Too Late To Beg: The Don's Regret

I was still bleeding into the mesh underwear the hospital gave me when the photos hit the internet: my husband, the Don, forcing his tongue down his mistress's throat.

Three days ago, that very mistress had shoved me off a yacht.

I lost the baby. I lost my uterus. I was left completely barren.

Yet, when my husband finally called, it wasn't to ask if I was alive.

"The press is eating us alive," Dante barked through the phone. "Send a gift basket to Sofia. Fix this mess."

To make matters worse, his grandmother stood at the foot of my bed, holding the hand of the daughter they had stolen from me at birth.

"Mommy looks like a ghost," my daughter said, her voice devoid of love.

That was the moment the last ember of affection died. I realized I wasn't a wife to them; I was just a broken vessel.

So, when they sneered that I was useless, I didn't cry.

I pulled a black USB drive from under my pillow and threw it on the bed.

"Divorce papers," I said calmly. "And the complete security blueprints of the Moretti Fortress. Every blind spot. Every tunnel I designed."

"Sign the papers and let me go, or I sell this drive to your enemies for one dollar."

I left the country with nothing but the clothes on my back, vanishing into a freezing attic in Paris.

I thought I was finally free.

But three weeks later, Dante kicked down my door, looking at my poverty with horror.

"Come home," he begged, tossing a box of diamonds onto my drafting table. "We can be a family."

I looked at the man who had destroyed me and opened the window.

"You're looking for the girl who loved you," I whispered, throwing the diamonds into the trash alley below.

"But you killed her."

Chapter 1

Elena POV

I was still bleeding into the mesh underwear the hospital had given me when the tabloid photos hit the internet: my husband, forcing his tongue down his mistress's throat.

The caption screamed in bold font: "The Don and his Muse."

I perched precariously on the edge of the massive four-poster bed in the Moretti estate's guest wing, the light of my phone screen cutting through the room's oppressive darkness.

My abdomen throbbed—a relentless, hot pulse where they had cut me open only three days ago to remove the remains of my unborn child and my uterus.

I was empty. A hollowed-out husk, left to rot on the porch.

Downstairs, the distinct crash of shattering porcelain echoed.

Nonna Rosa was awake. And she was furious.

Not because her grandson's mistress had shoved me off a yacht into the freezing Atlantic on New Year's Eve. Not because the heir to the Moretti throne had been washed away in a tide of blood and brine.

She was furious because Dante had been sloppy enough to get caught kissing Sofia Rossi while his wife was in surgery.

The door to