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CHAPTER 11: Cracks

Author: B. Nelson
last update publish date: 2026-03-21 00:50:08

On the ninth day I stopped counting the days.

I didn't decide to. It just happened somewhere between the morning walk with Nico and the afternoon in the library, when I looked up from a book and realized I had no idea what time it was and for one whole minute I genuinely hadn't cared.

That bothered me more than I wanted to admit.

I had been spending my afternoons in the library since the third day, working through his mother's shelf one book at a time. Italian poetry first because it was beauti
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    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

  • CLAIM 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

  • CLAIM 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

  • CLAIM 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

  • CLAIM ME, DON   CHAPTER 84: It's Over

    Dante stood in that room for exactly thirty seconds.Not over Viktor specifically. Just standing in the space that smelled like cigarette smoke and thirty years of inherited purpose while the coalition held every position outside and the Tuesday evening moved past the compound windows completely indifferent to what had just happened inside.He took his phone from his jacket and called the estate.I picked up before the first ring finished.I had been sitting at the kitchen table with the phone face up in front of me for two hours and Elena had been beside me and Nico in the corridor and the radio going in and out and the evening turning fully dark outside the window without any of us noticing it happen.The phone lit up and I had it to my ear before the sound finished.One moment of silence.Then his voice."It's done," he said.Two words and I pressed my free hand flat against the kitchen table and felt the wood solid and real under my palm and breathed slowly and completely for the

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    The room on the second floor was small and smelled like cigarette smoke and old decisions.Viktor was standing at the window when Dante came through the door with two coalition men behind him and the particular quality of stillness that came from a man who had been waiting for this moment and had decided that sitting down for it would be a concession he was not willing to make.He was smaller than expected. Not physically small, a broad man in his fifties with grey at his temples and the weathered look of someone who had spent decades in rooms exactly like this one, but small in the way of a thing that had seemed enormous from a distance and revealed its actual dimensions up close.He looked at Dante for a long moment.Dante looked back at him.Neither of them spoke for what felt like a very long time but was probably fifteen seconds.Viktor moved first. Just a shift of his weight, a small adjustment, the body language of a man deciding which version of himself to lead with.He chose

  • CLAIM 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

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    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 13: Marco

    He arrived on a Thursday like a weather event.I heard him before I saw him, a voice in the entrance hall below carrying the kind of energy that didn't ask permission before filling a room. Warm and loud and completely unbothered about either. I was coming down the main staircase when he appeared a

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