Too Late to Love Me Now

My father, a rising star in a crime family, decided to leave my mother. During the divorce, he asked me to choose who to live with.

For the sake of my future, I chose him, the man who had money and power, over my penniless mother.

My choice broke her heart. "He has money, Mom. You don't. I don't want to be poor anymore," I told her, a lie that felt like swallowing glass. She looked at me with utter betrayal before collapsing in tears.

In my previous life, my love for her became the burden that destroyed her. After we were cast out, she worked herself to the bone to support me, only to die tragically trying to sell a kidney to pay for my medical bills. I followed her into death a week later.

I didn't understand. I had loved her with all my soul, but my love only led to her suffering and death. Why did choosing love mean choosing ruin?

Waking up again, I was fourteen, back at the moment of that devastating choice. This time, my love would not be a burden. It would be a weapon. I would get close to my father, dismantle his empire from the inside, and build my mother a fortress with the rubble.

Chapter 1

Alessia "Blake" Falcone POV:

The first time I died, it was a quiet, pathetic affair in a sterile hospital room, drowned out by the beeping of machines my mother couldn't afford.

The second time I died was today, in the living room of a home about to be shattered, when I chose the man who destroyed my family over the woman who was my entire world.

I was fourteen again.

The air in my lungs was clean, my limbs strong, not the frail, useless things they had become.

Outside, the sun was shining. Inside, my father, Clifton Daniels, a newly made man in the Daniels crime family, stood before us, his face a mask of cold resolution.

"I'm leaving," he said. The words were simple, clean, like a knife sliding between ribs.

My mother, Edna, flinched as if struck. Her eyes, still bright with a life I'd seen extinguished, filled with a desperate, pleading hope as they landed on me.

But I wasn't seeing her. I was seeing the future. My past. The life I'd already lived.

I remembered her, cast out with nothing but the clothes on her back.

I remembered her hands, once soft, becoming raw and chapped from three different cleaning jobs.

I saw the damp, mold-infested one-bedroom apartment we moved into, a place where the cold seeped into your bones and never left.

I felt the gnawing ache of hunger in my stomach, a constant companion.

Then came the diagnosis. A rare blood disease. A death sentence.

I remembered my mother on her knees in front of Clifton's polished shoes, begging. He was a Soldier then, already climbing the ladder, already dripping with the kind of money that could have saved me.

He was with Karel, and her needs, her desires, came first.

His man shoved a few hundred-dollar bills into my mother's hand and threw her out of his office like garbage.

The final memory was the worst. My mother, desperate, trying to sell a kidney to a loan shark connected to a rival Family. They took her money, left her bleeding in an alley, and she died of an infection a week later.

I followed her into the darkness seven days after that.

But now, I was back. Reborn.

My mother was alive. Her eyes were still full of light.

This was my one chance to stop the storm.

"Alessia," my father's voice cut through the memories. "You need to choose. Who do you want to live with?"

My mother's gaze was a physical weight, begging me to say her name, to come home with her.

My soul screamed to do it, to run into her arms and never let go.

But love wouldn't save her. My love had been a burden that broke her back. This time, I would be her weapon.

To win this war, I had to be on the inside. I had to get close to the enemy.

I looked away from my mother's crumbling face and met my father's impatient stare.

"I'll go with you," I said, my voice flat and empty.

The hope in my mother's eyes didn't just fade-it shattered, replaced by the raw, gaping wound of betrayal.

"Alessia... no..."

I turned to her, forcing ice into my veins.

"He has money, Mom. You don't. I don't want to be poor anymore."

It was a lie that felt like swallowing glass. I needed her to hate me. I needed her to let me go, so she could be free.

My father's lips curved into a smug, satisfied smile. He saw a daughter who recognized power.

He had no idea he had just invited his own executioner into his home.

Alessia "Blake" Falcone POV

The ride to my father's new life was silent. I sat in the back of his black Mercedes, the leather cool against my skin, and tracked the city lights as they bled into streaks of gold and red through the tinted windows.

It was a world away from the cracked pavement and flickering streetlights of the neighborhood I'd left behind.

His penthouse was in a tower that scraped the sky, a fortress of glass and steel. The doormen in their crisp uniforms studiously avoided my eyes.

We were whisked up in a private elevator that ascended with a silent, stomach-dropping speed.

My father glanced at me, a flicker of something-assessment-in his eyes. I kept my expression blank, made myself small. He saw a child, naive and easily molded. Good. Invisibility was the best camouflage.

