"My Mafia Fiancé Let My Stepsister Wear My Wedding Dress—So I Vanished He Regretted Everything...

Lorenzo DeMarco did not leave.

Instead of returning to his private jet in Grand Rapids, he rented the entire top floor of the Havenport Inn—a creaking, three-story bed-and-breakfast that smelled of cinnamon and dry rot, located precisely four hundred yards from Clara Finch’s salvage yard.

He didn't bring security guards. He didn't bring his luxury cars. He sent Marco back to Chicago with strict instructions to oversee the legal slaughter of Celeste Hart’s remaining assets and keep the syndicate runnings smoothly without him.

"Boss," Marco had said over the encrypted line that evening, his voice heavy with disbelief. "Julian Moretti has been making moves on our trucking routes through Gary. The docks in Milwaukee are waiting on your sign-off. You can't stay in a five-hundred-person fishing village in Michigan."

"Let Moretti have the Gary routes," Lorenzo replied, standing by the lace-curtained window of his rented room, watching the yellow light burning in the window above Clara's garage.

"Are you insane?" Marco yelled, breaking professional protocol for the first time in ten years. "That's forty million dollars in annual freight revenue!"

"I don't care," Lorenzo said, and hung up.

He didn't care about the freight routes. He didn't care about the Moretti family. He didn't care about the aldermen calling his private line every twenty minutes asking what had happened to the DeMarco political contributions.

All he could see when he closed his eyes was the image of Elena standing on that wooden pier, her hands covered in sawdust, looking at him as if he were nothing more than a stranger who had interrupted her morning walk.

The next morning, it began to snow.

Elena emerged from the garage apartment at 6:30 a.m., carrying an iron snow shovel. The heavy lake-effect snow was already four inches deep, coating the salvage yard's gravel driveway in a thick, silent blanket of white.

She plunged the shovel into the drift, levered the heavy slush to the side, and stepped forward.

Before she could take a second scoop, a pair of black leather work boots appeared in the snow beside her.

A second shovel sliced into the drift, lifting twice as much snow as hers, tossing it clean over the fence into the ditch.

Elena stopped. She leaned against the wooden handle of her shovel and looked up.

Lorenzo was wearing a heavy canvas chore coat he had clearly bought at the local farm supply store an hour ago. The tags had been roughly ripped off the collar. He didn't have gloves on, his bare hands red and chapped from the biting wind, his dark hair dusted with snowflakes.

"What are you doing?" Elena asked, her breath misting between them.

"Shoveling," Lorenzo said without looking at her. He dug the blade into the snow again, clearing a three-foot swath of gravel in a single, effortless motion.

"I didn't ask for your help."

"I'm not helping you," Lorenzo said, his voice flat and gritty. "I'm clearing Clara Finch's driveway so she doesn't break a hip when she comes out to feed her chickens."

Elena stared at him. "You don't even know what a chicken looks like unless it's braised in truffles at a private club."

Lorenzo paused, his shovel buried in the white drift. He looked at her, his dark eyes hollow, the pain in them so raw it almost made her look away.

"You're right," he said softly. "I don't know a lot of things. But I'm learning."

He turned back to the snow, his broad shoulders moving with mechanical precision, clearing foot after foot of the freezing slush while the wind whipped off the lake.

Elena stood there for two full minutes, watching the most feared syndicate head in the state of Illinois do manual labor in the freezing cold for an eighty-year-old antique dealer.

She didn't thank him.

She simply picked up her shovel, walked to the opposite side of the driveway, and began clearing the path to the front door.

They worked in absolute silence for two hours.

The only sound was the scrape of steel blades against frozen gravel and the whistling of the wind through the cedar trees. By the time Clara Finch cracked open the front door of the main house, holding a steaming mug in each hand, the entire five-hundred-foot driveway was cleared down to the bare stone.

Clara stepped onto the porch, looking between the two of them. She looked at Elena, whose nose was bright red, then at Lorenzo, whose knuckles were bleeding slightly from the rough wood of the shovel handle.

"Well," Clara said, taking a sip from her mug. "I don't know what you did to her, young man, but if you think eighty dollars worth of free snow removal makes up for two years of being a blind jackass, you have a lot more shoveling to do."

Lorenzo didn't flinch. He leaned the shovel against the fence, wiped his brow with the back of his bare, freezing hand, and looked at Clara.

"The back lot needs clearing too, ma'am," he said respectfully. "I'll do that before noon."

Elena threw her shovel down into the snow with a loud clatter.

"Stop it, Lorenzo," she said, her chest heaving with frustration. "Just stop it! What are you trying to prove? That you can suffer? That you can wear cheap clothes and get blisters on your hands? You think this undoes anything?"

Lorenzo turned to face her.

For the first time since she had met him four years ago, Lorenzo DeMarco didn't look powerful. He didn't look like an emperor. He looked broken.

"It doesn't undo a single second," Lorenzo said, his voice cracking against the cold air. "I know that. You could spend the next forty years spitting on my face every time I walk past you, and it wouldn't equal a tenth of the humiliation you swallowed in my house."

He stepped closer, heedless of Clara watching from the porch, heedless of the snow falling between them.

"I didn't come here to make you take me back, Elena," he said, tears finally welling in his dark, bloodshot eyes, freezing on his eyelashes before they could fall. "I came here because I cannot breathe in Chicago knowing that you think I didn't love you."

Elena felt her throat tighten, a sudden, violent wave of grief threatening to crack her ribs from the inside out.

"You had a strange way of showing it," she whispered.

"I didn't know *how*," Lorenzo choked out. "My father taught me how to kill a man with a fountain pen before I was twelve. He taught me how to bribe a judge, how to wash dirty cash through real estate, how to keep every weakness buried six feet under concrete so no one could use it against me."

He dropped to his knees in the cold, wet gravel right in front of her.

The Don of Chicago. On his knees in the slush, looking up at a girl in paint-stained work pants.

"I treated you like an asset because I didn't know how to handle something that was pure," he sobbed, the sound tearing out of him like broken glass. "I thought if I gave you security, if I put you behind high walls and guards, that was enough. I let those women poison you because I thought you were safe just by having my name. I was a coward, Elena. The biggest coward in that entire city."

Elena stood frozen, looking down at the man she had loved in silence for two years.

Her hands trembled inside her pockets.

Part of her wanted to drop to her knees and pull his head against her chest, to forgive him because the agony in his voice was real, because she had loved him so deeply it had almost killed her.

But the other part—the part that had survived the East Wing bedroom, the part that had walked out of the mansion with one suitcase—held her feet rooted to the frozen ground.

"Forgiveness isn't something you can shovel out of a driveway, Lorenzo," she said, her voice shaking despite her best efforts. "And love isn't something you give someone only after you've lost them."

She turned and walked into the salvage workshop, shutting the heavy oak door between them.