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chapter 404
publish date:
2026-09-18 21:04:05
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The Don's Ruthless Empire chapter 425
POV: Isabella"I have never wanted so badly to be wrong," I said again, as though repeating it might make the impossible arrangement of facts in front of me finally make sense, though it did not, no matter how many times I turned it over.Matteo took the photograph from my hands gently, studying it with the same disbelief I felt settling cold in my chest. "A funeral without a body," he said slowly. "Do you remember if there was one?"I tried to reach back through twenty two years of memory, past the grief and the smoke and my father's stern, unreadable face at the graveside, and felt a fresh chill work its way down my spine. "I do not remember," I admitted. "I was sixteen. I remember the casket. I do not remember anyone opening it.""The fire was hot enough to destroy a stone cellar," Gabriel said quietly. "It is entirely plausible there was nothing left to identify. Which means it is also plausible there was nothing in that casket at all."Camilla had gone very pale, sinking slowly i
The Don's Ruthless Empire chapter 424
POV: Matteo"What if it is someone we love?" Camilla asked, and I watched Isabella's hand go still on the table, because it was the one question none of us had allowed ourselves to say aloud until now."Then we deal with it the way we have dealt with every hard truth this family has ever faced," I said, though the words cost me more than I let show. "Honestly, and together, no matter how much it hurts."Camilla studied me for a moment, as if testing whether I actually believed what I had just said or had only offered it because the moment demanded something noble sounding. I did not blame her for the doubt. There had been years, before the consortium fell, when I would not have believed it myself.Adrian arrived within the hour, and I could see the moment he stepped through the door that Nico had kept his word about telling him nothing was wrong, because the boy looked simply curious, a little nervous the way any young man might be meeting the heads of three houses at once, but not af
The Don's Ruthless Empire chapter 423
POV: Isabella"That describes almost everyone standing in this room," Camilla said, and I felt the words land on every person present like a slow, spreading chill none of us could shake off.No one spoke for a long moment. I watched Sofia's eyes move instinctively toward Nico, then catch herself and look away, ashamed of the suspicion even as it rose in her. I understood the impulse completely, because I felt it too, an ugly, involuntary calculation running behind my own eyes as I looked at each familiar face and asked myself, silently, could it be you."We are not doing this," Matteo said firmly, before the silence could curdle into something worse. "We are not going to sit in this house and accuse each other based on a symbol and a confession from a man who kidnapped an innocent woman. That is exactly the kind of fracture someone like this would want.""Then what do you suggest," Camilla said, her voice tight. "That we simply wait for the next disappearance and hope we are faster th
The Don's Ruthless Empire chapter 422
POV: Matteo"There is something else he told me," Bianca said, her voice shaking so hard I nearly missed the words, and I felt the whole morning tilt sideways again, exhausted as we already were.I crossed to the car in three strides, kneeling beside the open door where Nico had wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. Her eyes were red rimmed, her wrists still marked from the bindings, but she held my gaze steadily, the way a woman does when she has decided the fear is not going to win this particular round."Tell me," I said, as gently as I could manage with my pulse still hammering from the vineyard."He said it while we waited for you," Bianca said, glancing toward Isabella and Camilla as they reached the car. "He kept saying he was sorry, over and over, and then he said something about a ledger. An old one. He said, tell them to look at the second page, not the first, because everyone always stops at the first.""A ledger of what," Isabella asked, crouching beside me now, her hand
The Don's Ruthless Empire chapter 421
POV: Isabella"That was never entirely my choice to make," Dario said, and the words hit me harder than any blade could have, because they meant that everything I feared about the council was already true and I had only just learned it.Matteo did not move at first. I saw the exact moment his hand found mine in the dark, cold and steady, though I could feel the tremor underneath it that he would never let anyone else see. Gabriel stepped closer to Dario's other side, and behind us Sofia was already calling Camilla's name into the grey morning air, her voice cracking with something between fear and fury."Whose choice was it, then?" I asked, though I already suspected the answer would only open a door none of us were ready to walk through.Dario looked at me for a long moment, and something in his face softened into an exhaustion I had not expected from a man who had just spent eleven days holding another woman prisoner in a cellar. "You would not believe me if I told you," he said. "I
The Don's Ruthless Empire chapter 420
POV: Matteo (Male Lead)“Dario left the council building,” Isabella said, her voice tight with a fear I had rarely heard from her, the words tumbling out fast and breathless. “He is walking toward the vineyard, Matteo. I think he is coming for me.”I was still helping carry Bianca to the car, her weight fragile and trembling against my shoulder, when my phone lit up with Isabella’s name, and I felt the ground shift beneath me before I had even answered it fully, some old instinct recognizing danger before my mind had caught up to the words.“Where are you,” I said, already moving, already handing Bianca gently into Nico’s waiting arms so my hands would be free.“At the house. I am safe, for now, but Matteo, I need to go out and think, and some part of me knows I am going to end up in those rows whether I plan to or not. I always do, when everything else becomes too much to hold inside four walls.”“Isabella, wait for me. Please, just wait.”“I cannot promise that,” she said, and the c
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