Red Card to Your Heart: You Don't Deserve My Love Extra Time novel Chapter 19

I was the most cherished lover of Salvatore Ricci, the formidable head of the infamous Ricci crime family—Italy's oldest and most notoriously brutal Mafia dynasty dating back five generations.

For three years we were together. I loved him more than life itself, standing by his side through countless dangers.

Everyone in the crime family called me "Madrina," certain I would eventually wear his ring.

Until the day his first love returned, hunted by rivals. He pushed me aside and took a bullet meant for her.

What he didn't know was that I was pregnant.

That day, I was struck in the abdomen. I miscarried, hemorrhaging severely.

This man, usually so cold and calculating, completely broke down.

He knelt beside me, cradling my body, begging me not to die.

He told me he loved me.

But I didn't love him anymore.

The man who truly held my heart was Daniel Reed—the very officer leading the task force to bring down my Mafia lover.

Five years earlier, the day before our wedding...

That man died—by Salvatore's own gun.

In my third year as Salvatore Ricci's lover, he told me he wanted to marry me.

One night after dinner in his penthouse overlooking Milan, I asked him why. He was smoking by the window, silhouette cut sharp against the city lights. He turned, those cold eyes suddenly soft.

"Because you're good for me, bella," he said, taking my chin between his fingers. "You don't ask questions when I come home with blood on my cuffs. You understand this life." He paused, thumb tracing my lower lip. "And when you look down just like that—Cristo—you remind me of someone I once knew."

I knew my place in his world. I wasn't his love—I was his echo, a ghost wearing another woman's face. In the hierarchy of his heart, I would always rank second to a memory.

On nights when ghosts of his past haunted him, he would drink too much whiskey and drag me to bed. His hands would grip my wrists above my head, his body claiming mine with desperate hunger. The sex was brutal, possessive—never gentle.

Two weeks before our wedding, the real Carina was back.

"Carina," he breathed, and the way he said it shattered my world.

Carina Bianchi. Not a term of endearment whispered in the dark, but a woman of flesh and blood—the ghost made real.

That same morning, I had sat alone in my bathroom, staring at the pregnancy test with two unmistakable lines.

No goodbye.

No explanation.

Nothing but silence as I was erased from the family I thought would become mine.

The Salvatore Ricci who had almost made me his wife disappeared the moment his first love returned.