Red Card to Your Heart: You Don't Deserve My Love Extra Time novel Chapter 31

When Salvatore returned home, he found me frantically searching our bedroom drawers and cabinets, scattering contents across the floor in my desperation.

He observed me silently from the doorway, his presence undetected until he finally spoke. "What are you looking for, Isabella?"

I froze mid-motion, then turned to face him slowly, inhaling deeply to compose myself. "Nothing important," I replied, the dismissive lie falling flat between us.

Salvatore crossed the room in three strides, grasping my arm firmly as he pulled me against his chest. His eyes—those dark, perceptive eyes that missed nothing—bored into mine with devastating intensity.

After a moment, his mouth twisted into a bitter smile. "You don't even care enough to craft a convincing lie anymore, do you?" he asked, his voice carrying a wounded edge beneath the anger. "Am I worth so little effort now?"

He raised his hand, revealing what I'd been desperately searching for: a worn photograph pinched between his fingers.

The image showed Daniel Reed attempting to leave our small apartment while I sat on the floor clutching his legs, begging him not to go undercover into the Ricci territory—the northern district that Salvatore controlled with iron discipline.

Daniel had been the lead detective on the operation to bring down the Ricci crime family. The mission that would ultimately cost him his life.

That year with Daniel had been the only light in my otherwise shadowed existence. That morning—captured forever in the photograph—I had sensed something ominous about his assignment. I should have fought harder to keep him from walking out that door.

In his profession, keeping photographs was dangerous. Undercover officers maintained minimal personal connections—no pictures, no letters, nothing that could identify loved ones if their cover was blown.

This single image was our only tangible memory together.

Daniel's partner had taken it that morning, laughing at my desperation, calling me "lovesick" as I clung to Daniel's legs like a child.

I was shameless in my love. Growing up in a corrupt orphanage in Boston's worst neighborhood, I'd learned early that affection was a currency no one would spend on me. Unwanted and unclaimed, I developed all the wrong instincts for survival but the perfect ones for self-preservation.

When I met Daniel, I was seventeen, recently expelled from the system and living on the streets. That day, I'd stolen a sandwich from a corner deli and ducked into an alley to eat it—the same alley where Daniel was taking a cigarette break from his surveillance shift.

I had planned to die that night. Before ending my life, I wanted to taste something good just once—something that wasn't garbage or the stale donations to homeless shelters.

That sandwich represented my last stolen pleasure from a world that had given me nothing.

"Daniel Reed," he said, introducing himself with no expectation of reciprocation.

My Daniel. The late afternoon sun haloed his silhouette, turning him into something almost divine in my desperate eyes.

He crouched before me, crushing his cigarette beneath his heel. "What's your name, little thief?" he asked, his voice gentle despite the accusation.

I stared at him, momentarily speechless at being addressed as a person rather than a nuisance. "Isabella," I said softly. "Isabella Foster."

He didn't recoil from my unwashed state or the distrust radiating from my posture. Instead, he reached out slowly—telegraphing his movement to avoid startling me—and gently tousled my matted hair.

"Isabella Foster," he said with warmth that reached his eyes, "how about a smile to match your name?"

That day, in that filthy alley, Daniel became my guardian angel—the first ray of light to penetrate the darkness of my existence.