The elevator doors slid open directly into the living room.

And there she was.

Karel Sellers.

She was even more beautiful than I remembered from the blurry photos. Tall and slender, with hair the color of midnight and eyes that were a startling, icy blue. She was art and elegance and cold, hard edges.

She stood by a floor-to-ceiling window, a glass of wine in her hand, and regarded me with the undisguised contempt of a queen surveying an insect.

"You're late, Clifton," she said, her voice low and melodic.

It was the same voice I'd heard laughing in the background of that final, devastating phone call.

My father, a man who made others tremble, melted.

"I'm sorry, my love. It took longer than I thought." He fawned over her, kissing her cheek, a powerful Capo reduced to a supplicant.

He gestured toward me. "Karel, this is Alessia."

Karel's eyes swept over me, dismissing me in a single, cold glance. She offered no greeting, no smile. I was a ghost from a past he was supposed to have buried, an unwelcome stain on her perfect new world.

My father, sensing the frost, cleared his throat and launched into a tour. I followed silently, my mind a whirring calculator. I cataloged everything: the expensive art on the walls, the location of the heavy steel safe behind a painting, the subtle signs of his immense, illicit wealth.

I was mapping his empire, searching for its vulnerabilities.

He showed me Karel's art studio, a bright, airy space filled with canvases.

"She's a genius," he whispered, his voice thick with adoration. "A tormented soul. It's my destiny to save her."

My room was last. It was at the end of a long hall, a small, windowless space that felt more like a storage closet than a bedroom.

A cage within a cage.

For a moment, a flicker of guilt crossed my father's face. He saw the stark contrast between this box and the rest of his palace.

He reached into his wallet and pulled out a thick fold of cash, pressing it into my hand. Five hundred dollars.

"For clothes," he said gruffly. "Whatever you need."

It wasn't a gift. It was hush money. An apology for the cage.

I took it without a word, my fingers closing around the bills. The first deposit into my mother's war chest.

My plan wasn't just to survive him. It was to bleed him dry.

Alessia "Blake" Falcone POV:

For the next few weeks, I perfected the art of being a ghost.

I drifted through the penthouse, a withdrawn, sullen teenager. It was a role I inhabited easily.

Karel's resentment was a physical presence in every room, a constant, low-level hum of hostility.

She treated my very existence as a personal affront. She never spoke to me directly, but her silence was more cutting than any insult.

If I was in a room, she would leave it.

If I used a glass, I would later find it in the trash.

Of course, my father noticed. His defense of her always came in the form of harsh whispers. "She's been through a lot, Alessia. Be patient."

But his guilt was a weapon, and I was learning how to wield it. When Karel wasn't looking, he would slip me cash-a hundred here, two hundred there. A balm for his conscience.

I hid the money under a loose floorboard in my closet.

It grew steadily, soon cresting eight thousand dollars.

A war chest built from his blood money, destined to save the woman he'd discarded.

Summer bled into fall, and school started.

Northgate High became my sanctuary. In its crowded hallways, I wasn't Clifton Daniels' inconvenient daughter or Karel Sellers' personal ghost. I was just another anonymous face in the crowd.

It was a place where I could breathe.

One Saturday afternoon, when my father and Karel were out at some gallery opening, I took my chance.

I rode a city bus for an hour, the polished gleam of downtown giving way to the familiar grit of my mother's world.

I found her near our old apartment, struggling with two heavy bags of groceries.

She was thinner.

The light in her eyes had dimmed, worn thin by exhaustion and worry.

When she saw me, she dropped the bags. An orange rolled into the gutter.

Her face, the face I saw in my nightmares, just crumpled.

"Alessia," she breathed.

Her first words weren't of anger, but of frantic concern. "Are you okay? Is he feeding you? You're too thin."

Her love was a fist clenching around my heart. I wanted to fall into her arms, tell her everything, and beg her to take me home.

But I couldn't. Not yet.

She pleaded with me to come back, her voice cracking.

I forced myself to remain cold, logical. "You can't protect me, Mom. Not yet. He'd crush you."

I reached into my bag and pulled out the thick envelope of cash. I pressed the eight thousand dollars into her hands.

Her eyes, wide and disbelieving, flew from the cash to my face.

"What is this?"

"It's a start," I said, my voice firm, clinical. "Start a business. A food cart. Edna's Kitchen, like you always talked about. Anything. Just get strong. Get powerful enough that he can never touch you again."