Pregnant by the Ruthless Mafia Devil

Chapter 2: Keep the Change, Grandpa

At 8:52 PM, Celia pushed through the brass revolving doors of the Aethelgard Private Medical Center, gasping for breath as she shook the October rain out of her dark curls.

With its black marble floors, crystal sconces, and velvet-roped corridors, the building felt less like a clinic and more like a fortress built for underworld kings. At the reception desk, Mia's cousin Chloe looked up in relief and snapped a plastic wristband marked File 402 around Celia's slender wrist.

"Take the west corridor to the private elevators and go straight to Suite 402 on the fourth floor," Chloe whispered, glancing nervously toward the main security doors. "And keep your head down, Celia. The man who owns this building arrived ten minutes ago for a classified procedure on the top floor, and his personal guards have half the wing locked down."

"In and out like a shadow," Celia promised with a quick wink. "I owe you my life, Chloe."

She hurried around the corner into the elevator hall, reaching inside her wet canvas bag to switch her phone to silent mode. Because her head was ducked down and a damp curl had fallen across her cheek, she didn't see the private bronze elevator doors slide open ahead of her.

She didn't see the four massive men in tailored black suits step out in a tight diamond formation until a wall of solid muscle slammed directly into her shoulder.

"Clear the path!" a harsh, gravelly voice barked.

A heavy hand shoved Celia backward. Her wet boot lost its grip on the slick marble. She hit the floor hard on her hip, her canvas bag flying open and sending her economics notebook, pens, and lip gloss skittering across the stone tiles. A sharp sting radiated up her wrist and elbow where she had braced her fall.

Celia sucked in a sharp breath, her famous temper igniting like gasoline thrown onto an open flame.

Around the vast lobby, the few doctors and nurses in sight immediately pressed their backs flat against the walls, lowering their chins in terrified silence. Nobody dared to speak. Nobody dared to step forward and help her up.

Because walking in the dead center of those four armed bodyguards was the devil himself.

Leonardo Moretti looked as if he had been sculpted from dark granite and winter ice. He stood an imposing six-foot-four, his broad, lethal shoulders filling out a tailored charcoal suit beneath an unbuttoned black cashmere overcoat. His hair was jet-black and thick, swept back cleanly from a face of ruthless perfection, marked only by a thin scar cutting through his left eyebrow and a faint dusting of silver at his temples.

He was the sole heir to the Moretti syndicate, a global financial and criminal empire so vast that senators begged for his favor and rival cartels trembled at the mention of his surname.

And Leonardo despised every single woman who walked the earth.

As a boy, he had stood in the shadows of his family's dining hall and watched his own mother smile tenderly across a candlelit table while feeding his father a slow poison so she could run away with her lover and half the family vault. That night, before Leonardo eventually painted the marble halls red to claim his crown, he had carved two truths into his cold heart: love was a fatal disease for weak men, and every woman alive was a scheming w***e waiting to name her price.

When the girl in the wet leather jacket crashed across the marble floor directly in front of his handmade Italian shoes, Leonardo didn't even slow his stride. He had watched dozens of desperate socialites, models, and actresses stage clumsy falls in hotel lobbies just to catch ten seconds of his attention.

Celia shoved a damp lock of hair out of her face and glared up from the floor. "Are you blind, or do your pet gorillas shove girls down just to make you feel tall?"

A suffocating silence dropped over the hall. The bodyguard who had pushed her went rigid, his right hand sliding inside his jacket toward the pistol holstered beneath his arm.

Leonardo stopped. Slowly, he turned his head and looked down at the floor.

His eyes were the exact color of a winter storm over steel water. Cold, ancient, and devoid of human mercy. Yet as his gaze swept over the girl kneeling at his feet, taking in her heart-shaped face, her full rosebud lips, and the lush curves straining against her damp clothes, something dark and unfamiliar flickered behind the ice.

She was tiny compared to him, barely reaching his collarbone, and she was glaring up at the most dangerous man alive as if he were gum stuck to the bottom of her sneaker.

"Get out of my way," Leonardo said. His voice was a deep, raspy baritone that vibrated through the floor and sent a strange, electric jolt straight up Celia's spine.

Instead of scrambling aside, Celia pushed herself up to her feet, brushed the dust off her tight jeans, and planted her boots squarely in front of his chest. The top of her head barely reached the silk knot of his tie, yet she tilted her chin high as if looking down at him from a throne.

"Your bodyguard knocked me down, bruised my arm, and scattered my books across the floor," Celia snapped, her clear voice echoing off the marble pillars. "Where I come from, grown men apologize when they run someone over. Or did you grow this tall without ever learning kindergarten manners?"

Two paces behind Leonardo, his underboss, Marco, let out a sharp breath. Grown men had ended up at the bottom of the harbor in concrete chains for looking at Don Moretti with disrespect. This fiery little spitfire had just insulted him and demanded an apology to his face.

