All Chapters of Mafia’s Girlfriend: Chapter 31 - Chapter 34

Damian's POV I kept my face composed. It took more than usual. The paper in my hand — my paper, from my office, a specific stock that lived in the second drawer of my desk and nowhere else in this building — was doing something that most pieces of evidence didn't manage. It was making me question everything I thought I knew about the security of my own house. I folded it carefully and put it in my jacket pocket. "Stay here," I said to Lena. "Absolutely not," she said. I looked at her. She looked back with the particular steadiness that I had long since stopped expecting to outlast and no longer tried to. "Fine," I said. "Stay close." The sweep of the house took forty minutes. Reeves and two others moved through it systematically while I watched the monitors in the security room with Lena standing beside me, arms crossed, saying nothing. She'd learned when silence was the right instrument and deployed it with a precision that still occasionally surprised me. Nothing. Ever

Lena's POV I sat with the envelope for a long time. On the writing desk, in the afternoon quiet of my room, with the single sheet of paper open in front of me and the two sentences doing what they were designed to do — working their way through every assumption I'd just carefully constructed and loosening the foundations. Your uncle didn't act alone. Ask Damian who else was in the room when the arrangement was made. I read it twice. Three times. Then I folded it carefully and put it back in the envelope and put the envelope in the drawer of the writing desk, underneath the folder with my name on it. Then I sat very still and thought. The first thing I thought was: this is what they do. Whoever was leaving these notes — the photograph, the first note, now this — they were working a specific strategy. Feed information in fragments. Enough to destabilise, not enough to clarify. Keep the subject off-balance, keep them questioning, keep them turning to the wrong people with the right