The Mafia Princess Is a Miracle Healer Chapter 09
He needed heavy sedation just to fall asleep.
Eyen then, it didn’t hold.
He’d jolt awake out of nightmares, drenched in pain, screaming my name into the dark.
He hadn’t let go of Caitlyn through any of it.
Until the day he found out it was her, using his name and his power, who had ordered the men to
finish destroying my hands.
He broke.
He went to her room.
They tore into each other.
The calm, composed man I’d once known was gone.
What stood in his place looked like something feral.
He had both hands around her throat and wouldn’t let go.
“You did this to me.”
“All of it. You.”
“How did I end up here because of you?”
“I’ll kill you. I swear to God I’ll kill you.”
Heaven balances its books.
Caitlyn had destroyed one man.
Carlo had destroyed an entire family.
No number of deaths could settle that debt.
I stood in the doorway and watched him come apart.
Watched him beat her until she bled.
Then watched him collapse and sob.
When the rage was gone, there was nothing left but emptiness.
Carlo sank to the floor and looked up at me.
“Elena. Why did it get like this?”
“How did I become this?”
“How did we end up here?”
Maybe greed.
When something comes too easily, you stop valuing it.
Love. Life.
Carlo had assumed my devotion was permanent.
He’d assumed I’d always be there to pull him back from the edge.
But the world doesn’t work that way.
What you take without appreciation, you lose.
I walked over and gave him a sedative injection.
My hands shook.
His arm swelled up where the needle went in wrong.
He’d been ground down by pain for so long he barely registered it.
He turned his head and stared at me.
Like a drowning man who’d finally found something to hold onto.
Broken. Stripped down. Begging.
“Elena. Save me.”
“Whatever you want. I’ll do it.”
“I’ll get on my knees. I’ll beg. Just tell me what it takes.”
There’s no dignity left when you’re standing at death’s door.
Sickness strips everything away.
Carlo wasn’t the powerful, untouchable man anymore.
He was gaunt. Undone.
Every last layer of pride burned off.
What remained was the most human thing there is.
The need to survive.
Just survive.
Whatever it costs.
His forehead hit the floor.
Blood beaded at his temple.
I watched him without moving.
Then I spoke.
“I’ll ask my master.”
“But first you confess. Everything you did to me, in front of everyone. You clear my father’s name.”
Back then, Carlo had spread the lie that my father had been working as an FBI informant, selling out the city’s most powerful families.
Carlo hesitated.
Then he looked at his reflection in the window, at what he’d become, and made up his mind.
“Whatever you say. I’ll do whatever you say.”
“I’ll tell the truth. All of it. Publicly.”
He stumbled to his feet and called the Commission.
He confessed everything.
When it was done, he slid down the wall and sat on the floor with his eyes closed.
Moonlight moved across the room and settled on him.
Quiet. Almost holy.
Like something in him had been absolved.
To make good on the rest of what he owed me, Carlo had his lawyers draw up paperwork
transferring half his assets to my name.
A hundred million dollars for one word of forgiveness.
A hundred million dollars for one more day alive.
I kept my end of the deal.
I reached out to my master.
But my master was old now, his own hands too unsteady to hold a needle.
He sent Carlo away.
“The Thirteen Ghost Needles demands a rare kind of gift.”
“I spent decades looking. Elena was the only student I ever found.”
“And you broke her. You destroyed the best student I ever had.”
“The technique dies with her hands.”
That sentence cut Carlo’s last thread.
Whatever had been holding him together snapped.
The final reason to fight was gone.
His body gave up fast after that.
By the time I saw him again, he was bedridden.
Machines keeping him functional.
He saw me come in.
His lips moved.
Maybe “save me.”
Maybe “I’m sorry.”
But whatever it was, it couldn’t reach me.
And it couldn’t stop what was coming.
The day Carlo died, I bought a plane ticket.
My hands would never fully heal. I’d accepted that.
But the knowledge was still mine.
I wanted to pass it on.
To find the next one.
To make sure that what I carried kept living beyond me.
