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CHAPTER 71: The Question
publish date:
2026-04-25 19:46:50
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CLAIM ME, DON Chapter 108: Mrs. Paola
Nico dropped me at the corner of Carver Street on a Saturday morning and I walked the last half block the way I had walked it hundreds of times before, past the dry cleaner and the place that sold newspapers and the bench where the old men sat on warm afternoons playing chess badly and arguing about it excellently.The building looked exactly the same.Of course it did because buildings did not rearrange themselves to account for the fact that the person approaching them had become someone considerably different from the person who had left them several months ago in a hurry that had not felt like leaving at the time.I got my key out on the steps and the door to number four opened before I had reached the lock.Mrs. Paola was already there.She was in her good housecoat, the blue one with the embroidered collar that she wore when she had decided an occasion required it, and she looked at me from her doorway with the specific expression of a woman who had been waiting for this visit a
CLAIM ME, DON Chapter 107: Fabio
I asked him on a Wednesday morning.Not planned and not because anything had led directly to it. He had mentioned the visit in passing, the way he mentioned it every month, brief and factual and not inviting anything, and this time I looked up from my coffee and said I would like to come with him if that was something he was willing to consider.He looked at me across the breakfast table.The silence that followed was not an uncomfortable one but it was long, longer than his silences usually went, and I waited in it and did not fill it because this was the kind of question that needed whatever time it needed."Yes," he said finally.Just that.We drove out on Thursday afternoon, an hour north of the city on a road that got quieter the further it went from everything, and the facility was low and pale and surrounded by gardens that were tended with the specific care of a place that understood the people inside it couldn't tend things themselves anymore.Dante said almost nothing on the
CLAIM ME, DON Chapter 106: Marco Proposes
The argument was about shelving.That was the thing that made it so completely Marco, the specific absurdity of the context, which was that he and Isadora had been arguing about the correct way to organise the shelving in her apartment for twenty minutes before he dropped to one knee on her kitchen floor and asked her to marry him.We found out the details afterward, in pieces, the way you found out things that happened when you weren't in the room, each piece slightly more vivid and more Marco than the last.They had been arguing about whether shelves should be organised by subject or by size, which was the kind of argument that was never actually about shelving and was always about the specific texture of two people learning to share a life and discovering where the friction was, and Marco had apparently been losing on the merits and had known he was losing and had kept going anyway because Marco in an argument had never been particularly interested in the merits.Isadora had said s
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 105: Lorenzo
The meeting was on Thursday at two.Lorenzo Voss's club sat in the older part of the city where the buildings were all pale stone and tall windows and the kind of architecture that communicated wealth by never mentioning it. Dante told me on the drive over that Lorenzo had chosen the club rather than his office, which was itself a deliberate choice, the club being the territory where Lorenzo felt entirely himself and visitors were intended to feel slightly less so.I wore the black dress.The one Dante had chosen for the first dinner party with the allied family heads, the one I had been wearing when I read a table of six powerful men before the first course arrived and held my own through three courses and a possessive hand at my back and a slow smile from Rafael that had stayed at my neck for the rest of the night.That dress had done something before and I needed whatever it carried.Dante noticed when I came downstairs and said nothing and offered his arm.We were shown to the tab
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 104: The Voss Problem
Marco arrived at the estate on a Tuesday evening without calling ahead.I heard the car on the gravel at seven and the specific quality of the door closing told me something was wrong before I saw his face, the sound of a man not paying attention to how he was moving because his attention was somewhere else entirely.He came through the front door and Dante was already in the entrance hall, which told me Dante had heard the car too and had read the same thing from it that I had, and Marco stood in the entrance hall and looked at his brother and something in his face that had been held in place for however long the drive had taken let go."Lorenzo Voss called me in this afternoon," he said.Dante said nothing and gestured toward the sitting room.They went in and I went to the doorway and stood in it and listened because standing in doorways and paying attention had served me well in this house from the beginning and I saw no reason to stop now.Marco sat on the sofa and Dante sat acro
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 103: Four of Them
Marco announced he was cooking on a Friday afternoon without asking anyone if this was something they wanted. He sent a message to the estate at two o'clock that said I am bringing ingredients and Isadora and dinner is handled, do not let Elena interfere, which was the kind of message that required no response because there was no version of events where any of those things did not happen exactly as stated. He arrived at four with two bags of groceries and Isadora and the energy of a man who had committed to something and was not going to be moved from it regardless of what the evidence suggested about his actual cooking ability. Elena appeared in the kitchen doorway when Marco began unpacking the bags, looked at the specific combination of ingredients he had assembled, looked at Dante, looked at me, made a decision that this was not her concern this evening, and went to the sitting room with her book and closed the door. Wise woman. Isadora and I sat at the kitchen table with win
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 98: The Compromise
The negotiation took two days.It happened in pieces across different rooms of the estate, at breakfast and in the library and once at the kitchen table with Elena moving around us with diplomatic efficiency and Biscuit sitting on the chair between us like a moderator who had strong opinions and ha
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 97: Independence
I brought it up on a Sunday morning.Not because Sunday felt significant but because we were at breakfast and the morning was good and the estate was quiet and I had been carrying the conversation in my chest for long enough that waiting for a better moment had started feeling like waiting because
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 96: Reconnection
He found me in the library at ten that night.I had been in the armchair for an hour doing the thing I did when I needed to sit somewhere familiar and let the day finish itself, which was hold a book open and not read it and let the room do what the room always did, which was hold things quietly un
CLAIM ME, DON CHAPTER 95: Making Up
The apology came in pieces.Not all at once and not in a single conversation but the way real apologies came between real people, in small honest increments across a whole day, each one slightly more complete than the last until the full shape of it was visible.The first piece came at dinner on Th
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