All Chapters of Auctioned to the mafia land: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Milene's POVThe car smelled like gasoline and something sharper underneath it, fear maybe, mine or Roberto's, I couldn't tell anymore. I pressed myself against the door, as far from him as the small backseat allowed, my wrist throbbing where his fingers had dug in."You didn't have to do this," I said, once my voice came back to me. "Whatever you think you're proving. This isn't proving it.""You don't get to tell me what this proves." His jaw was tight, staring straight ahead at the back of the driver's headrest, none of the easy charm left in him now. "You don't know what it's like. Watching someone hand you scraps your whole life and call it generosity.""So this is about Angelo.""This is about everything." He finally looked at me, and something in his face had cracked open, raw in a way I'd never seen from him, not even in the hallway that first week. "I did everything right. I gave him loyalty. I gave him years. And every time I asked for so

Milene's POVMarco found reasons to be near me after that first night in the dining hall, small ones, the kind that could always be explained away. He volunteered for the evening shift more often than the schedule required. He remembered, without being told twice, that I liked my tea with too much honey. He laughed at things I said like they were funnier than they actually were, and some starved, lonely part of me, the part with nothing solid left to hold onto, leaned into that warmth without meaning to."You're good at this," I told him one evening, watching him charm a laugh out of Corinne over dinner trays. "Making people feel like they matter.""Only the ones who do," he said, and the way he looked at me when he said it made my stomach do something complicated I didn't have a name for yet.I told myself it was normal. Six weeks with no memory, no past, nothing to stand on, of course I'd cling to the first person who made the days feel less like drowni

Milene's POVNadia came to find me two days later with a look on her face I didn't like, careful in the way that always meant something worse underneath it."I made those calls," she said, closing her office door behind her. "The ones about Marco.""And?""And nothing official exists under that name. No employment records, no rental history, nothing that ties a Marco anything to any address within fifty miles of here." She sat down across from me, folding her hands the way she did when she was about to say something she'd rather not. "But I did find something. A private investigator I know, someone I've used before when girls come through here running from men who don't want to be found by. I gave him the description. Dark hair, the accent you mentioned, the way he carries himself."My stomach tightened. "And?""He came back within a day. Faster than I expected, which told me something on its own." Nadia's voice had gone quieter now, careful

Milene's POVI didn't call that night. I told myself I needed time, though really, I think I was scared of what picking up that phone might undo, some fragile equilibrium I'd built out of nothing but Teresa's blunt kindness and my own careful, guarded days.I carried the card with me everywhere for three days, tucked into the pocket of whatever cardigan I was wearing, tracing the edges of it with my thumb the way I used to trace patterns on tables I couldn't remember sitting at. Angelo Rossi. I said the name out loud once, alone in my narrow little room, testing the shape of it the same way I'd once tested my own.Nothing came back. No flood of memory, no sudden clarity. Just that same aching, wordless grief that had been sitting under my ribs since the first night I woke up in Nadia's care, except now it had a name attached to it, and somehow that made it worse instead of better."You haven't called," Teresa said on the fourth morning, setting my breakfa

Milene's POVI didn't sleep much that first night in the apartment, my mind circling too many questions to let my body settle into anything close to rest. Angelo had taken the couch without me having to ask, insisting on it before I'd even worked up the nerve to bring it up myself, and I lay awake in the unfamiliar bedroom listening to the quiet sounds of a stranger who apparently wasn't a stranger moving carefully around a space too small to fully avoid each other in.By morning, exhaustion had worn down enough of my guard that I found him in the kitchen, making coffee with the kind of careful concentration of a man trying to give his hands something to do besides shake."You're up early," he said, not turning around right away."I couldn't sleep.""Neither could I." He finally turned, two mugs in hand, sliding one across the counter toward me. "I kept waiting to hear you crying out. Habit, I think. You used to have nightm