Owned By The Psychotic Billionaire (Mafia BL)

LOUISE’S POV

Once Mateo had nothing left to give, once his bank accounts were completely drained to zero and his name was ruined, Alice left him in the dust. She packed her bags, turned her back on his shattered life, and walked away without looking back a single time.

It was then that young Louise realized the horrible, gut-wrenching truth. To Alice, this was always going to be the end for Mateo.

He was never a human being to her. He was just a placeholder, a convenient bank account to bleed dry while she waited for a wealthier man’s wife to rot in her bed.

Louise never saw Mateo again after the day Alice packed their luggage and dragged her through the massive, lifeless iron gates of the Dubois estate.

Life in the Dubois mansion was a suffocating nightmare disguised as grand luxury.

Louise hated every single inch of the place. She hated the towering, cold marble pillars, the silent servants walking on eggshells, the golden chandeliers that cast long, fake shadows, and the heavy atmosphere of thick resentment hanging in every hallway.

Most of all, she harbored an innate, burning dislike for Henri and his young son, Adrien.

Henri was a monster who treated the entire world like his personal playground, but Adrien was something entirely different. To young Louise, Adrien was a spoiled, miserable prince sitting on a golden throne he had done nothing to earn.

He had everything she had ever desperately dreamed of having— safety, wealth, power, and a father who actually acknowledged his existence. Even if it was with a hatred that she knew she could not bear.

Yet he walked around the vast estate with a quiet, biting disdain for everything around him, as if the whole world disgusted him to death.

She hated the way Adrien looked at her and her mother whenever they crossed paths in the long, quiet hallways.

He saw right through Alice’s fake, sweet smiles and manipulative charm. He eyed both of them like cheap trash that had washed up on his clean doorstep.

He never hesitated to show his disgust, cutting Louise down with sharp, quiet insults that made her mother smile with frightening malice. Malice aimed at both of them.

Yet, beneath her sharp, burning hatred for Adrien, there was a bitter, unwanted sliver of pity that made Louise’s stomach turn.

Because Louise knew the truth buried beneath the polished floors of the estate. She had heard her mother whispering over the black telephone all those years ago.

She knew that Adrien’s true mother had not simply died of poor health. The poor woman had been mentally drained, starved of affection, and pushed into an early grave by a husband who wished her dead and a ruthless mistress who fed his dark desires every single night.

Adrien had lost his mother to the very same viper that had destroyed Mateo.

He was being forced to grow up under the exact same roof as the woman who had orchestrated his family’s ruin. He was forced to eat dinner at the same table as the murderer of his mother’s peace.

Louise watched Adrien from afar over the years, watching him grow sharper, darker, quieter, and deeply isolated with every passing day, and she felt a sickening, heavy pang of sympathy.

Sympathy that she could never show, because hatred was easier for her to express.

They were both victims of Alice Dubois. They were both broken pieces left in the wake of her relentless ambition.

The only difference was that Adrien had the power, the money, and the authority of the Dubois bloodline to fight back, while Louise was just a nameless parasite attached to her mother’s back, forced to stay silent to survive.

And that difference was all that was needed to seal her hatred.

Years passed in a blur of fake polite dinners, cold glances over stupidly expensive cutlery, and silent, bloody wars waged in the grand hallways of the mansion.

Louise grew up surrounded by a hollow luxury she despised, living under the roof of a family that barely tolerated her presence.

She learned to stand out in the crowd, to keep her shoulders up, to play the useful step-daughter while her mother climbed higher and higher up the social ladder.

Until she turned thirteen.

She was sitting in the quietest corner of the vast Dubois library one rainy morning, flipping through the back pages of the morning newspaper to practice her reading and avoid her mother’s daily critiques.

Her eyes caught a small, forgotten paragraph buried near the bottom of the local crime and economic section.

The headline was tiny, almost invisible beneath advertisements and stock market reports. It spoke of a small-scale businessman who had attempted to take his own life after fighting unbearable debt and severe legal trouble for three long, agonizing years.