Leonardo stared down into her blazing green eyes for three long heartbeats. His gaze dropped briefly to the rapid pulse fluttering at the base of her slender throat, then rose back to the angry flush staining her cheeks.

Without saying a word, Leonardo reached into his suit pocket with a black-gloved hand, pulled out two crisp hundred-dollar bills, and let them drop carelessly from his fingers. The bills fluttered down beside her scuffed boots.

"You staged your little fall, and you bought yourself ten seconds of my time," Leonardo murmured, his tone dripping with icy boredom. "Pick up your money, buy yourself a clean coat, and disappear before I have my men throw you into the street."

White-hot fury roared in Celia's ears. First the frat boy at the diner, then her controlling father on the phone, and now this arrogant, cold-blooded bastard who thought every girl breathing was a beggar waiting for his scraps.

Celia bent down, gathered her notebooks into her arms, and plucked the two hundred-dollar bills off the marble floor.

Leonardo's mouth curled into a cold, bitter sneer. Every woman was the same. Every last one of them bowed at the sight of money.

Then Celia took one fearless step forward, invading his personal space so fast his four bodyguards gasped and reached for their weapons. Before anyone could grab her arm, she reached up, shoved the folded bills straight back into the breast pocket of Leonardo's suit jacket right over his heart, and gave his rock-hard chest two sharp, patronizing pats with her bare palm.

"Keep it, grandpa," Celia whispered sweetly, looking straight into his lethal gray eyes from six inches away. "Save up for a soul. Looks like yours rotted out years ago."

Four gun safeties clicked off in unison.

Leonardo raised two gloved fingers in the air, halting his men a fraction of a second before they tackled her to the stone floor. Beneath his wool suit jacket and silk shirt, his chest burned as if he had been branded with a hot iron right where her small, warm palm had struck him.

Celia didn't wait for him to recover. She spun on her heel, her dark curls whipping across her back, and marched straight into the elevator at the end of the corridor. Right as the bronze doors slid shut, she met Leonardo's dark, unblinking stare from across the lobby and lifted her chin in one final challenge.

"Boss," Marco growled low under his breath, his hand still resting on his gun. "Give me the word. I will have her dragged off the fourth floor and taught a lesson she will remember until the day she dies."

Leonardo didn't move a muscle. The air around him still carried the faint scent of rain and wild vanilla, cutting right through the sterile smell of antiseptic. Slowly, he reached into his breast pocket, pulled out the crumpled bills still warm from her small fingers, and crushed them inside his gloved fist.

"Leave her," Leonardo murmured, his voice darker than midnight. "We have business in the lab."

Ten minutes later, in the embryology laboratory on the top floor, Dr. Arthur Vance was sweating through his white coat as Leonardo stood beside the steel incubator.

"Everything is ready according to your orders, Don Moretti," Dr. Vance said, pointing to the monitor. "This single male embryo is the only viable heir produced from your sample. The anonymous surrogate we contracted through Zurich is sedated downstairs in Suite 401. Once I complete the transfer tonight, you will have your blood heir in nine months without ever having to look at the woman carrying him."

Leonardo stared at the glowing screen without a flicker of emotion. The Syndicate elders had given him a final ultimatum: take a wife to secure the Moretti succession, or forfeit the eastern shipping routes. Since Leonardo would rather burn the world to ash than allow a deceitful woman into his bed or his life, a clinical transaction was the only answer.

"If a single mistake happens during that transfer, Doctor," Leonardo said softly, "I will erase your entire bloodline from the earth before sunrise. Do it now."

Meanwhile, downstairs in Suite 402, Celia changed into a cotton gown, climbed beneath the warm sheets, and let a kindly nurse connect a clear IV drip to her hand. Within sixty seconds, the mild sedative pulled her into deep unconsciousness.

She didn't hear the silenced gunshots that tore through the fourth-floor laboratory twenty minutes later.

Three armed assassins hired by the Russian Bratva had breached the stairwell to destroy Leonardo Moretti's sole embryo. Taking a bullet through his left shoulder as he fought off the first gunman in the lab adjoining Suite 401, a bleeding, terrified Dr. Vance realized the hitmen were seconds away from storming Suite 401 and killing the contracted surrogate.

If the embryo was destroyed, Leonardo Moretti would torture Vance and his family to death.

Clutching his bleeding shoulder in panic, the doctor snatched the sterile thermal catheter containing Leonardo's only heir, stumbled through the connecting surgical door into Room 402, and locked it behind him. On the bed lay a healthy girl in deep sedation, completely off the assassins' radar.

Whispering a desperate prayer, Dr. Vance snapped on sterile gloves, performed the painless four-minute embryo transfer while Celia slept soundly, and wiped the digital monitor clean just seconds before Moretti's security forces stormed the hallway to execute the intruders.

Under the warm white sheets, Celia slept peacefully through the storm, dreaming of paying off her tuition on Monday morning, completely unaware that her fate had just been sealed and she would soon be carrying the ruthless devil's only child.