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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.
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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.Latest chapter
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 88: Sophia Leaves
Elena told us at breakfast on a Thursday morning.She came in from wherever she had been and set the bread basket on the table and said it the way she said things that required no ceremony, plainly and without preamble, the way you stated a fact that had been decided somewhere else and had simply arrived here to be acknowledged.Sophia Caruso had been seen loading a car outside her apartment on the east side of the city two days ago. Not a removal company. Not boxes being put into storage. Everything. Her whole life going into a vehicle that left the city heading south and had not come back.Elena said it and then sat down and poured her own coffee and picked up the bread basket and offered it to Marco who was seated beside her with his sling and his appetite and his complete lack of interest in performing any emotion he wasn't actually having.Dante said nothing.I watched his face the way I always watched his face and found what I had not entirely expected to find there, which was n
Last Updated : 2026-05-11CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 87: Loose Ends
Katya was still in the city on the fourth day after the compound.Dante told me at breakfast without being asked, which was itself something worth noting because in the early weeks of all of this he would have managed information like this carefully, deciding what I needed and what I didn't and delivering only the former. He sat across from me with his coffee and said her name and told me what his people had found and I listened and understood that the telling was its own kind of thing, a continuation of something that had been building since the night he came back and said home.He told me because I had a right to know.Because I was part of this now in a way that went past witness and past captive and past everything the early chapters of us had been."Where has she been," I said."Moving," he said. "Not randomly. She has been in three specific locations in the city over four days and none of them are accidental.""Which locations," I said.He told me the addresses and I held them i
Last Updated : 2026-05-10CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 86: Marco Recovers
Marco decided on the second morning that he was well enough to hold court.He had established himself in the main sitting room with a blanket across his lap that he hadn't asked for and a cup of tea he hadn't made and a position on the sofa that suggested he had been there for years and intended to remain indefinitely. By nine in the morning two of the household staff had already been through to check on him and Elena had brought food he hadn't requested and Biscuit had somehow migrated from the library and was sitting beside him with the proprietary ease of a cat who recognized someone who would tolerate being used as a cushion.I found him there at half past nine with the blanket and the cat and an expression of complete unashamed satisfaction."You look comfortable," I said."I am in significant pain," he said immediately. "My arm is extremely troubling. The doctors were very concerned.""The doctors cleared you for light activity yesterday," I said."Light activity," he said. "Not
Last Updated : 2026-05-08CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 85: He Comes Home
Nobody moved for a long time.We stood in the entrance hall with his arms around me and my face against his shoulder and the estate completely still around us and the fountain running outside and the evening doing its quiet thing beyond the windows and none of it mattered at all because he was here and whole and breathing and that was the only fact that had any weight to it.After a while I became aware of the staircase.I lifted my head slightly and looked past Dante's shoulder and Marco was sitting on the third step with his arm in a sling and his face doing something he was working extremely hard to control and not entirely succeeding at.He was watching us.His eyes were bright in the specific way eyes got when a person was determined to deny what they were doing with them.He raised his good hand and pressed two fingers to the corner of his eye with the casual unhurried manner of a man doing something completely ordinary."Dust," he said. To the ceiling. To the staircase banister
Last Updated : 2026-05-07CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 33: Rafael
Rafael Vega arrived late.Everyone else was already seated when he walked in, unhurried, like a man who understood that making people wait was its own kind of statement. He was younger than the others, maybe late thirties, dark suited, the kind of handsome that came with the full awareness of being
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 31: No Pretense & Second Intimacy
Neither of us moved for a long time.We sat in the dark library with his hand in mine and the fountain running outside and the quiet of the estate settling around us and I thought about Fen in the entrance hall and the way Dante's voice had been so completely still and I thought about all the weigh
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 29: Viktor's Real Play
I wasn't supposed to hear it.I had come downstairs for water at eleven at night and the study door was open a crack, which never happened when Dante was working. I would have walked straight past it except I heard my name in a sentence that stopped me cold in the corridor.I stood outside and list
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 28: Sophia Returns
She arrived on a Friday without warning, same as before.I was coming down the main staircase when I saw her in the entrance hall below, already inside, already making herself at home in the specific way that said she considered home to be the operative word. Same polished appearance. Same cream cl
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