LOGINFated Dynasties Maya Rossi manages the Cape Town Falcons a hockey team that she will inherit,while hiding her father's criminal empire behind pristine PR. Exhausted by duty, she seeks one anonymous night with a stranger in a hotel bar, not knowing the person she's fallen for is an enemy. The Rossi and Zurri families have warred for decades over territory, power, and old wounds no one will name. When violence threatens to explode, both patriarchs propose an arranged marriage between Maya and Ryan to broker peace. It's a business merger disguised as romance,except Maya and Ryan can't stop wanting each other. They marry, testify against their fathers in a RICO case, and spend months restructuring the families' operations into legitimate businesses. For the first time, Maya feels free. She's building something clean with the man she loves. Then she finds the discrepancies. Financial records don't match. The assault that reignited the family war wasn't ordered by either patriarch. Following the money leads Maya to Pieter Smitt, a ghost from 1995 who was once her father's partner. Smitt has spent thirty years orchestrating the entire conflict, manipulating both families into destroying each other while he profits. Maya discovers Smitt murdered her mother when she tried to expose their smuggling operation. Her father and Ryan's father aren't guilty of the crimes they're imprisoned for,they're victims of an elaborate revenge plot. Before Maya can act on this evidence, she's taken. Ryan launches a desperate rescue mission with their hockey team as backup, storming a docklands warehouse to save his wife. The confrontation is brutal and violent, ending with an arrest and Ryan shot. Maya and Ryan's testimony frees their fathers and sends Smitt to prison for life.Two people choose love over legacy and survive to build something better.
View MoreRyan The first thing I notice is the silence. Not the absence of sound—the city is there, doing what the city does, the low continuous hum of Milan at midmorning filtering through the shutters in the way of a place that does not pause for the private circumstances of the people inside its buildings. The silence I mean is the specific silence of a space where someone was, and is no longer. A silence with a shape. A silence that knows its own dimensions because they were defined by a person and that person has left. Maya's side of the bed is cool. Not cold. Not the cold of hours. Cool—the warmth still present at the edges, the impression of her still in the pillow, the particular intimacy of sheets that remember the shape of someone who was there an hour ago and has since become somewhere else. I lie in this for a moment with my eyes open and the ceiling above me and the October light doing what it has been doing all morning, which is coming through the shutters and meaning nothi
Maya I wake up slowly, the way you only wake when your body has finally decided it is safe to. Not the way I have been waking up for the past three years,jolted, already calculating, already somewhere in the middle of a thought that started before I was fully conscious. Not the way I woke in Lagos with the fever burning through me and the particular dread of a woman who does not have the luxury of being ill. Not even the way I woke for most of the past week, which was with the dim awareness of four walls and the careful distance I keep between myself and everything that matters too much. This is different. This is October light coming through the shutters in pale bars across the ceiling, and somewhere in the building a door closing gently, and the sound of the city doing what the city does at this hour—unhurried, the particular quiet of a Tuesday morning that has no urgency to it—and Ryan, who is warm and present and sleeping on his side with his back to me and his breathing so
Chapter 70 Ryan The idea starts the way bad ideas usually do simply, and with complete confidence. Maya is sleeping. This is itself an event worth noting—she is, by her own admission and the evidence of the past week, not a good sleeper in ordinary circumstances, which these are not, and the fact that she went down at nine and stayed down and is now, at ten-thirty the following morning, still asleep with her face turned toward the window and her breathing slow and even, is a sign that her body is finally doing the work of recovering properly. I am not going to wake her. I am, however, hungry in a way that has been building since six AM, and I am standing in Maya's kitchen with its elegant stone worktops and its copper pots and its nearly empty refrigerator—Maria stocked essentials before we arrived but not, apparently, accounting for a second person—and I am thinking that Maya deserves to wake up to a proper meal. This is a good thought. Everything that follows from it is somew
Chapter 69 Maya The house is on Via dei Giardini. I bought it four years ago during a property acquisition that was, on paper, a portfolio diversification decision and was, in reality, the first thing I had ever purchased purely because I wanted it. No strategic rationale. No yield calculation that justified the price. Just a nineteenth century townhouse on a quiet street in Brera with original stone floors and a courtyard with a fig tree and windows that let in afternoon light the colour of something warm. I have spent a total of eleven weeks in it across four years. I've never brought anyone here. I tell myself this is because my time in Milan is always professional—meetings, due diligence, the quarterly visits to the investment fund I co-manage with a Milanese firm. I tell myself it's practical. I tell myself a lot of things about a lot of decisions and I've gotten very efficient at not examining them too closely. Ryan examines everything closely. This is one of the
Welcome to GoodNovel world of fiction. If you like this novel, or you are an idealist hoping to explore a perfect world, and also want to become an original novel author online to increase income, you can join our family to read or create various types of books, such as romance novel, epic reading, werewolf novel, fantasy novel, history novel and so on. If you are a reader, high quality novels can be selected here. If you are an author, you can obtain more inspiration from others to create more brilliant works, what's more, your works on our platform will catch more attention and win more admiration from readers.