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CHAPTER 32: The Dinner Party
publish date:
2026-03-27 17:58:19
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CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 37: The Truth About Carlo
I didn't sleep.I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and turned it over and over the way you turned something over when you were hoping a different angle would make it look like something more manageable than what it actually was.It didn't look more manageable from any angle.My father had given information to the Marchetti family fifteen years ago. Information that had consequences he hadn't fully anticipated and had been living with ever since in the quiet guilty way of a man who had made one catastrophic choice and spent the rest of his life being grateful it hadn't destroyed him yet.Hadn't destroyed him yet.Because it had found him eventually. It had found him in the form of his daughter walking into the wrong alley on a Tuesday night and ending up inside the very world he had spent fifteen years hoping she would never know existed.I got up at five because lying down wasn't working.I sat on the floor with my back against the bed the way I had on the first night in this
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 36: The Secret About Carlo
Three days after the key everything felt different.Not dramatically. Just quietly and fundamentally different the way things felt when something significant had settled into its permanent position and stopped being uncertain. We moved through the estate together with a new ease, dinners that ran late, evenings in the library, mornings where he appeared in the doorway with coffee before I had fully woken up and sat at the reading desk while I came back to life in the armchair.It was good.It was the best thing I had experienced in longer than I could honestly account for.Which was exactly why what happened on Thursday hit as hard as it did.I had been in the garden with Nico doing the eastern path when I decided to ask the question I had been carrying since Chapter Nine. Since the phone call. Since my father's voice going strange and careful and reaching for a word like sweetheart that didn't belong to him."Dante knows something about my father," I said.Nico was quiet for a moment
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 35: The Key
He found me in the library the next morning.I was in the armchair with coffee going cold and Biscuit heavy on my lap and the kind of tiredness that came from lying awake too long with too many thoughts and not enough answers. He appeared in the doorway and I looked up and he looked at me and neither of us mentioned the dining room or what had been said in it.He came in and sat at the reading desk and put something on the table between us.A key.Small and old, worn smooth from years of use. He slid it across the table without a word and I looked at it and then at him."What is this," I said."The front gate," he said.I looked at it again."You can leave whenever you choose," he said. "The gate opens from the inside and there are no guards between you and the road." A pause. "If you stay it should be because you want to. Not because you have no other option."I want to be something you choose.Last night's words sitting right there in the daylight between us with a key making them r
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 34: The Almost
The guests left at eleven.I heard the cars on the gravel, one after another, and the house settling back into its nighttime quiet and I stood at the dining room window with a glass of wine I had been holding for twenty minutes without drinking and thought about Rafael's smile.Footsteps behind me.I didn't turn around because I already knew them.Dante stopped somewhere behind me and for a moment neither of us spoke and the room held the particular silence of a space that had been full of people and was now empty of everyone except us."He was watching you all evening," he said."I know," I said. "I was watching him watch me.""And?"I turned from the window. He was standing near the table still in his dinner clothes, jacket on, looking at me with that steady dark attention that I had stopped being able to pretend didn't affect me."He's intelligent," I said. "More than he wants people to think. And patient in a way that has nothing casual about it."Dante looked at me for a moment.
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 handsome and had learned exactly how to use it.He looked around the room when he entered and his eyes landed on me and stayed a beat longer than introductions required.Dante noticed. I felt it in the slight shift beside me, barely visible, the kind of thing you only caught if you had been studying this man for weeks.Rafael sat two seats away and smiled across the table. "I don't believe we've met.""Mia," I said."Rafael." The smile widened slowly. "A genuine pleasure."Dante picked up his wine without a word.The dinner moved through its courses and Rafael was charming in the specific way of men who had practiced it until it became completely effortless. He told stories that made the ta
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 32: The Dinner Party
Three days after the library he asked me to do something I hadn't seen coming.I was in the armchair reading when he appeared in the doorway and I looked up the way I always did when he appeared, that awareness in my chest that I had completely given up pretending wasn't there."I need you at dinner on Friday," he said."I'm at dinner every night.""Not like this one." He came in and sat at the reading desk and looked at me the way he looked at things he needed me to understand completely. "Allied family heads. Six of them. They need to see that I am not distracted."I looked at him. "And bringing your captive to the table fixes that?""Bringing the woman I chose to bring here fixes that," he said. "There's a difference."The woman he chose to bring here.I sat with that for a moment because it landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to land."Just be who you are," he said quietly. "That's all I'm asking."I looked at him across the library and thought about what it meant to sit beside D
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