The Mafia Princess Is a Miracle Healer Chapter 02
A wood splinter from the broom handle bit into my palm.
I wrenched my arm free. Whatever feeling I’d once had for this man was long gone.
“Carlo, stop lying to yourself.”
“What you did to me back then.”
“Do you really not remember?”
A breeze moved through the street and set a leaf down on Carlo’s shoulder.
He stopped walking.
He turned to look at me, and there was something in his eyes I couldn’t read.
Carlo and I had been an accident.
I was doing rounds in Chinatown when he first saw me.
One look and he was gone. He tracked down my family, found out I was a Ross, and went straight to my father to propose an arrangement.
We were good together. Genuinely happy, or so I’d believed.
Then Valentine’s Day happened.
He was on his way to see me when another car slammed into his.
The crash left him with catastrophic brain trauma. The Vittoris tried everything. Every specialist. Every connection.
Nothing worked.
They came to me as a last resort.
Carlo’s grandmother showed up at my door herself. She got down on her knees.
“They say the Ross girl is a once-in-a-generation talent.”
“Started learning medicine at three. Studying texts by five.”
“And then she found a master. Her acupuncture is unlike anything anyone’s ever seen. She can bring people back from the edge of death.”
“Save my grandson, and I’ll hand over everything the Vittori family has. Every last dollar.”
By then, Carlo had no vital signs.
Every doctor who looked at him shook his head and walked away.
My master, Elder Lee, pulled me aside.
“Carlo’s time has run out. This is the hand he was dealt.”
“Forcing your way into someone else’s fate will only turn back on you.”
“Elena, you’re young. Don’t do this.”
He was right. I knew he was right.
But that was the man I loved lying in that hospital bed.
The man I thought about every single day.
He’d been on his way to me when the crash happened.
How could I just walk away?
I stood there watching him, and something in me broke open.
I used the Thirteen Ghost Needles.
It was my master’s most closely guarded technique, an ancient method of acupuncture passed down through generations.
It could pull the dying back from the threshold.
It could also destroy the person who performed it.
I tested it on myself first.
Spent over a month working out how to make it work.
When Carlo opened his eyes, I had aged a decade overnight.
He reached up and touched the white that had spread through my hair, and he cried.
“I’m so sorry, Elena. I did this to you.”
“Marry me. Let me spend the rest of my life making it up to you.”
That shared brush with death bound us together in a way nothing else could.
I was terrified of losing him.
Terrified of losing the man who I believed had loved me more than his own life.
The Vittori family threw us a wedding that the city talked about for years.
On the day we married, Carlo held my hands and made his vows.
“Elena, you saved my life. I don’t know how to repay that. All I can do is love you twice as hard.”
“From this day forward, everything I am and everything I have belongs to you. Only you.”
He kept that promise.
He loved me like he meant it.
No matter how packed his schedule got, he carved out time every day to rub lotion into my hands.
He’d press his lips to each of my fingers, then smile at me.
“These hands are the most precious things in the world.”
“Leave the messy stuff to me from here on out.”
“You just focus on being the brilliant little doctor you are.”
Back then, I genuinely believed we’d have that forever.
