He Chose My Copy I Became The Law Chapter 02
When I returned to the estate and opened the weighty oak doors, the wedding portrait above the fireplace greeted me.
The man in the picture wore a daring grin, his nose grazing my temple.
The photograph had captured us when our love was at its strongest.
Adrian and I had both been raised in the orphanage.
When I turned seventeen, the headmaster arranged to marry me to a brutal elderly mobster as payment for a debt.
Adrian seized my hand, hauled me over the tall brick wall, and helped me flee all the way to the shipping docks.
Behind us, the headmaster shouted, “Adrian Romano! Since you think you’re so strong, let’s see whether you can protect her for the rest of her life!”
Adrian had looked back, fierce resolve blazing in his eyes. “Then I’ll defend her with my life!”
With the scraps he earned in illegal fights, he rented us a basement apartment and began collecting street protection money for the Family.
“When I become a made man, I’ll get you out of this life.”
“Then nobody will ever dare touch you.”
During his first three years on the streets, territorial battles nearly killed him.
Whenever he drew his weapon and entered a gunfight, he carefully slipped my photograph into the chest pocket of his leather jacket.
I managed the accounts at a Family-owned laundromat and saved every cent I could.
On our bleakest New Year’s Eve, the contents of our pockets didn’t amount to even a handful of change. A single slice of cold pizza was all we had to share for the holiday.
Afterward, ruthless determination carried him steadily through the ranks, while I devised his strategies, coordinated logistics, and kept his operations moving from the shadows.
We left the damp basement for an expensive penthouse, then eventually moved into the hilltop estate that embodied absolute power.
The farther Adrian’s influence spread, the more glamorous his so-called “partners” became.
Then one day, I noticed lipstick smeared inside his shirt collar.
The color was bold and vivid, nothing I would ever choose.
“A new dancer stumbled at the casino. I caught her, and it rubbed off!” Tugging impatiently at his bow tie, he said, “Valentina, you’re not some sheltered girl. Stop acting paranoid like a resentful housewife.”
“My trust doesn’t guarantee your faithfulness. Adrian, we promised forever—not one day short of it!”
From then on, our life became an unbroken pattern of fights and icy silences.
I combed through his call history and schedule. On nights he claimed to be checking the docks, I secretly drove to the warehouses and waited outside.
Once cornered, Adrian abandoned the charade altogether.
Women passed through his life one after another. At his cruelest, he deliberately left his shirt hanging open so the overlapping scratches across his back were impossible for me to miss.
“Finished with your investigation?” he taunted. “You demanded evidence. Now you have it.”
I became someone wild and unrecognizable. Reason told me to release him, yet I remained rooted where I was.
More than ten years had passed, and Adrian and I seemed fused into one another’s bones.
Separating would tear us apart, but remaining together would ruin us both.
One year earlier, he had abruptly decided to “settle down.” He dismissed every other woman and kept only Sofia, a dancer from the casino.
I ordered an investigation into her past, and the instant her photograph reached me, I nearly laughed.
Her face reflected the girl I had been at seventeen, when I still believed Adrian and I would last forever.
At the time, I was eight months pregnant and nearing delivery. During an assault on the estate, I learned that he had diverted his strongest men solely to guard Sofia.
I survived, but the terror triggered an early labor. Our son arrived desperately fragile and fought inside an incubator for three agonizing days before he died.
That was when I understood: Adrian preferred loving a poor copy of me to ever seeing the woman I truly was.
The night after we buried our baby, despair drove me to swallow an entire bottle of sleeping pills. Adrian broke through the bedroom door, his whole body trembling uncontrollably.
He gathered me into his arms and raced to the hospital, his eyes frighteningly red. “Valentina! Are you trying to die?! We’ll begin again. I swear it will only be us from now on. I’ll never go near that woman again!”
Stretched out on the gurney, I felt nothing but emptiness. I no longer had the strength to cry.
That same day, Cesare, Porto Aurelia’s aging Consigliere, had a confidential letter and an old, yellowed file delivered to me.
“Miss Valentina, the Commission has reviewed the records of the war among the Six Houses twenty years ago. The couple documented here are your birth parents.”
My fingers tightened around the file until my knuckles blanched.
For the first time, I learned that my father, Gabriel Rinaldi, had been the underworld’s most revered Consigliere, the man who had negotiated a twenty-year truce by himself.
I burned the secret letter, then drifted toward the window like a specter.
Below me in the garden, Sofia stood enclosed in Adrian’s arms.
“I’m sorry, baby. She just lost our child, and she isn’t emotionally stable. I can’t abandon her yet.”
“Give me a little more time. As soon as she’s steady again, I promise I’ll make everything right between us.”
They kissed with desperate passion, reluctant to separate, like doomed lovers divided by circumstances beyond their control.
Something in my chest split open then, the pain too piercing to let me make a sound.
By my seventh day in the hospital, a frigid sense of certainty had settled over me.
I would leave Adrian. With my own hands, I would cut the bond between us.Â