Mateo.

The short, cold article explained that the attempt had failed to end his life completely. Instead, it had left him in a deep, irreversible coma.

He had been rushed to a poorly funded public hospital on the edge of the city, forgotten by the world, penniless, and totally alone without a single family member to sign his care forms.

Eleven long years.

For eleven long years, Mateo—the gentle man who was once so full of vibrant life, who read scriptures with such tender passion, who laughed at silly childish jokes and bought strawberry candies for a little girl who was not his own—lay confined to a narrow metal bed in a small, sterile room.

He lay there in a vegetative state, staring at nothing with closed eyes, breathing through plastic tubes, waiting for a final death that took over a decade to claim his broken body.

Now, Louise sits on that very bed.

She is here at the public hospital to collect his ashes. He had passed away quietly in his sleep the night before, his exhausted heart simply surrendering after years of empty, hollow waiting.

The moment Louise had turned eighteen and became a legal adult in the eyes of the law, she had marched straight to the hospital records office without telling a soul.

She had put her own name down as his official next of kin, taking responsibility for a man the rest of the world had discarded like trash.

She remembered the way Alice had laughed when she accidentally found out about it months later. Alice had been sitting in her high-backed leather chair, sipping expensive red wine, laughing until real tears ran down her flawless, painted cheeks.

She had called Louise a pathetic, stupidly sentimental fool for clinging to the ghost of a dead-end loser who could not even keep his own bank account afloat.

The woman who had utterly ruined his life saw Louise’s quiet devotion as nothing more than a hilarious, pathetic joke.

Louise sits alone in the silent, cold room, slowly rolling the small glass vial between her trembling fingers. The glass is freezing against her skin, but the murky liquid inside feels heavy, like a quiet, terrible promise waiting to be fulfilled.

Being kind will take you nowhere in this wicked world.

Being kind is nothing more than an open, weak invitation for those who are happily, ruthlessly evil to exploit you, bleed you completely dry, and destroy every single thing you hold dear.

Mateo was kind. Mateo was gentle, pure, faithful, and loving. And his grand reward for a life of virtue was eleven agonizing years of nothing, lying on a cold hospital bed while the wicked woman who ruined him drank expensive champagne in a mansion.

Being kind today is spitting directly on Mateo’s last eleven years of suffering.

Being kind is not an option when you are always destined to be the loser in someone else’s grand game.

A quiet clarity settles deep within her chest, turning every soft part of her heart cold and hard as stone. The frantic, painful grief that had been tearing her apart from the inside for the past twelve hours slowly solidifies into something sharp, something focused, something lethal.

She slips the small glass vial into the deep pocket of her black wool coat, her fingers lingering over the cold glass for just a second before letting go.

The heavy wooden door of Room 408 creaks open on rusty hinges. A young hospital attendant stands in the doorway, holding a worn metal clipboard, looking down at her with a deeply sympathetic, tired expression.

"Miss Louise?" the attendant calls out softly, her voice gentle in the quiet room. "The cremation process is fine. You can come down to the front desk now to sign the final release forms and collect the urn."

Louise takes a slow, deep breath, feeling the cold air fill her lungs one last time. She lifts her head to look straight at the attendant.

Her eyes are swollen, raw, and heavily bloodshot. Tears spill over her lower lids, tracing slow, wet paths down her pale cheeks.

It is the face of an utterly heartbroken woman, a devoted daughter who has spent the last several hours weeping uncontrollably over the death of her beloved father.

A man who was only hers in name.

The attendant’s heart breaks at the sight, offering a soft, pitying smile as she steps back to give her space.

Louise stands up slowly from the narrow bed, smoothing down the front of her black coat, her right hand resting firmly, protective and heavy, over the coat pocket containing the murky vial.

She walks out of the sterile room without looking back, leaving the empty bed behind, stepping forward into the path she has chosen to walk for herself.

And for Mateo.