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CHAPTER 62: Giulia
publish date:
2026-04-11 20:47:29
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CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 63: Surrender
The deliberate distance stopped.Not all at once and not with any announcement. It just stopped, the way things stopped when they had run out of reasons to continue, and what replaced it was something quieter and more honest and considerably more permanent feeling.The library became ours properly.Not mine and his separately, both of us drifting there independently and happening to occupy the same space. Actually ours, both of us choosing it at the same time for the same reason which was that it was where we were most ourselves and most comfortable and most able to just exist without any of the weight that existed everywhere else.He started leaving things there.Small things. A book he thought I would like placed on the side table without comment. A blanket on the armchair on an evening when the house was cold. Once a small dish of the particular biscuits Elena made that I had mentioned once in passing weeks ago and apparently he had remembered and apparently Elena had been informed
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 62: Giulia
He told me on a Tuesday evening.Not because I asked. Not because anything had forced it out of him. He told me because we were sitting in the library after dinner and the house was quiet and he had been somewhere else for most of the evening, not distant exactly, just carrying something, and at some point I had put my book down and looked at him and said nothing and waited and he had looked back at me and understood that I was ready to hear whatever he had been holding.He set his own book down.He was quiet for a long moment.Then he told me about his sister.He told me about growing up with her. About the seven year gap between them that should have made them strangers and somehow made them closer instead, the way she had followed him around the estate when she was small demanding his attention with the absolute confidence of someone who had never once been refused it. The way she used to appear in his study when he was sixteen and too serious for his age and sit on his desk and t
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 61: The Real Argument
It started over nothing.That was the thing about real arguments. They never started over the actual thing. They started over something small and ordinary that had the real thing sitting underneath it and when the pressure got high enough the small thing cracked open and everything underneath came out all at once.It started over a phone call.Marco had called me directly on Monday afternoon to tell me he was bringing Isadora to the estate on Wednesday for dinner and wanted to make sure I would be there. I said yes without hesitation and thought nothing more of it.Until dinner that evening when Dante mentioned casually that he had moved Wednesday to Thursday because of a meeting.I set my fork down. "You rescheduled Marco's dinner.""A meeting came up," he said."Without asking me," I said."It's one day," he said."That's not the point and you know it," I said. "You made a decision about my schedule without asking me once."He looked at me with the expression of a man who knew he ha
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 60: Elena's Truth
She found me in the garden on a Friday morning.Not by accident because Elena never did anything by accident. She was at the rose beds with her cutting tools when I came around the eastern path and she looked up with the expression of someone who had been waiting for exactly this long and not a moment more."Sit with me," she said.I sat on the stone bench at the edge of the bed and watched her work and waited. She moved through the roses with the unhurried precision of someone who had been tending this particular garden for years and knew every plant in it personally. The morning was cool and still and the mist was still low on the grass further along the path and the birds were doing their usual unreasonable amount of noise in the cypress trees along the boundary wall.She worked through three stems before she spoke."You know about Giulia," she said. Not a question."What I've been told," I said. "Which isn't the whole of it.""No," she said. "It isn't." She cut another stem cleanl
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 59: Fear of Softness
Something shifted after Marco left.Not dramatically. Nothing between us was ever dramatic in the obvious way. It was smaller than that and more complicated, the way Dante went slightly quieter over the next two days, slightly more contained, the careful management creeping back in around the edges in a way that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with the specific fear of a man who had let himself be seen completely and was now standing in the aftermath of that and not entirely sure what to do with it.I noticed it the way I noticed everything about him.Dinner on the first evening was good. Easy conversation, his hand finding mine across the table once, the comfortable warmth we had built between us sitting naturally in the room.By the second evening something had cooled slightly.Not cold. Not distant in the way of the early weeks when distance had been deliberate and structural. Just a fraction pulled back. A fraction more managed. The almost smile arriving and the
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 58: Marco Sees It
He slept for eleven hours.I know because I woke twice in the night and both times he was still there, deeply and completely asleep in a way I had never seen him sleep before, no watchfulness in it, no half-alertness, just the total surrender of a man whose body had finally collected on a very long debt.I lay beside him and listened to him breathe and felt the specific peace of a person who had been afraid for someone and had gotten them back whole.In the morning I got up carefully and went downstairs and made coffee properly and stood at the kitchen window looking at the garden in the early light and thought about the word over.Over.It sat differently in the morning than it had last night. Less like relief and more like something opening up. A door that had been locked since the alley swinging wide into something I couldn't fully see yet but could feel the air of. Fresh and unobstructed and completely unknown.What did life look like now.What did we look like now.Elena appeared
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 24: He Returns
I wasn't supposed to be in the hallway.I had been in bed, or trying to be, lying in the dark staring at the ceiling the way I had been doing on and off for three days while the estate held its breath around me. I had told myself at midnight that I was going to sleep. I had told myself the same thi
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 23: Viktor Moves
I heard it before anyone told me anything.Not details. Just the change in the house. The way an estate that had settled into a particular rhythm over the past three weeks shifted overnight into something tighter and faster and considerably less comfortable.It was four in the morning when it star
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 22: Giulia
I found it on a Wednesday afternoon.I had been working my way along the lower shelves of the library, the ones I hadn't reached yet, pulling books out and reading the inscriptions and putting them back. It had become a habit without my meaning it to, learning the woman who had lived in this room t
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 21: Elena's Story
I found her in the rose garden on a Thursday morning.Not by accident. Elena didn't do anything by accident. She was deadheading the roses with the focused attention of someone who had decided to be in a specific place at a specific time and was simply waiting for the other person to arrive.I had
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