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Home / Mafia / The Mafia’s Housewife Revenge / Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

All Chapters of The Mafia’s Housewife Revenge: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

80 Chapters

Seventy-one

PERRY'S POVThe bar was quiet and I hated it.I had been sitting here for over an hour and the whiskey was doing absolutely nothing for me.I signaled the bartender for another glass without looking at him and leaned back in my seat and stared at nothing in particular. My jaw was tight. It had been tight since the moment that bastard’s hand closed around my arm in that boardroom and steered me toward the door like I was some kind of problem to be removed.Like I was nobody.I kept going back to it no matter how hard I tried not to. Imogen. That was the part I could not stop seeing.Imogen stood beside him with her chin up and her shoulders back and her face completely calm, looking at me from across the table like I was something she had already finished dealing with. Like I was a chapter she had closed and put down and was not planning to pick back up.The bartender set a fresh glass in front of me and I picked it up and drank half of it without tasting anything.I had built that c

Seventy two

IMOGEN'S POVThe elevator doors closed behind us and the silence that came with it was the good kind.The whole ride up from the ground floor of the building I had been replaying it. The way my own husband pointed at me across the table with his hand shaking and his voice cracking and for the first time in all the years I had known him he looked small.I was still thinking about it when Silas turned to look at me.He studied my face for a moment the way he sometimes did, like he was reading something written there that I did not know was visible. Then he reached out, took my chin between his fingers, tilted my face up toward his and kissed me without hesitation.Right there in the elevator.Deep and slow and completely unhurried, like we were not in a glass box in the middle of a building full of people.I kissed him back for a few seconds before I pulled away slightly and looked up at him with my eyebrows raised."There are cameras in here," I said.He looked at me. Then he looked up

Seventy three

SILAS'S POVAfter Imogen fell asleep I sat in the chair by the window with a drink and did not move for a while.The bedroom door was open and I could see the edge of the bed from where I was sitting. She was still, her breathing had evened out about twenty minutes ago and I had been here since, watching the rise and fall of her chest and turning things over in my head.I picked up my phone from the side table.Three missed calls from my mother. All from the past two days.I stared at the screen for a moment then pressed call, She picked up on the second ring."So you are alive," she said.Her voice was the same as it always was. Warm and dry and carrying that particular tone she had perfected over the years, the one that managed to sound relieved and unimpressed at the same time. I had never met another woman who could do both things simultaneously the way my mother could."I am alive," I said quietly, keeping my voice low so I did not wake Imogen."You could not call me back for two

Seventy four

PERRY'S POVI had been pacing for the better part of an hour, back and forth between the window and the minibar, stopping at neither for long enough to do anything useful. I could not go home, not when I had nothing to return to. I had been waiting for days to get feedback or anything.My phone buzzed on the table.Dante.I picked it up before the second vibration. "Talk to me.""I have something," Dante said. His voice was the same as always. "Not everything you asked for. Not even close to everything but something."I sat down on the edge of the bed. "How much is something worth to me right now?""Depends on what you plan to do with it.""Dante." My voice came out sharp and I did not soften it. "I did not call you to have a philosophical conversation. What did you find?"I could hear him breathing on the other end slowly. "Moretti is clean on the surface," he said finally. "Cleaner than anyone I have looked into in twenty years of doing this. His finances are structured in a way th

Seventy five

IMOGEN'S POVI could hear Silas from the bedroom, his voice moving between English and Italian the way he did when the conversation was serious and he did not want anyone nearby to follow it completely. I lay still for a moment and listened to the rhythm of it without trying to catch the words.Then I got up quietly, washed my face, pulled on jeans and a loose shirt, picked up my bag and my keys from the side table and slipped out of the penthouse without making a sound.The villa was twenty minutes away.I took a cab and sat in the back with my bag on my lap and watched Rome move past the windows. I had not been back to the villa since the night I left.The cab pulled up outside and I paid the driver and stood on the pavement for a moment looking at the building. It looked the same as it always had. I went in.I unlocked the suite and pushed the door open and stood in the doorway for a second before I went inside.Perry was not there.I did not know whether that was his choice or

