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I took a shortcut through the alley and watched Dante Marchetti put a bullet in a man like it was nothing. He saw my face. That was the end of my normal life. Within an hour I was in the back of his car being driven to an estate I had never seen before with gates that locked from the outside and a wardrobe full of clothes in my exact size waiting like someone had known I was coming before I did. He told me I wasn't a prisoner but a guest. He said people who wanted to find me were considerably worse than him and that his walls were the only thing standing between me and a conversation I wouldn't survive. Maybe he was right. The problem is the longer I stayed the harder it became to remember which one was true. Because the man who caught me in that alley wasn't the only version of him. There was another one that nobody else seemed to get to see. The one who stood alone in his dead mother's library looking tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. The one who had my cat brought to the estate because he heard me crying through a closed door and didn't know what else to do about it. The one who almost smiled when I threw a glass at his head. That version of him was the one I couldn't stop thinking about. I came here as a witness. I stayed as something else entirely. Somewhere between the locked doors, the candlelit dinners and the secrets we started sharing in the dark I stopped wanting to leave. The question was whether a woman like me could survive loving a man like him. I was about to find out.
Voir plusChapitre 1
CHAPTER 1: The Wrong Place
I should have taken the main road home.
Ten extra minutes on my feet was all it would have cost me. But after eight hours of wiping counters and smiling at men who didn't deserve it my body was completely done. My shoes were killing me and all I wanted was my bed and the pasta waiting in my fridge since Tuesday, so I took the shortcut through the alley behind Benedetti Square. I have regretted it every single day since. I heard them before I saw anything. Low voices carrying that particular kind of calm that has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with men who have never had a reason to be afraid of anything. Something in my chest told me to stop walking and turn around, and take the long way home like a sensible person but I didn't listen and I kept walking. Then the gunshot split the night open. One shot clean and final like a door slamming shut on someone's entire life, and my hand flew to my mouth before the scream could get out. I spun around and that's when I saw him standing under a broken streetlamp at the far end of the alley. Tall and broad shouldered in a black suit that probably cost more than my rent with a gun held loosely at his side and smoke still curling from the barrel like it meant absolutely nothing to him. Two men stood behind him silent and still and on the ground between them was a body. I looked away from the ground fast but I had already looked at him and the moment my eyes found his face he was already looking straight back at me. Dark eyes. Cold and steady. The eyes of a man who had nothing in this world to fear except me right now because I had just seen everything. "She saw your face Don," one of the men said quietly and that word moved through my whole body like ice water, because everyone in this city knew what that word meant. You learned it young the same way you learned not to touch fire. Early and once and permanently. Dante Marchetti. Head of the most powerful crime family in Sorrento City. The man police didn't question and politicians didn't cross and ordinary people didn't look at directly if they had any sense at all. I had just looked directly at him so I ran. My heels hit the wet pavement hard and I pushed my legs as fast as they would go but behind me. I heard footsteps that were steady and unhurried, not running at all. Just walking like a man who already knew exactly how this was going to end, and saw no reason to hurry toward it. I made it exactly twelve steps before a hand caught my arm and swung me hard into the brick wall, suddenly he was right in front of me and there was nowhere left to go. Up close he was worse than from a distance. Taller and harder with a face made entirely of sharp angles and cold certainty that made me forget for one stupid second what I had just watched him do in that alley. His hand was wrapped around my wrist and that was all he needed. "Let me go." My voice came out steady and I was genuinely proud of that. He looked at me the way someone looks at a problem they are already three steps ahead of solving, and said "You were at Luca's bar tonight. Bar shift. You finish at one." His voice was low and quiet. "How do you know that?" "I know everything that happens in this city." His thumb moved once against the inside of my wrist and it was such a small absent movement, but it made my skin feel strange in a way I didn't want to think about. "Including what you just saw." "I didn't see anything." Something shifted in his expression then. Not quite a smile but more like a man who had heard exactly the lie he expected. "Mia Russo. Twenty four. Carver Street third floor unit 7B." He paused just long enough to make it hurt. "You have a cat named Biscuit." The ground felt completely unsteady under my feet. "Please." The word tore out of me before I could stop it and I hated myself the moment it did. "I won't tell anyone I swear I won't say a single word about tonight just please let me go home." "I know you won't," he said releasing my wrist and stepping back just enough to give me air while his eyes never once left my face. "Because you're coming with me." "No I'm not." He looked at me for a long moment with no anger and no threat and just that complete total certainty of a man who had never once in his life been told no and had it actually stick. "That was not a request Mia." Behind him a black car sat at the beginning of the alley with the engine running and I did the math fast. I couldn't outrun him and he already knew my name and my address, including my cat. There was no corner of this city I could reach before sunrise where he wouldn't already be waiting. So I watched him read every single thought right off my face without blinking and then he placed one hand at my back and guided me toward the car. His hand was warm. The city moved past the tinted windows and I sat completely still and told myself to breathe and think and pay attention because I was going to survive this. I told myself that the whole way to his estate and I almost believed it.Dernier chapitre
