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CHAPTER 53: "I'm Afraid"
publish date:
2026-04-07 18:31:44
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CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 56: The Wait
He was gone before I came downstairs.The note on the pillow said four words. Back by noon. Always. I read it three times standing at the window in the early light before I folded it carefully and put it in the pocket of my cardigan where the key used to live.The estate felt different without him in it.Not empty. Nico was here and Elena was here and the guards were on every entrance and the fountain was running and all the ordinary sounds of the house were doing what they always did. But there was a quality to the silence that was specific to his absence, something I had stopped noticing because he was almost always here and now noticed sharply because he wasn't.Elena put coffee in front of me without being asked."He left at five," she said. Not information exactly. Just something to place in the silence between us."I know," I said.She refilled my cup and went back to the kitchen and I sat at the table and held the warm cup in both hands and looked at the window and thought abo
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 55: The Night Before
I found him in the library at ten.Not working. Not on his phone. Just sitting in the reading desk chair with a glass of whiskey and the lamp on low and the freesia painting catching the light the way it did in the evenings when everything else in the room went soft and warm.He looked up when I came in.I closed the door and crossed the room and sat in the armchair and we looked at each other and neither of us said anything for a moment because we both understood what tonight was.Tomorrow it began.The coalition was assembled. The information was in place. Every piece of what had been built over the last weeks was positioned and ready and tomorrow Dante would set it all in motion and the thing that had been circling this house since the alley would finally be forced into its conclusion.Tonight was the last night before all of that."Are you ready," I said."Yes," he said."Are you afraid," I said.He looked at me steadily. "Yes," he said.I looked at my hands. "Tell me something,"
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 54: Building the Coalition
I watched him work for the first time on a Friday afternoon.Not by accident and not from a distance. He asked me to be there, which surprised me enough that I stood in the study doorway for a moment before I understood he meant it."Sit," he said. "You don't have to say anything. Just sit."I sat in the chair near the window and I watched.Three men came in over the course of two hours. Each one different. Each conversation different. But the same Dante in each of them, reading the room before anyone else had finished walking into it, knowing what each man needed to hear before the man had finished deciding how to ask for it.The first was an older Don from the northern district, cautious and traditional, the kind of man who needed to feel that joining something was his idea rather than someone else's request. Dante gave him that. He laid out the situation and then sat back and let the man arrive at the conclusion himself and when the man said what Dante had been waiting for him to s
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 53: "I'm Afraid"
I told him at breakfast.Not planned. Not something I had been building toward or organizing into the right words. It just came out over coffee on a Thursday morning while Elena was somewhere in the kitchen and the estate was quiet and Dante was reading something on his phone with his brow slightly furrowed the way it furrowed when something required more attention than he wanted to give it first thing in the morning."I'm afraid," I said.He looked up."Not of you," I said quickly. "Not of any of that. I'm afraid for you." I wrapped both hands around my coffee cup and looked at him directly. "I've been afraid for you since Viktor's name started appearing in every conversation and I've been managing it and telling myself it was fine and it isn't fine. I'm genuinely afraid and I wanted you to know that."He set his phone down.He didn't say anything immediately and I waited because I had learned that his silences weren't empty, they were full, and rushing them cost you the real answer.
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 52: Victor's Real Plan
Chapter 52 — Viktor's Real PlanThe information came through on a Wednesday night.Dante had been in the study since morning, which wasn't unusual, but by evening the quality of the silence coming from behind that door had changed into something denser and more deliberate and I had learned to read the difference between Dante working and Dante sitting with something significant.I knocked at nine."Come in," he said.He was at his desk with papers in front of him and his phone face down beside them and the particular stillness of a man who had just finished processing something and hadn't decided what to do with it yet.I sat in the chair across from him and waited."Viktor's endgame," he said. "We finally have the full picture.""Tell me," I said.He looked at me steadily. "It was never the territory," he said. "Not primarily. The territory is a consequence, not the objective." He paused. "The objective is personal. Viktor's father was killed thirty years ago. By my father. Over some
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 51
Chapter 51 — Sophia ExposedShe came to the estate one last time on a grey Tuesday morning.I didn't know she was coming. Nobody told me in advance and I only found out because I was in the library when I heard a car on the drive and looked out the window and recognized the silver one immediately. That particular silver, low and expensive, pulling up to the fountain with the unhurried confidence of something that believed it still had a right to be here.I stayed in the library.Whatever was happening below didn't need me in it. I sat in the armchair and held my book and didn't read a single word and listened to the sounds of the house instead. The front door. Voices in the entrance hall, low and controlled, which was almost worse than raised because controlled meant Dante and controlled meant he had already decided how this was going to go before she walked through the door.Biscuit jumped onto my lap.I put my hand on him and stared at the freesia painting and waited.Twenty minutes
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