LOGINShare
Chapter 7 - Collision course
publish date:
2026-01-29 17:03:43
Latest chapter
Fated Dynasties Chapter 70
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
Fated Dynasties chapter 69
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
Fated Dynasties Chapter 68
Chapter 68 Ryan The heartbeat doesn't stop. I mean that literally it continues, of course, monitored and steady in the way that Dr. Conti has pronounced satisfactory, and then the ultrasound ends and the room returns to its ordinary hospital dimensions and the sound stops being something I can hear externally. But it doesn't stop. It moves from the screen to somewhere inside my chest and it stays there, beating alongside my own at a frequency I can feel but couldn't explain to anyone. I've heard descriptions of this moment. From Marco, when his daughter was born three years ago—he called me from the hospital at two in the morning barely coherent, saying things that didn't connect grammatically, and I thought at the time that I understood what he meant. I was sympathetic and warm and entirely wrong about what I understood. I didn't understand anything. Dr. Conti leaves with the particular tact of a woman who has learned when a room needs to be vacated. Maya and I sit in th
Fated Dynasties Chapter 67
Chapter 67 Maya The thing about hospitals is that they make time strange. There is no natural light calibration in this room—the window shows me sky but not sun, brightness but not warmth, and the hours move in the rhythm of the ward rather than the rhythm of the world outside. Vitals at six. Rounds at eight. Medication at ten. Lunch at twelve-thirty that I eat approximately half of before my appetite retreats again. The structure is imposed from outside, which should feel like the opposite of everything I've built my life around, and yet. There is something almost restful about it. I think about this while Ryan sleeps in the chair beside me. He fell asleep at around eleven, which I consider a personal achievement—I'd been working on it since nine, responding to his attempts at conversation with shorter and shorter answers, letting the silences stretch until they became comfortable and then soporific, the way you'd settle a child who doesn't know it's tired yet. He's sleepi
Fated Dynasties Chapter 66
Chapter 66RyanThe hotel is four blocks from the hospital.I know this because I walked it. Not because walking made sense at ten o'clock at night in an unfamiliar city in October, but because the alternative was getting into the car Chiara had arranged and sitting in the back of it while someone else controlled the speed and the direction and the arrival time, and I couldn't do that. I needed to move under my own power. I needed the pavement beneath my feet and the cold Milan air in my lungs and the physical fact of forward momentum, because if I stopped moving It was going to have to fully feel what I'd been holding at arm's length for the past fourteen hours.I wasn't ready to feel it yet.So I walked.The hotel room is anonymous and adequate and completely wrong.I stand in the middle of it for approximately thirty seconds after the door closes behind me, looking at the bed I'm supposed to sleep in, the desk I'm supposed to sit at, the window that looks out at a street that has
Fated Dynasties Chapter 65
Chapter 65MayaThere is a particular quality to hospital ceilings.I have noticed this before—at my mother's bedside, once, when I was nineteen and not yet good at the controlled composure I would later develop into something approaching an art form. Hospital ceilings are uniformly indifferent. They don't react to what happens beneath them. They offer nothing except the reminder that there is something above you, solid and unhurried, while everything below is in motion.I stare at the ceiling of my room in the Ospedale San Raffaele and I breathe, because breathing is currently a project rather than an automatic function and projects require attention.In through the nose. Count to four. Out through the mouth.The oxygen cannula sits awkwardly against my face and I resist the urge to pull at it the way I've been resisting for the past—I check the clock on the wall—six hours. It is now early afternoon. The Milan light coming through the window has the particular flat quality of a cloud
Fated Dynasties Chapter 18 Walk away
Chapter 18 Maya The party moved from the dining room to the lounge, the music swelling into something jazzier, more hedonistic, the kind of music that encourages bad decisions and expensive regrets. I get caught in a conversation with a group of investors, nodding and smiling while my mind is
Last Updated : 2026-03-21Fated Dynasties Chapter 13 WTF
Chapter 13 Maya The drive to the Commodore takes fifteen minutes. I spend it oscillating between fury and something that feels dangerously like vindication. Jeremy wasn't devoted. He was using me, probably for access to the family, to information. Or maybe he just wanted both Rossi sisters and
Last Updated : 2026-03-19Fated Dynasties Chapter 34
Chapter 34: RyanThe takeout containers were still on the kitchen counter half-eaten pad Thai, a demolished box of spring rolls, the lingering scent of ginger and toasted sesame oil hanging heavy in the air. The fluorescent light of the glass extractor fan cast a sharp, clinical glow over the is
Last Updated : 2026-04-05Fated Dynasties chapter 33
Chapter 33: Maya The hydrogen peroxide bubbled on my knee, white and angry, eating at the grime from the bathroom floor. I bit my lip against the sting and pressed the cotton pad harder. Physical pain was easier. Physical pain had rules. "You're sure you're okay?" Gabriella's
Last Updated : 2026-04-04
You may also like
Dom and little Academy
Cendrillon1996132.7K viewsEntangled with the Mafia Don
Nicole Mariam128.5K viewsTied to the mafia man 3 : Mia
Pravs_3618163.1K viewsCLAIMED BY THE MAFIA DON
JacqueAuthor 288.5K viewsLawless Eclipse
PROGRESS AREREBO98 viewsThe Mafia Boss's Possession
Lidiane Trindade 340 viewsPoison me softly
Pearl Cole425 viewsBLOOD, LIES, AND THE ROMANOV HEIR
AMARI195 views
