When She Loves (The Fallen, #4)

by Gabrielle Sands

Do not fucking touch what’s mine. It’s what I said to Ludovico right before I killed him, although Cleo was far from mine when I saw the bastard trying to force himself on her. But in the moment, that didn’t matter. I wanted him to die.

This place is my new prison. It doesn’t matter how pretty it is. A cage is still a cage, and he will always be my jailer.

If I have to be miserable in this marriage, he’ll be miserable right there with me.

I don’t have the luxury of feeling guilty. Feelings have no place in the life of a don. I learned that a long time ago. My breathing deepens. Slowly, I push all the useless emotions out of my mind until all that remains is a blank canvas. A canvas where I can paint whatever I want.

“How do you know the ideal wife in my head looks any different from you?”

She’d take me to the Japanese garden in Brooklyn and tell me the tale of the koi that climbed up the waterfall. A Japanese legend. The fish that managed to overcome the challenge of swimming upstream in a waterfall became a fearsome dragon. She’d say to me that no matter how impossible it felt to navigate a given situation, pushing through would make me stronger.”

My father was first and foremost a don. For him, family wasn’t even in the top ten of his priorities. He cared about me in his own twisted way, but when it came to my mother and my sisters… He treated them like possessions devoid of thoughts and feelings. He wasn’t the kind of man who’d ever have any empathy for another man’s family. For all his rigid rules and traditions, he spit on all our family’s core values.

You know which man fights the hardest? The man who’s got something real to lose.”