Promised To The Don: The Runaway Mafia Princess novel Chapter 12

Rino

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Age 19 | Chicago | Penthouse Resident, Gold Coast.

They say time dulls things. Wounds fade, grudges rot away, memories lose their teeth.

Yeah, bullshit.

Whoever came up with that never sat across from a Capone.

Or a Lombardi.

And they sure as fuck never watched what happens when you shove both bloodlines into the same room and lock the door.

I lit a cigarette with one hand, staring out the window, the skyline jagged and indifferent in the rain. The glass pane was cool beneath my knuckles, my jaw tight. The city didn’t care what I did.

But she did.

Alessia Capone.

Three fucking years.

And I couldn’t get rid of the taste.

Not after what I did, not after the way I handled her that night like she was something I could punish just because I was young and angry and drunk on her mouth.

I was sixteen and a fucking animal, and now I’m nineteen, still an animal but the difference is, I know it now. I just stopped pretending to be anything else.

The door clicked open behind me, and Fabio strolled in, tossing his keys on the marble counter.

“Redhead from last night’s has been blowing up my phone,” he muttered. “Wants to know if you're coming back for round two.”

Round two? Christ. I didn’t even give her a round one. Couldn’t. Alessia had already fucked up my appetite, my patience, my whole night. I walked out of that restaurant with my blood boiling and never laid a hand on the girl.

I hadn't answered her or the blonde from Wednesday.

Or the one who moaned my name in the back of my cousin’s yacht last weekend. She thought I was lost in her, truth was, I was staring at the ceiling, jaw clenched, hearing Alessia’s voice in my head calling me disgusting.

Alessia doesn’t even look at me on our so-called dates anymore, and that should piss me off but it just empties me.

I’m not used to being ignored. I’m not built for it. I was raised with power in my back pocket and a gun in my lap. I get what I want. Always have.

Except her.

Alessia Capone was the only thing in this world I can’t bend, buy, or break without shattering myself in the process.

I crushed the cigarette in the ashtray and turned toward the mirror, looked at myself like I was staring at a problem I couldn’t shoot.

I want to make it right.

But I don’t say sorry.

That’s not who I am.

Instead, I show up to every date they force us into. Every dinner. Every art gallery. Every cold, quiet corner of public life where I’m allowed to look but not touch.

And she always arrives dressed perfectly, perfect glossed lips, and cold eyes. She doesn’t speak unless she has to and when she does, her words slice clean through me because she enjoys watching me bleed.

It drives me insane.

Makes me want to shatter every mirror in this city just so I don’t have to see myself, burn it all down until there’s nothing left but ash.

I hate myself more than she ever could, for being the one who made her this way.

Fabio’s phone buzzed again on the counter, vibrating against the marble like it was mocking me. He didn’t even bother checking the screen this time, just smirked.

“Want me to tell her you’re busy?”

I slid my arms into my jacket, the weight of the holster settling against my ribs, “Tell her I’m dead.”

Fabio barked a laugh, shaking his head like I was being dramatic.

But I wasn’t, because the truth is I only feel alive when Alessia’s in the room. When her eyes are on me, even if they’re burning with hate, at least I exist. The rest of the time, I’m nothing but smoke and shadow, a ghost with too much money and not enough soul.

⊱⊶⊷⊶⊷⊰

I stepped out of the SUV, adjusted my cuffs, nodded at the soldiers flanking the door, and walked in with Fabio.

The meeting was upstairs. Something about new gun routes, a customs issue at the port, bodies that needed to be moved without headlines.

I didn’t care.

Because the moment I stepped past the archway, went up to the back terrace of the Capone estate, I saw her.

Alessia.

Floating.

Her head tilted back in the Capones’ pool, her hair was wet, fanned around her. She was laughing with two girls I didn’t know. Her legs kicked lazily beneath the water. Drops of water slid down her stomach, glinting every time she shifted, and I swear it was obscene the way daylight loved her.

She didn’t see me yet and fuck, I wish she had.

I stood there for a second too long, heat rising in my throat like blood after a hit gone wronng.

Fabio leaned close, his voice low enough only I could hear. “If stare any harder and you’ll knock her up from across the pool.”

I didn’t take my eyes off her, “Shut the fuck up, Fabio.”

She laughed again at something the girl on her right said, and I went still because that laugh, that smile and that lightness in her body? It didn’t belong to me, it never has.

I wanted it to... more than anything I’ve ever stolen, bought, or bled for.

I thought about texting her after our date the other night, calling and showing up at her wing, bribing her guards, but I didn’t. Because when it came to her, I wasn’t the man with the gun and the name and the bloodline. I was just a coward.

One of the girls splashed her, and Alessia shrieked and swam to the far edge, fingers gripping the stone as she laughed breathlessly.

And I fucking felt it in my teeth.

That girl, my fiancée, the one I marked when we were kids and ruined before I was old enough to understand what I had done, she didn’t need me.

But I need her.

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