Se connecterELEANOR~•~They found Mr. Paulo three weeks later, in a port town two countries over, sitting on a pile of money he thought made him untouchable.I asked to be there when they took him. Armando didn’t want me to come, and we had our first real fight about it, the kind two people have when they’ve stopped being owner and property and started standing on level ground. I won it the same way I’d won every argument with him since the auction. I didn’t beg. I just didn’t back down.So I was standing in the room when they brought Mr. Paulo in.He looked smaller than I remembered. That was the first thing. In my memory he filled whole rooms, the fat greedy king of that auction floor, the man who decided whether my sister lived by how high the bidding climbed. Now he was just a sweating man in a chair with two of Armando’s people behind him, his eyes darting around the room for the most powerful person to bargain with, the way men like him always do.His gaze passed over me twice before it st
ARMANDO~•~Eleanor didn’t come back to me for four days.She stayed at the doctor’s place those first nights, sleeping in a chair by the kid’s bed, and when Matilda was stable enough that the staff finally sent her home to rest, she came back to the mansion, went straight up to her room, and shut the door. She wasn’t avoiding me, exactly. She’d nod at me in a hallway. She just had nothing she was ready to say, and I’d learned by now not to chase her for it.So I waited. Me. Waiting. Matteo would’ve found that funny.I spent those four days doing the things a man does after a war. Counting what was left. Burying what wasn’t. Sitting alone in the study with the chair I still hadn’t moved.On the fourth morning Dante came down with his bag packed.He set it by the door the same way he’d brought it in. One bag, no ceremony. He found me at the window, where I did most of my standing around these days.“Rafael wants me back,” he said. “And the job’s done. Salvatore’s in the ground, the kid
ELEANOR~•~The next few hours came to me in pieces.I remember Armando carrying Matilda out across the courtyard himself, not handing her to one of his men, carrying her against his chest with her head tucked under his chin and his coat wrapped around her, stepping over bodies like they were furniture. I remember the car. I remember Dante driving fast enough that the world smeared past the windows, and nobody telling him to slow down. I remember holding my sister’s hand in the back seat and counting her breaths out loud, because it felt like if I counted them they couldn’t stop.I don’t remember the drive ending. One second we were moving and the next there were doors and lights and people in scrubs, and a gray-haired man with tired eyes was already waiting on the steps like he’d been standing there an hour.“Don Armando,” he said, and then his eyes went to the bundle in Armando’s arms and everything else dropped off his face. “This is the child. The one from before.”“This is her.”
ARMANDO~•~“Choose,” Salvatore said.I’d walked into a lot of rooms in my life knowing the math was bad. This was the worst of them. Salvatore with a gun dead center on Eleanor’s chest. Two of his men against the far wall with theirs leveled on me. The sick kid slumped on the cot behind her sister. And me alone in the doorway with one weapon and a count that didn’t add up no matter how I ran it.So I didn’t run it. I’d learned that much from Dante in three days. You don’t win the room you’re standing in. You win the room the other man thinks he’s standing in.“You’re quiet, Armando.” Salvatore was enjoying himself. The gun didn’t drift off Eleanor an inch. “That’s not like you. The Armando I hear about would’ve done something loud and stupid by now. But look at you. Standing in a doorway doing arithmetic. You know why?” He smiled. “Because of her. One girl off an auction block and she’s turned you into a man who hesitates. You should thank me. A weakness you don’t know about is the o
ELEANOR~•~One second I had my hand on Armando’s sleeve and the next the whole world went white and loud and I lost him.I don’t know how. A man came at us from the side and Armando turned to put him down, and the crowd of it, the light and the noise and the bodies, just swallowed the space between us. I reached for where he’d been and my hand closed on nothing.I should’ve stayed put. I knew that even while I was moving. But the gate man had said east hall, and east hall meant Matilda, and three weeks of not knowing whether my sister was alive had stripped the careful part of me right out of my body. I ran low along the inside wall, away from the worst of the shooting, toward a doorway with a dim light burning over it.The speakers crackled above me.“Eleanor.” Salvatore’s voice, slow and warm, sliding over the whole compound. “There you are. Come in, bella. Come in out of the cold.”He could see me somehow, and he was letting me come, and that should’ve frozen me where I stood. It
ARMANDO~•~Eleanor walked up to the gate alone and I hated every step of it.That was the plan. She walks, they watch, the gate opens for the prize Salvatore had been waiting on, and I come through two steps behind her in the dark with Marco while Dante took the back with the others. Two ways in. One girl to grab. Everybody out before Salvatore worked out he’d been played.It looked good on Dante’s map. On that map everything looked good.But this wasn’t the map. This was Eleanor in a thin coat crossing forty feet of open gravel toward a man who’d already used her once, and me crouched in the tree line with my pulse going hard, telling myself she was bait and not letting myself finish the thought about what bait is actually for.A floodlight snapped on and caught her. She froze in it. I watched her shoulders climb up toward her ears and then come down again, slow, like she was forcing herself steady.“Eleanor.” A voice from the gatehouse. One of Salvatore’s men, not the man himself.
ELEANOR “What do you want from me?” I asked, staring Don Salvatore dead in the eye. My voice was steady, but I could feel the tension buzzing under my skin. “What was so important your men had to kill Enzo and drag me here?”He smiled—a slow, calculated thing that made my stomach churn. “Patience, my
ELEANOR Stephan's boss remained standing at the top of the staircase a while longer as he seemed to carry the entire room’s attention on his shoulders. It was clear that he wasn’t just about to walk down the stairs, he was also about to make an entrance, ensuring everyone in the room knew exactly wh
ELEANOR I stood there frozen with both my legs trembling beneath me. My knees were weak—barely holding me upright, my ankles throbbed from where the ropes had burned into my skin, and every slight shift of my weight sent sharp aches through them. The guard assigned to watch me loomed a little too cl
ELEANORTears blurred my vision as I sat frozen in the car, my heart pounding so loudly I could barely hear the hum of the engine. My legs trembled uncontrollably, and I couldn’t seem to stop them. The man sitting beside me—the one Enzo had called Stephan—was silent, staring ahead like nothing had ha







