All Chapters of The Chosen Bride: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

Elena MorettiGrief doesn’t announce itself.It doesn’t always crash through the door or scream its way into the room. Sometimes it arrives quietly, settles into your bones, and refuses to leave. It becomes the way you breathe. The way you stand. The way you learn to keep moving even when something essential has gone missing.The night my mother died, the Moretti estate felt hollow.Not empty — hollow. Completely hollow.The house still hummed with the sounds of guards. Whispered conversations, radios crackling somewhere deep in the corridors, doors opening and closing softly as people tried to be useful. But the sound had changed. It echoed too much, like the walls themselves had lost something they couldn’t replace.I couldn’t stay in my room. I had to get out.Every surface smelled like her. Lavender and bergamot. Ink and old paper. The faint sweetness of the tea she drank every night before bed. I stripped off the dress I’d worn through the endless hours of condolences and closed

Enzo- Year OneThere are moments that change the shape of a man’s life without ever becoming a story he’s allowed to tell.The terrace was one of mine.I replayed it more times than I care to admit—not the nearly-kiss itself, but the second before it. The instant when instinct screamed yes and something older, heavier, far more dangerous forced my body to stop.I told myself it was discipline.I told myself it was loyalty.I told myself it was survival.But none of those explanations dulled the ache that followed.The morning after, I rose before the bells, before the guards rotated, before the estate fully woke. Training was the only place I could take the tension without letting it show. The weights didn’t ask questions. The sparring floor didn’t judge hesitation. Pain made sense. Desire didn’t.I fought harder than necessary that morning. The younger men noticed. They always did.They mistook it for intensity.They didn’t know it was restraint curdling into frustration.When I fina

Enzo Ferri - Year TwoThe first thing I tell myself is that I’m imagining it.That’s been my strategy for two years now—disbelief as discipline. If I don’t trust my instincts, I don’t have to answer to them. And for the most part, it works. I execute orders. I manage people. I keep my voice even and my presence unobtrusive.I do not look for Elena Moretti.Not anymore.So when I notice her across the room with Luca De Santis, my instinctive reaction—to catalogue the way she’s standing, the angle of her shoulders, the tilt of her head—is a reflex I immediately resent.They’re close.Not intimately. Not yet. But close enough that it’s intentional. Close enough that it’s meant to be seen.Luca’s hand rests lightly at the small of her back. Familiar. Comfortable. The kind of touch you don’t earn in a single evening.She doesn’t move away.The thought settles in my chest like a weight.So this is how it ends.I turn my attention back to the conversation in front of me, nodding at intervals

Enzo - Year ThreeBy the third year, I’ve learned how to stand in a room with Elena Moretti and not touch anything that matters.It’s a skill. One I never wanted, but perfected anyway.The city changes with the seasons, but Elena doesn’t—not really. She still moves through rooms like she owns them, still speaks with that quiet authority that makes people listen even when she says very little. The difference now is that she looks… settled.That’s the lie I tell myself.When Bella enters the picture, it feels harmless at first. A favor, a responsibility. Someone my family is watching over. Someone Elena takes to immediately.I tell myself it makes sense. Elena has always collected people—not as possessions, but as orbit. Bella just slides into that space like she belongs there.And somehow, so do I.At first, Aristide drags me along under the guise of normalcy. Don’t make it obvious, he says once, clapping my shoulder like I’m not already hyper-aware of every step I take around Elena. Y

EnzoI learned a long time ago that fear doesn’t announce itself the way people expect.It doesn’t come screaming.It doesn’t shake your hands or steal your breath.Fear settles in quietly, like a weight you don’t realize you’re carrying until you try to stand.I felt it the moment Aristide said we were moving.Final confrontation.Those words had lived in the background of our lives for months—circling, waiting. Now they were here, solid and unavoidable. Cipher was cornered. Desperate. Dangerous in the way wounded animals always were.And I was going back into the line of fire with my body still remembering what it felt like to be torn open.But that wasn’t what scared me.What scared me was Elena.She stood a few feet away from the others, arms crossed, posture composed, eyes sharp and calculating. Anyone else would’ve seen only the strategist, the Moretti steel.I saw the woman who had knelt in blood-soaked silk and held me together with her bare hands.I saw the one person I had n