The Don’s Fake Poverty Chapter 04

The Don’s Fake Poverty Chapter 04

Killian’s POV

The OR light stayed red for three days straight.

Her brother took a bullet for me. I owed the Costello family a life.

That damn debt nailed me to the floor outside the OR doors.

I yanked at my tie and checked my watch.

Three days.

There was no heating in Brooklyn. The blizzard was brutal. Aria was alone in that crappy apartment.

She’d freeze.

Finally, the OR doors swung open.

Nurses wheeled Chloe out, her head wrapped in thick bandages.

The head surgeon gave a short, nervous nod. “Mr. Moretti, the surgery was a success.”

I let out a long breath and turned to leave.

“Kil…”

Chloe struggled to reach out. She gripped the cuff of my bespoke suit.

She panted weakly, but a flash of pure malice crossed her eyes.

“Kil, you stayed with me for three days. Don’t you dare go back to that gutter rat from Brooklyn,” she spat, her voice dripping with venom. “What’s so good about that bitch? She doesn’t even own decent shoes. She doesn’t deserve to stand by your side!”

Bile rose in my throat. My patience shattered.

“Shut up!”

I violently shook off her hand.

The IV pole wobbled wildly. The needle almost ripped right out of her vein.

Chloe screamed in terror and stared at me in shock.

I glared down at her. I didn’t hide my disgust.

“She might be poor, but she’s a million times the woman you are! All you want is my money and power!” I lowered my voice. Every word dripped with ice. “You don’t even have the right to say her name.”

I ignored the guards and doctors in the hallway and stormed into the elevator.

I needed to see Aria. Now.

I’d tell her everything. I’d shower her in the Moretti fortune. I’d make her the goddamn queen of New York.

I floored the gas and raced all the way back to Brooklyn.

“Aria! I’m home!”

I burst into the rundown apartment.

Only dead, suffocating silence answered me.

No lights in the kitchen. No hot food. No Aria running over to hug me.

The air even smelled sour and musty.

My blood ran cold. I rushed into the bedroom.

Everything was still there, but a thin layer of dust covered the desk.

I stumbled back to the living room. My eyes locked onto the dining table.

Right in the middle sat a tarnished, blackened silver ring.

The cheap fifty-dollar band I’d bought off the street.

She used to treat it like a treasure. Now, she threw it away.

My breathing grew heavy. I followed the sour smell to the kitchen trash can.

Inside lay a crushed, cheap cardboard box.

Inside the box was a sour, moldy strawberry cake.

The receipt stuck to the packaging screamed at me: $5.90. Date: December 24th.

The air left my lungs. A sledgehammer smashed into my chest.

Four days ago. That was our three-year anniversary!

I frantically pulled out my phone and dialed her number.

“The number you dialed is out of service.”

Out of service!

I flipped the dining table. The crack of breaking wood was deafening.

“Luigi!” I roared, my eyes bloodshot. “Find her! Turn this city upside down! I want a timeline of her every

goddamn move for the last four days!”

Half an hour later.

Luigi, my head of intel, dropped to his knees. He handed me a thin piece of paper.

“Boss… your wife… she took a part-time delivery job on the night of the blizzard.”

“Where to?” My voice shook.

“Manhattan… Outside the Waldorf Astoria. Exactly… when you and Miss Chloe were parking downstairs.”

My mind went completely blank.

She heard everything.

The next day, she even came to the Long Island estate. She watched me carry another woman away-the

same woman who’d called her gutter trash. And I let it happen.

I didn’t just lose my mind. I broke it.

For a whole month, I used all of the Moretti family’s underground networks, hackers, and FBI moles. I

turned the entire country upside down.

But there were no flight records. No train tickets. No credit card swipes.

Until early this morning. My men found the last clue at a slum bus stop with no cameras.

She used her last three thousand dollars in cash to buy a ticket for a rundown Greyhound bus heading

West.

No ID required. It crossed half of America, passing through hundreds of ghost towns.

For three years, to hide my identity, I “protected” her so well that she became an invisible nobody.

The mask I made for her became her perfect cover to escape me.

The snow outside fell harder.

I slumped onto the freezing floor.

I reached out and shakily pulled the stinking cake box from the trash.

Scrawled on the side of the box in cheap marker:

Happy 3rd Anniversary Kil & Aria. We are going to have a home.

Tears hit the rotten, blackened frosting.

I hugged the broken cardboard box tight and buried my face in it.

“Where are you… Aria… I was wrong…”