The Godfather’s Forsaken Rose Chapter 01
I was the brightest, most untouchable red rose in New York’s mafia world.
I was beautiful enough to make men lose their nerve with a single glance. People said the men obsessed with me could line up from Manhattan all the way to Brooklyn, but I rarely bothered to look twice.
Then my best friend made a bet with me.
“Bella, if you can win over my godfather, Dominic Morello, you can pick any car you want from my underground garage.”
Dominic Morello was the head of the Morello family, one of the most powerful names in New York’s underworld. Cold, restrained, born to command. To the daughters of old money families and mafia clans alike, he was the kind of man no one dared reach for. Rumor had it no woman could get within arm’s length of him.
I smiled.
I had never failed to get something I wanted.
But plans rarely survive contact with reality.
On the very first day of the bet, I found Dominic drugged and barely holding on. I had already meant to get close to him. By sheer accident, I became the antidote he needed.
After that night, the ice around Dominic Morello seemed to crack.
For three years, he came back to me again and again. Against the floor-to-ceiling windows on the top floor of the family headquarters, in the bathroom of his private Gulfstream, in the dressing room of a private cigar club. We tangled together in places no one would have imagined.
And piece by piece, through all that intimacy, I lost my heart.
I thought this man, worshiped by everyone else like a god, had become mine too.
Until tonight.
After we had been together in the back seat of his car, I noticed one of his sapphire cufflinks had fallen off. I picked it up and went to return it.
At the end of the corridor, the door to a cigar room stood half-open. I was about to push it wider when laughter drifted out from inside.
“Dominic, did you just get out of her bed? Isabella is usually such a proud little wildcat. She looks down on everyone. But with you, she turns sweet enough to melt. When are you going to marry her?”
I stopped in my tracks.
Then I heard the cold voice I knew down to my bones.
“She’s just a bed partner. How could I marry her?”
Seven words.
Careless. Weightless.
They drove into my heart like seven ice-cold blades and left me bleeding where I stood.
The cigar room fell into a strange silence. Even his men seemed stunned by the cruelty of that answer.
After a long moment, someone asked carefully, “Come on, Dominic. It’s been three years. Are you still thinking about the woman you never got over?”
The woman he never got over?
My mind went blank.
Dominic had someone like that?
I stood outside the door like a puppet with its strings cut, and listened as Dominic gave a quiet, indifferent sound of agreement.
“When we broke up, she asked for three years. She wanted to try being with someone else, and she wanted me to do the same. If we still wanted each other afterward, we would get back together.”
“She was restless. Insecure. So I let her have it her way.”
“Three years have passed. I’m done trying.” He paused, and for the first time that night, I heard something almost like anticipation in his voice. “She should be coming back now.”
It felt as if lightning had struck straight through me. My whole body turned cold. Even my fingertips began to tremble.
Three years.
All those nights, all those moments when I thought there had been something unspoken between us, something real. To him, they had only been an experiment.
Someone inside asked, “Then what about Isabella? With her temper, if she finds out…”
Bang.
Before he could finish, I shoved the heavy door open.
Everyone inside turned toward me at once.
I stood in the doorway, my face pale, my eyes burning so hard they felt ready to bleed. I looked at no one except the man seated at the head of the room.
Dominic wore a perfectly tailored suit. His back was straight, his posture composed.
He showed no surprise at seeing me there. No guilt. No panic. He looked as calm as ever, as if nothing in the world could shake him.
That calm hurt more than any confession could have.
If he had ever cared about me, even a little, he would not have looked at me like that.
I walked to him and stared at the face I had loved for three years.
“Dominic,” I said, my voice hoarse, “don’t you have anything to say to me?”
He lifted his eyes and looked at me evenly.
“No. You heard the truth.”
“We were bed partners. I thought you understood that.”
“Vivian made a bet with you. If you could get me, she would let you choose any sports car in her garage. If cars aren’t enough…”
He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and took out a black Swiss bank card. Then he pushed it across the coffee table toward me.
“Ten million dollars. Consider it payment for the past three years of being available whenever I called.”
“From now on, whatever this was between us is over.”
With that, he stood to leave.
As he passed me, I grabbed his wrist.
My hand was ice-cold. I held on so tightly my knuckles went white.
Dominic stopped.
And then he heard me, proud and ruined, clinging to him like he was the last piece of wreckage in a storm.
“But I fell for you.”
Dominic, I fell for you.
I did not even know when it had happened.
Maybe it was that winter night when I was too lazy to put on shoes, and he crouched in front of me, wrapped his warm hand around my cold ankle, and slid slippers onto my feet.
Maybe it was after my appendectomy, when I woke up groggy with pain and saw him sitting beside my bed, shadows under his eyes.
Maybe it was during one of those countless stormy nights, when he came home from business dinners smelling faintly of whiskey but still remembered that thunder frightened me, and pulled me into his arms.
Tiny, ordinary things.
One after another.
They gathered into a tide and drowned me completely.
And now he was telling me I had only ever been a bed partner.
Dominic Morello, how could you be so cruel?
His lips moved as if he meant to speak, but his phone rang first.
He took it out. The screen lit up, and the preview of a message appeared right in front of me.
[Dominic, it’s been three years. I tried, but I still only want you. Let’s get back together.]
My world collapsed in that instant.
Dominic looked at the message for a moment.
Then, one finger at a time, he pried my hand off his wrist.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never fell for you.”
Then he turned and walked away without looking back.