Too Late To Love: The Don's Dying Wife
At my boyfriend's poorest moment, I suddenly broke up with him.
Later, he became a Don in the Mafia and married me by any means necessary.
Everyone said he loved me to the bone.
But every night, he brought different women home, deliberately trying to provoke me.
I asked no questions, shed no tears, and never disturbed his trysts with his mistresses.
He went crazy with rage instead, kissing me fiercely and demanding, "Why aren't you jealous?"
He didn't know I was sick. Dying.
While he was furiously taking his revenge on me, I was slowly walking toward death.
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Chapter 10
The sound was rhythmic. Relentless. Beep. Beep. Beep.
The sharp sting of antiseptic filled my lungs.
I tried to force my eyes open, but my eyelids felt heavy, sewn shut by exhaustion.
I heard voices. Loud, fractured voices.
"She's dying, Dante! How did you not see it?"
It was Giulia. My best friend. My sister in everything but blood.
She was screaming, her voice torn raw with a fury I had never before heard her aim at a man of his station.
"I thought she was lying," Dante's voice said. His voice was a ruin, as if he had been gargling with broken glass. "I saw the video. I thought it was a game. Another ploy for money."
"A game?" Giulia yelled. "Do you imagine coughing up one's own lungs is a parlor game? That this skeleton in the bed is some grand performance?"
I summoned what little strength remained in me and forced my eyelids apart. A sliver of light.
I was in a hospital room.
Dante was standing by the window. He looked disheveled, a jarring departure from his usual, severe perfection. His shirt was still stained with my blood. He hadn't changed.
"Fix her," he said to the man in the white coat, his tone admitting no possibility of refusal.
The doctor shook his head, his expression one of profound gravity. "Mr. Cavallaro, it doesn't make sense. She stopped treatment months ago."
"Why?" Dante demanded, striding forward. "Why did she stop?"
"She couldn't afford it," the doctor said quietly. "The course of immunotherapy she required is not covered by any conventional insurance. It demanded substantial cash payments, up-front."
Dante staggered back as if he had been dealt a physical blow.
"Money?" he whispered. "She stopped treatment over money?"
He looked down at his own hands, which had begun to tremble.
"I have millions. I have billions."
Silence stretched, suffocating and heavy.
"I cut her off," he said. The realization hit him as a physical impact. "I froze everything. Even her jewelry. I left her with nothing."
I saw his knees buckle. He grabbed the windowsill to stay upright, his knuckles bleaching white from the pressure.
"I killed her," he whispered.
Giulia stepped forward. She slammed a folder onto the table.
"This is her Living Will," she said. Her voice was cold. Deadly.
Dante looked at the folder as if it were a venomous snake. "What is this?"
"It says Do Not Resuscitate," Giulia said.
Dante shook his head, his features contorting in denial. "No."
Giulia continued, unrelenting. "It says no extraordinary measures. It says she wants to go without pain. It says she doesn't want you to extend her suffering just to make yourself feel better."
"Burn it," Dante said. He lunged for the folder. "I'm taking her to Switzerland. I'm taking her to the best specialists. I will buy every doctor in the world."
"You can't buy life, Dante!" Giulia screamed. She pushed him back, with surprising force. "She saved you!"
Dante froze. "What?"
Giulia was crying now. Tears coursed down her angry face. "She didn't leave you because you were poor, you idiot! She left you because her father was going to put a bullet in your brain!"
The room went silent. The only sound was the monitor. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Dante stared at her. His face was pale. Ghostly.
"She broke your heart to save your life," Giulia sobbed. "She has loved you every single day for ten years. And you... you treated her like garbage."
Dante turned slowly to look at the bed. He looked at me. He saw the tubes. The bruises. The skeleton under the sheets.
He was, at last, looking upon the truth of his own making.
He walked over to the bed. He fell to his knees. He took my hand. He was seized by a violent tremor.
"Elena," he whispered. He pressed his forehead against my palm. "Open your eyes, baby. Please. Tell me it's a lie."
I looked at him. I saw the man I loved. And I saw the man whose cruelty I had so carefully cultivated.
I didn't have the strength to speak. I just pulled my hand away.
It was a small movement. But it broke him.
He let out a sound that wasn't human. A howl of pure, unadulterated agony.
But I didn't care. I closed my eyes again.
I was, at last, ready for the sleep from which there is no waking.
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9.7
Prostitution wasn't exactly the future Ariella pictured for herself. But a series of unfortunate events landed her in a brothel she couldn't escape. Until he came in.
His name is Killian Morozcov. He moved liked he owned the world and planted bullets in the heads of men who looked at him the wrong way. He came into the brothel and left with her, and no matter how much she pleaded, he refused to tell her why.
In Ariella's experience, she's learnt that you either stab someone in the back or they'll do it to you. Yet Killian showed her a side of humanity she'd never seen before and her defences fall, leading to a love that they both knew couldn't last.
he was an heir to a Mafia kingdom, and she was a girl from a brothel with no familial backing.
their love was doomed the moment Killian saved her.
especially since he saved the wrong girl. he'd gone to the brothel thinking Ariella was his lost sister, Stella Morozcov.
he'd been wrong and in the process of continuing his search for Stella he grew attracted to Ariella. so much that he felt that he couldn't breath without her.
Their love is built on nothing but pain and deceit...skeletons rotting in their closets. They both have secrets that could tear them apart.
But the past is a funny thing... no matter how much you run from it, it always guns you down in the end.
7.6
When the Pollard family kicked Alyssa out into the freezing rain, Walter threw a ten-thousand-dollar check into a dirty puddle.
