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.