“Can You Buy This Painting?” Billionaire Mafia froze because He Thought the Woman in the Painting Was Dead—Until Three Starving Triplets Asked Him to Save Their Mother

The basement apartment was freezing.

The only source of light was a single forty-watt bulb hanging from an exposed ceiling wire, and the faint, blue glow of a portable electric space heater whose heating element was flickering and half-dead. The air was thick with the smell of damp concrete, linseed oil, and the sharp, metallic tang of illness.

In the corner of the room, resting on a mattress supported by wooden pallets, lay a woman beneath three layers of frayed woolen blankets.

She was shivering violently.

Her face was deathly pale, her high cheekbones hollowed out by months of fever and malnutrition. Her dark-blond hair was damp with sweat, clinging to her forehead. An old plastic inhaler lay empty on the overturned milk crate beside her pillow.

Every breath she drew rattled in her chest—a harsh, whistling rasp that sounded like sandpaper rubbing against dry wood.

When she heard the footsteps, her eyelids fluttered open.

Her hazel-green eyes were glassy with fever, squinting against the dim light, frantically searching the room for her daughters.

"Maya...?" Elena wheezed, her voice a dry, broken whisper. "Chloe... Lily... where did you go? I told you... never leave the block..."

"We sold the picture, Mommy," Maya said, rushing to the side of the mattress, holding out the thick stack of bills. "The man gave us thousands of dollars. We can buy the inhaler now. And the soup from the market."

Elena’s gaze drifted from the money in her daughter's hands, moving slowly upward along the tailored black trousers, past the broad shoulders encased in the charcoal overcoat, until her eyes locked onto Dante Russo's face.

The room seemed to lose all its remaining warmth.

Elena’s breath hitched in her throat. The monitor of her soul seemed to flatline.

Her eyes widened in absolute, disbelieving horror. A violent, suffocating gasp tore through her lungs, throwing her into a racking fit of coughing that curled her body into a tight knot against the thin mattress.

"No..." she wept, the tears spilling over her fever-flushed cheeks as she tried desperately to drag the blankets over her daughters, shielding them with her frail, trembling body. "No... please... Dante... not them... don't take them..."

Dante fell to his knees on the raw concrete floor.

He didn't care about the dampness soaking into his clothes. He didn't care about the armed men watching from the hallway.

He reached out with shaking, calloused hands, his fingers hovering half an inch above her cheek, terrified that if he touched her skin, she would dissolve into smoke like every dream that had haunted his nights for seven years.

"Elena," he choked out, his deep baritone breaking into a ragged sob.

His fingers finally touched her cheek.

She was warm. Burning with fever, soaked in cold sweat, but real. Her pulse hammered against his thumb beneath the delicate line of her jaw.

"You're alive," Dante wept openly, bowing his head until his forehead rested against her trembling shoulder, his large frame shaking with the crushing release of seven years of agonizing grief. "My God... Elena... you're alive."

Elena lay beneath his touch, her hands weakly pushing against his chest, her strength completely gone. "You... you were supposed to forget me... I made sure you thought I was dead..."

Dante lifted his head, his slate-gray eyes blazing with a mixture of profound, desperate love and terrifying, protective fury.

"Who did this to you, Elena?" Dante demanded, his voice dropping into an icy growl that shook the walls of the basement. "Who told you to hide from me?"

Before Elena could answer, her eyes rolled back into her head, her breath cut off entirely by a massive spasm in her chest, and her body went limp against the mattress.

"Mommy!" Lily screamed, bursting into tears.

Dante moved with blinding, explosive speed.

He scooped Elena's feather-light, shivering body into his arms, wrapping her in his heavy cashmere overcoat, and stood up from the floor in one fluid, powerful motion.

"Nico!" Dante roared toward the open door.

Nico stepped into the room, his gun drawn. "Boss?"

"Clear the tunnel to Massachusetts General Hospital," Dante barked, carrying Elena through the doorway like she weighed nothing at all. "Call Dr. Samuel Rossi. Tell him if the chief of pulmonary surgery isn't waiting on the emergency bay ramp when my wheels hit the pavement, I will tear down the hospital wing by wing."

He turned to Maya, Chloe, and Lily, who were huddled together by the pallets, crying in terror.