"Take it and get out. Don't ever come back," he sneered.
Her adoptive mother and stepsister stood on the mansion's porch, mocking her as a worthless country girl who tarnished their wealthy name. They laughed, claiming she wouldn't even be able to afford community college and would be begging on the streets in a week.
They looked at her cheap clothes and worn backpack with absolute disgust.
They were completely unaware that for the past five years, Alyssa was the secret mastermind who had built their failing gallery into a multi-million-dollar investment empire.
Every key investment, every fortune they made, came from the anonymous notes she had slipped into their unread books. They genuinely believed they were business geniuses, while treating the true architect of their wealth like a stray dog.
Looking at their smug, arrogant faces, Alyssa didn't feel a shred of sadness, only a cold, sharp irony.
They actually believed they had raised her.
She stepped close, whispered the master code to Walter's most secret offshore account, and watched the blood completely drain from his face.
"I raised you," she said, turning her back on the mansion without hesitation.
Walking into the storm, she pulled out a heavily encrypted phone and gave a single, cold order.
"Initiate a full hostile takeover of the Pollard Group."
It was time to end this little game and step into her true life—as the world's most elusive medical genius, and the long-lost billionaire heiress of the Summers dynasty.
8.3
I lost my memory. Or rather, I faked it.
Conrad Gallagher, the boyfriend I had been secretly dating for five years, effortlessly erased our entire relationship.
"You're only fit to be a casual hookup."
Then, he announced his engagement to a woman approved by his parents.
To save myself from utter humiliation, I faked amnesia, conveniently forgetting no one but Conrad.
But when it was time for me to get married, Conrad regretted it. He kidnapped me right out of my wedding and spirited me away: "Don't marry him, okay?"
9.3
Innocent Silesia
9.3
No!" My voice rang loudly. "Like I said, this is the first time I've even been in this city."
"Ah, I see..." His voice shifted. "I was going to give you a different punishment. But since you claim you haven't slept with me..." He leaned forward, his smile cruel. "Why not refresh your memory?"
When Matteo's empire is shaken by betrayal, a stolen jewel, a night of seduction turned deception, his wrath is swift. He vows to hunt down the thief who dared to cross him. But fate delivers him the wrong girl.
Silesia Elton is twenty-three, an orphan from the quiet seaside town of Averna. She comes to Bellmere chasing nothing more than a job, a chance, a future. Instead, she is mistaken for the thief who stole from the king. Kidnapped, accused, and punished, her innocence is shattered in a single night of cruelty.
By the time Matteo realizes the truth, it's too late. Silesia is gone, leaving behind nothing but tears and the echo of words he has never heard before: "I don't want your money."
But Matteo cannot forget her. Dreams of her innocence haunt him, stirring something he has never known, remorse. Guilt sharpens into obsession, and soon the man who swore never to chase anyone finds himself searching for the girl who slipped through his fingers.
Meanwhile, Silesia struggles to survive in a city that devours the weak. Betrayed by the law, cast out by kindness, she is forced into the shadows, where every hand that offers help demands a piece of her soul. Yet even as she runs from the man who ruined her life, fate drives her back into his world.
Caught between the two is Matias Loki, Matteo's twin, a man who hides warmth behind ambition and whose gentle eyes see in Silesia the light his brother cannot hold. But desire between brothers is dangerous, and Silesia becomes the spark that threatens to burn the empire down.
8.5
My fiancé left me standing alone at the podium during our rehearsal dinner to rush to the side of a woman whose only illness was a desperate need for attention.
He humiliated me in front of the heads of the Five Families, abandoning our alliance to scoop his "dying" mistress off the floor.
I didn't cry. I didn't run. I walked straight to the head table, to the most terrifying man in the city—his older brother, the Don.
"The Woodward family owes me a husband," I declared calmly.
An hour later, I was married to the Capo dei Capi. But my ex-fiancé didn't accept his demotion.
He kidnapped me, strapping me to a chair in a soundproof basement.
For three days, he drained my blood pint by pint to "save" his mistress, Jaidyn, who watched me fade while she casually ate an apple.
"Take another bag," she ordered, smiling at my agony. "She still has too much fight in her."
As the cold crept up my chest and my vision blurred, I realized I was going to die for a lie, drained dry by a madman.
Then, the steel door detonated.
Through the smoke and debris walked my husband, not with a ransom, but with a serrated knife and a promise to burn them alive.
8.7
Isabelle couldn't stop drinking as the music pounded through the club. She was trying to drown out the image of her best friend, Aurora, who was pregnant with her fiancé's child, on what should have been Isabelle's engagement night.
But fate had other plans. When an employee calls in sick, Isabelle volunteers to fill in, unaware she is about to walk straight into the arms of Don Miller-the club's most powerful and dangerous client. He was ruthless, commanding, and known for treating women as playthings. Don doesn't believe in love... until Isabelle.
One glance, one reckless touch, and something shifts. She stirs a hunger in him he thought he'd buried forever. And when he learns what broke her, Don makes Isabelle an indecent offer:
He promises to mend her shattered heart and destroy everyone who betrayed her-if she surrenders to him completely.
Two broken souls. One dark deal.
Isabelle is about to learn that submission might just be the sweetest form of revenge. What begins as a dangerous bargain soon spirals into something deeper, darker, and far more intoxicating than either expected.
Maybe love isn't always gentle. Sometimes it's an obsession. Sometimes it's surrender. And sometimes... it's the most exquisite kind of ruin.