CLAIM ME, DON Chapter 108: Mrs. Paola
Nico dropped me at the corner of Carver Street on a Saturday morning and I walked the last half block the way I had walked it hundreds of times before, past the dry cleaner and the place that sold newspapers and the bench where the old men sat on warm afternoons playing chess badly and arguing about it excellently.The building looked exactly the same.Of course it did because buildings did not rearrange themselves to account for the fact that the person approaching them had become someone considerably different from the person who had left them several months ago in a hurry that had not felt like leaving at the time.I got my key out on the steps and the door to number four opened before I had reached the lock.Mrs. Paola was already there.She was in her good housecoat, the blue one with the embroidered collar that she wore when she had decided an occasion required it, and she looked at me from her doorway with the specific expression of a woman who had been waiting for this visit a
Dernière mise à jour : 2026-06-17CLAIM ME, DON Chapter 107: Fabio
I asked him on a Wednesday morning.Not planned and not because anything had led directly to it. He had mentioned the visit in passing, the way he mentioned it every month, brief and factual and not inviting anything, and this time I looked up from my coffee and said I would like to come with him if that was something he was willing to consider.He looked at me across the breakfast table.The silence that followed was not an uncomfortable one but it was long, longer than his silences usually went, and I waited in it and did not fill it because this was the kind of question that needed whatever time it needed."Yes," he said finally.Just that.We drove out on Thursday afternoon, an hour north of the city on a road that got quieter the further it went from everything, and the facility was low and pale and surrounded by gardens that were tended with the specific care of a place that understood the people inside it couldn't tend things themselves anymore.Dante said almost nothing on the
Dernière mise à jour : 2026-06-16CLAIM ME, DON Chapter 106: Marco Proposes
The argument was about shelving.That was the thing that made it so completely Marco, the specific absurdity of the context, which was that he and Isadora had been arguing about the correct way to organise the shelving in her apartment for twenty minutes before he dropped to one knee on her kitchen floor and asked her to marry him.We found out the details afterward, in pieces, the way you found out things that happened when you weren't in the room, each piece slightly more vivid and more Marco than the last.They had been arguing about whether shelves should be organised by subject or by size, which was the kind of argument that was never actually about shelving and was always about the specific texture of two people learning to share a life and discovering where the friction was, and Marco had apparently been losing on the merits and had known he was losing and had kept going anyway because Marco in an argument had never been particularly interested in the merits.Isadora had said s
Dernière mise à jour : 2026-06-15CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 105: Lorenzo
The meeting was on Thursday at two.Lorenzo Voss's club sat in the older part of the city where the buildings were all pale stone and tall windows and the kind of architecture that communicated wealth by never mentioning it. Dante told me on the drive over that Lorenzo had chosen the club rather than his office, which was itself a deliberate choice, the club being the territory where Lorenzo felt entirely himself and visitors were intended to feel slightly less so.I wore the black dress.The one Dante had chosen for the first dinner party with the allied family heads, the one I had been wearing when I read a table of six powerful men before the first course arrived and held my own through three courses and a possessive hand at my back and a slow smile from Rafael that had stayed at my neck for the rest of the night.That dress had done something before and I needed whatever it carried.Dante noticed when I came downstairs and said nothing and offered his arm.We were shown to the tab
Dernière mise à jour : 2026-05-27CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 101: Buying The Bar
Luca named his number on a Monday.It was fair and we both knew it was fair and there was no negotiation required on that specific point, which was its own kind of respect between two people who had worked together long enough to understand what the thing between them was worth and what it wasn't w
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 99: Luca's Bar
Nico dropped me at the corner of Benedetti Street on a Thursday afternoon and I walked the last block alone because I needed the last block to be alone, needed to feel the familiar weight of the street under my feet and the smell of the city that was different from the estate, exhaust and coffee an
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 98: The Compromise
The negotiation took two days.It happened in pieces across different rooms of the estate, at breakfast and in the library and once at the kitchen table with Elena moving around us with diplomatic efficiency and Biscuit sitting on the chair between us like a moderator who had strong opinions and ha
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 93: Dr. Amara
She arrived on a Friday morning with a black medical bag and the specific energy of a woman who had been doing her job for a long time and had stopped being impressed by anything that wasn't an actual medical emergency.Dr. Amara was forty something, sharp eyed, with natural hair pulled back and re
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