Too loud in the

silence.

I forced myself to look like a Don. When I spoke, the despair came through anyway.

“Why.”

“You’re men in your forties. If you betray this family, which other outfit is going to take you in?”

The lead lieutenant met my eyes. The old deference was gone.

“With respect, Don. Everyone at this table knows how bad things have gotten. And we all know who

actually ran the day-to-day operations that kept this family alive. The police payments. The

laundering networks. Negotiating with other outfits. That was Elena.”

“She’s

gone. And Lucchesi has offered us double the earnings and full protection.”

That name.

Lucchesi. Again. Always Raphael Lucchesi.

I put my foot through a solid oak chair and screamed at every one of them to get out.

When the room had actually emptied, the silence that replaced the noise was worse.

All those years. I had looked at everything Elena quietly built and maintained and simply expected it to continue, as though it required nothing from her, as though it cost her nothing.

Last winter I’d taken a bullet in the shoulder. Fever had set in, the dangerous kind. Elena had stayed up for three days straight: managing the wound, keeping watch with a loaded gun at the door, refusing to sleep until I was out of danger.

And I had dismissed that woman for not being soft enough.

Nothing but regret.

I didn’t leave. I sat in the Don’s chair from dark until dawn, waiting for something that wasn’t going

to come.

At one point I thought I saw Elena in the doorway. I launched myself across the room to reach her.

I fell through empty air.

(Elena’s POV)

Half a year passed in what felt like a held breath.

My wedding to Raphael was approaching.

There was a reason for the delay.

That night in the interrogation room, faced with his confession, genuine and devastated and the kind of thing a person only says once, I had hesitated. Dante’s damage was still fresh in me. And beyond that, Raphael and I didn’t truly know each other. I had accepted his proposal in a moment of

pain and fury, and honesty demanded I acknowledge that. Rushing into a marriage, in that state,

would have been irresponsible to both of us.

Raphael had read my hesitation before I’d said a word. His beautiful, dangerous face showed no

anxiety. Only warmth.

“Then let’s take the time to know each other properly.”

“I’m absolutely certain you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. So wait until your heart is just as certain, and then we’ll marry.”

The afternoon light caught his amber eyes. My heart skipped a beat with uncomfortable clarity.

We left the violence behind for a while. Traveled the world.

Norway for the winter dark and the northern lights over snow. Iceland chasing the aurora.

Antarctica for the penguins. The autumn forests of the Australian highlands.

In Naples we were ambushed by a local crew with territorial ideas. Raphael drew without hesitation and put himself between me and the threat, solid and immovable, before any of his security team

had reached us.

Between the adrenaline and the quiet, the accumulated weight of ordinary days together, my uncertainty eroded piece by piece.

The second time he knelt in front of me, I was ready.

I let him slide the ring onto my finger. A pink diamond, flawless and enormous and absurd. My eyes

went hot and wet.

“Yes.”

Raphael had not cried since he was five years old. In the world he’d grown up in, that wasn’t

permitted.

His eyes turned red.

He lifted me off the ground and held me there, spinning once, twice, his face buried in my neck.

That evening I lay in the warmth of his arms and we talked about our childhoods. Counted stars through the glass roof of the estate.

Then I noticed the open safe.

Inside: half an antique bloodstone pendant. Old. Dark red. Cracked cleanly down the middle.

I stared.

My hands shaking, I reached beneath my collar and pulled out the other half.

My mother had arranged a betrothal for me when I was a child, an old-fashioned contract between families. I had been in my rebellious years. I flatly refused to honor it, put the pendant away, and

never thought about it again.

Raphael went very still when he heard me speak. Then a kind of wonder overtook him and he pulled

me against him so tightly I could feel his heartbeat.

“Our fate was tied together long before either of us knew what to do with it.”

Through his story I finally understood the whole truth.

My mother had once saved Raphael’s father, the old Don of the Lucchesi family. In gratitude, and to

bind the two bloodlines together, the old Don had broken a centuries-old Sicilian bloodstone in two.

Half for Raphael. Half for me.

The two pieces had been separated for more than twenty years.

Tonight they were whole again.

Something immense moved through me: a joy too large for the words I had for it, and a sadness for all the time already spent.

Tears came without warning.

Raphael was immediately, entirely flustered. He kissed my face, used his thumb to catch each tear

as fast as it fell.

“Please don’t cry, mia cara. Every tear you shed, I feel it break something in me.”