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CHAPTER 34: The Almost
publish date:
2026-03-27 18:02:12
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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
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 weight this man carried every single day of his life without ever putting it down.I turned to look at him.He was already looking at me.In the low moonlight coming through the library windows his face was open in the way it only got when he was too tired to manage it and I looked at him for a long moment and then I reached up and put my hand against his jaw.He went completely still.I had touched him before. He had touched me. But this was different, this was me choosing it deliberately with no urgency and no crisis behind it, just my hand against his face in the dark because I wanted it there.His eyes closed briefly.When they opened again something in them had shifted.He turned his face i
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 30: The Betraya
His name was Fen.I had seen him around the estate for weeks without thinking much about him. Mid thirties, quiet, the kind of man who occupied space without drawing attention to it. He worked logistics, schedules and routes and the movement of people and vehicles, which meant he knew things that most of the guards didn't.He had known enough to sell.I found out the way I found out most things in this house, by paying attention when people didn't know I was paying attention. Elena's face at breakfast. The absence of two guards who were usually at the east gate. Nico arriving at my door twenty minutes earlier than usual with a flatness in his expression that told me something was already resolved and the resolution hadn't been clean."Stay in the library today," he said."What happened?" I asked."Stay in the library," he said again, gently and without room for negotiation.I stayed in the library.For three hours I sat in the armchair with a book I wasn't reading and listened to the
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 listened.Dante was at his desk. Nico was standing. Between them was Paulo, one of the senior guards, delivering information in the careful measured way of someone who wished they were delivering something else entirely.The offer had come through a clean intermediary. No fingerprints. No trace.The terms were simple. Whoever delivered the woman currently residing at the estate to a specified location would receive safe passage out of the country. New documents. Money. A clean start somewhere beyond Viktor's reach.Whoever delivered the woman.I pressed my back against the wall and kept very still.Paulo kept talking. The offer had gone to three people inside the operation simultaneously. Paulo
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