Too Late For Regret: The Mafia King's Runaway

Elena Vitiello POV:

The cold was a physical weight, crushing down on my shoulders, seeping through the thin fabric of my sweater like icy needles.

I kept walking.

The snow crunched beneath my boots, a rhythmic sound that marked the seconds of my escape.

My breath plumed in front of me, white specters vanishing into the dark woods.

I didn't know where I was going. I just knew I couldn't be in that room anymore. I couldn't watch him pour her drink. I couldn't watch him hand her the pill. I couldn't watch him be the husband to her that he never was to me.

A twig snapped behind me.

I didn't turn. If it was a bear, let it take me. It would be a cleaner death than the slow suffocation I was living.

"Elena!"

The voice was a roar. It wasn't an animal. It was the Reaper.

I stumbled. The snow was deep here, rising up to my calves. My foot caught on a hidden root, and I went down.

The cold bit into my palms as I caught myself.

Strong hands grabbed my waist before I could stand.

I was hauled up against a chest that felt like a furnace.

"Are you insane?" Dante shouted. He was breathless. He had run.

He spun me around. His eyes were wide, dark abysses of panic. He stripped off his jacket and wrapped it around me. It smelled of him. Tobacco and expensive wool.

"You left the perimeter," he growled, but his hands were checking me for injuries. He touched my face. His fingers were warm.

I looked at him. For a second, just a second, the monster was gone. There was only a man who was terrified he had lost me.

"Let me go, Dante," I whispered.

"No," he said. "Never."

He scooped me up into his arms. He held me close to his chest, shielding me from the wind.

I rested my head against his shoulder. I was weak. I was pathetic. I let myself pretend, for the length of a walk back to the compound, that he came out here because he loved me.

We broke through the treeline.

The lights of the cabin spilled out onto the snow.

Dante tightened his grip on me.

"I got you," he murmured into my hair. "You're safe."

Then the door flew open.

Sofia stood there. She wasn't wearing a coat. She was barefoot in the snow.

"Dante!" she screamed. Her voice was shrill, piercing the quiet night.

She ran down the steps. She stumbled, falling to her knees in the powder.

"You left me!" she wailed. "You left me alone in there! I heard noises! The Genovese are coming!"

She was hysterical. She was acting. It was a performance worthy of an award.

Dante stopped. He looked at me, safe in his arms. Then he looked at her, sobbing in the snow, exposed and vulnerable.

The protector in him shifted gears.

He looked down at me. His eyes went cold.

"Can you stand?" he asked.

He didn't wait for an answer.

He simply let go.

My feet hit the ground hard. My knees buckled. I fell back into the snow.

"Stay here," he barked.

He ran to her. He ran past me as if I were a statue.

He scooped Sofia up. She clung to him, wrapping her legs around his waist, burying her face in his neck.

"I'm scared, Dante! Don't let me go!"

"I won't," he promised her. "I'm here."

He carried her toward the car. He shouted orders to the soldiers.

"Get the SUV! We need to get her to the clinic. She's in shock."

The engine roared to life.

I sat in the snow. The jacket he had given me slipped off my shoulders.

I watched him put her in the passenger seat. I watched him get in the driver's side.

He didn't look back.

The SUV peeled out of the driveway. I heard the screech of tires on ice. Then a sickening crunch of metal hitting a tree.

The soldiers started running.

"The Boss!" someone shouted. "The Boss and the Widow crashed!"

A security guard hauled me up.

"Come on, Mrs. Moretti," he said, his voice full of pity. "We have to follow them."

I sat in the back of the second car. We followed the ambulance to the local hospital.

I walked into the waiting room.

Dante was pacing. He had a cut on his forehead, bleeding into his eye. He didn't wipe it.

He was shouting at a nurse.

"I want the best neurologist! Now! She hit her head!"

I stood by the vending machine. I was wet. I was shivering. No one offered me a blanket.

Soldiers whispered near the entrance.

"He never got over her," one muttered.

"The wife is just a formality," another replied.

I closed my eyes.

I wasn't a wife. I wasn't even a formality.

I was a ghost haunting my own life.

And ghosts don't feel cold.