Seventy six

PERRY'S POVThe address Dante sent me was a small restaurant in a quiet part of Rome, the kind of place that had no sign outside and no presence online and existed entirely on the basis of people who already knew it was there telling other people who needed to know.I arrived first.The hostess led me to a private room at the back, separate from the main dining area, with a single table and two chairs and a window that looked out onto a narrow courtyard where nothing was happening. I sat down and ordered water and waited.She walked in seven minutes later.Ulla Adel was not what I had been expecting.I did not know exactly what I had been expecting. I had been picturing someone who looked the part, someone visibly worn down, someone whose damage showed on the surface the way damage sometimes did on people who had been through something they could not fully recover from.But she walked into that private room like a woman who had made a very deliberate decision about what she was going

Seventy Seven

PERRY'S POVThe private room she had in mind was upstairs in a wine bar three streets over. Dark walls and low lighting and a door that closed properly and a bottle of something red that arrived without being ordered because apparently she was known here.She poured two glasses and handed one to me and sat on the arm of one of the low chairs rather than in it, her long legs crossed at the ankle, watching me over the rim of her glass.She took a slow sip of wine. "Do you love her?""She is my wife," I retorted."That is not what I asked," she said.I looked at her across the low light of the room. "No," I said. "I do not think I do. Not anymore."Something in her expression settled.She set her glass down and stood up from the arm of the chair and crossed the room toward me slowly, the way she did everything, it was like the pace was entirely hers to set.She stopped close enough that I could smell her perfume, something dark and clean, and looked up at me with those pale eyes."Good

Seventy Eight

SILAS'S POVI was in the middle of reviewing contracts when Pete came in.He did not knock. He never knocked, we had an understanding about that, if Pete was coming through a door without being called it meant something needed my attention and the polite thing to do was get to it quickly. I had trained him that way years ago and he had never once abused it.I did not look up from the papers immediately. I finished the paragraph I was reading, noted the clause I wanted amended in the margin, and then set the pen down and looked at him.He was standing just inside the doorway with his hands in front of him and his face doing the careful neutral thing it did when he had information he was not entirely sure how I was going to receive.I had seen that face many times over the years."Talk," I commanded.Pete stepped further into the room. "Perry made a move today.""What kind of move."He paused for just a fraction of a second. Long enough for me to notice it."He met with someone," Pete

Seventy Nine

SILAS'S POVPete had the address by the following morning.A serviced apartment in Prati, third floor, corner unit. She had been renting it for five days under her own name which told me either she was not afraid or she had decided that being afraid was no longer a useful way to spend her energy.Pete had stood in the front of the car with his arms folded and his jaw set and given me the look he gave me when he disagreed with a decision but had already calculated that arguing about it was not going to change anything."I will be outside the door," he argued."You will be in the car," I replied.He had not responded to that but he had moved, which was the same thing.I took the stairs when I got to the building. Not because I was trying to be quiet, I just preferred stairs. They gave you a few extra seconds and a few extra seconds were always useful before a conversation you had not had in four years.I knocked on the door of the corner unit.There was a pause. Long enough that I knew

Eighty

IMOGEN'S POVI was curled against Silas on the couch with my legs tucked underneath me and a glass of red wine in my hand. His arm was loose around my shoulders and he had a stack of documents beside him that he had been working through all evening, making notes in the margins, reaching past me occasionally for his own drink without breaking his reading.The television was on low in the background. Some Italian news programme I had stopped paying attention to an hour ago.It felt good and that was the strange thing. In the middle of everything that was happening, all the chaos and the moving pieces and the war still playing out around Perry and the company and everything else, there were moments like this one that felt almost ordinary. Warm and still and easy in a way I had stopped trusting myself to hold onto too tightly.I took a sip of wine and looked at the city through the windows when the news ticker changed.BREAKING NEWS. Red letters scrolling across the bottom of the screen

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