All Chapters of Mafia’s Girlfriend: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Chapter 12 Lena's POV The dream always started the same. A room. Not this room-another one. One that felt like home, or the childhood memory of one, one that lived in your skin before you even registered it with your eyes. My uncle's sitting room. The brown carpet with a permanent cigarette stain ingrained, the crooked lampshade and the smell of his constant smoking. My uncle's face. He wasn't angry in the dream. That would have been easy. He was smiling-the smile that always presaged him getting something from me, warm and full and empty all at once. He was talking but I couldn't hear the words. Just the smile and his hands and the door behind him which I could never seem to reach. The room then shifted. Men. Heat. The stench of sweat and liquor and the feel of rope biting into my wrists. I woke up with a gasp. The room was dark. My room, the nice one, the gilded cage, and for a few panicked seconds I didn't know where I was. Sitting up I pushed my hands through my hair with

Chapter 14Lena's POV I'd been visiting the library every day. It had become the one part of my routine I looked forward to without complication — no performance required, no careful navigation of atmosphere or intention. Just shelves and light and the particular silence that exists only in rooms full of books. I had a corner I'd claimed without declaring it — the window seat at the far end, where afternoon light came in at an angle that was perfect for reading and the view outside was just garden and sky, no walls visible from that position if you sat exactly right. I liked that. The illusion of boundlessness, even a small one. I was deep in a novel — a nineteenth century one, naturally, a woman navigating a world that had been entirely arranged without her input — when I heard the door. I didn't look up immediately. Mara sometimes checked on me, and I'd learned her footsteps. These were different. Heavier. More deliberate. I looked up. Damian stood just inside the doorway,

Lena's POVIt was raining.Not the dramatic kind that announces itself — just a quiet, persistent grey drizzle that had settled over the estate since morning, turning the gardens soft and blurring the stone wall at the perimeter until it almost disappeared into the sky.I had been in the library most of the day. Not reading — thinking, mostly, with a book open in my lap as cover. Thinking about Marcus Hale, whose name I'd heard only once, muttered by one of the guards in the corridor two nights ago. Thinking about Damian's face when he'd come out of his office that morning — tighter than usual, something behind his eyes that hadn't been there before.Thinking about yet.Mara found me there just after four, carrying two cups of tea the way she sometimes did — without asking, without ceremony, simply arriving with what was needed.She set one beside me and took the armchair nearest the window, wrapping both hands around her own cup. The rain tapped softly against the glass.We sat quiet

Lena's POVI noticed three days after the midnight sitting room.We were at breakfast — our strange, quiet routine of it, the one that had settled between us without either of us deciding it would. Damian was reading, I was eating, the morning doing its usual thing with the light through the window.He reached across the table for the coffee pot and his sleeve pulled back.Just for a moment. Just enough.A scar ran along the back of his right hand — thick, pale against his skin, the kind that doesn't fade with time because whatever made it went deep enough to mean business. It disappeared beneath his cuff before I could trace its full length.He caught me looking.He said nothing. Just poured his coffee and returned to his newspaper as though I hadn't seen anything at all.I let it go. For that morning, at least.I found Mara in the garden after lunch, cutting back something along the far wall with the focused attention she gave everything. The rain from earlier in the week had cleare

Damian's POVI held the rose by its stem the entire way downstairs.I didn't crush it. Didn't throw it. I carried it with the careful deliberateness of a man who understood that the moment he let his anger find a physical expression was the moment he lost the upper hand — and the upper hand was the only thing standing between Lena and whatever Victor was actually planning.I set it on my desk and stood over it.A white rose.Victor had always had a theatrical streak — it was one of the things that made him dangerous in a way that straightforward violence wasn't. He thought in symbols. Communicated in gestures that left no fingerprints. A flower through a window was not a threat you could respond to directly. It was designed specifically to produce the feeling of helplessness — to make you aware of a vulnerability without giving you anything concrete to close.He knew exactly what he was doing.And he had done it in her room. While she slept.I picked up my phone.The meeting with my s