Lahat ng Kabanata ng Daddy's Bargain: Kabanata 41 - Kabanata 50

Azrael’s POVI woke up to pain.Not the sharp kind, but the deep, hot kind that crawled under your ribs and stayed there like it had paid rent. My entire right side felt like it’d been chewed by a shark. Breathing hurt. Existing hurt.The ceiling above me blurred in and out. It looked like wood… old, uneven planks, patched with rope in some places. A fan turned slowly overhead. The air smelled like saltwater and herbs.Footsteps approached, soft and careful.“You’re awake again,” Liora said.Her voice was calm. Not excited, not worried—just steady. Like she had been expecting this.She came to stand beside the bed, carrying a bowl. Her silver-ash hair was pulled into a messy braid, strands falling everywhere. Her eyes were impossibly green. I didn’t know if they were naturally like that or if the island sun did something to them.“How long was I out this time?” I asked, even though talking felt like dragging sandpaper through my throat.“Only a few minutes,” she said. “You passed out

Celeste’s POVI should’ve gone straight back to the hotel.But grief makes you stupid, and heartbreak makes you reckless, and losing Azrael… losing whatever the hell we were becoming… made me both.So instead of hiding, I took a cab straight to the Upper East Side. Straight to the penthouse I swore I wouldn’t return to.My father’s building was the same as always—too shiny, too cold, too proud of itself. The doorman saw me and softened immediately.“Miss Rivera,” he said. “Your father will be glad—”“No,” I cut him off. “He won’t.”He blinked while I walked past, letting myself into the elevator. The ride up felt like being dragged toward something I didn’t want to face.The doors opened into the penthouse foyer. Everything smelled like lemon polish and old power. My father always said a clean house was the sign of a disciplined mind. I used to believe him.Now it just felt like a place where the truth went to die.I found him in the living room, sitting on the couch with a tablet in

Don Enzo De Luca's POVThe message came at 4:47 in the morning.I knew the time because I had been watching the clock. Not intentionally. Just the way a man watches things when sleep has stopped coming and the mind refuses to go quiet and there is nothing left to do but sit in the dark and wait for the world to give him something to respond to.The study was still. The lamp in the corner threw its familiar yellow light across the desk. Azrael used to complain about that lamp. "It makes the whole room look like a funeral, Papa. Buy something from this century." I had never replaced it. I told myself it was because the lamp worked fine. I was not in the habit of examining my own sentimentality too closely.The message was from Marco. My man embedded in Rivera's New York circle for the past three years. Quiet, patient, invisible — exactly the kind of man I trusted most, because he understood that information was only valuable if it arrived before the damage did."Twelve private contracto

Celeste's POV""Here's the thing about grief nobody tells you.It doesn't feel like sadness. Not really. Sadness was something you could point at — a rainy Tuesday, a bad phone call, the last episode of a show you loved. Grief was different. Grief was waking up in the morning and reaching for your phone to tell someone something funny before remembering that the person you wanted to tell was gone, and then lying there staring at the ceiling while your brain slowly, cruelly caught up with reality.Every morning. Like a fresh delivery.I'd been doing that for three weeks.The Rivera townhouse was immaculate and suffocating and full of people who kept touching my shoulder and asking if I needed anything, and the answer was always "yes, actually, I need the one thing none of you can give me," so I smiled and said "I'm fine" until the words stopped meaning anything at all.Sofia was still there. In the guest room. Sitting on the edge of my father's secret like it was a chair she'd been ass

''Azrael's POV''They left me alone at 9am with half a loaf of bread, specific instructions not to die, and a list of things I was not permitted to do that Liora had written on actual paper and stuck to the refrigerator with a lemon-shaped magnet.The list read:'1. No cliffs.''2. No water.''3. No wandering.''4. No wandering and calling it something else.''5. Eat the soup on the stove.''6. Do not touch Auntie's radio.''7. If something hurts, sit down. Do not "push through it." You are not competing in anything.'I read it twice. Found it both deeply patronizing and oddly touching. Stuck it back under the lemon magnet and made myself coffee.The argument about whether they should go had started at breakfast and concluded approximately forty minutes later with Liora's aunt winning through sheer force of personality and a speech about how the market in the village only had fresh anchovies on Tuesdays and if they missed it they'd have to wait another week and she was not, she made c