All Chapters of CALAVERA: The Mafia’s Caged Bride : Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

THE FIRST TOUCH~ANYA POV~Three weeks.Three weeks of César showing up at six o'clock every evening like a metronome set to the beat of my disintegrating boundaries, three weeks of him sitting at my table with Marcello in his lap or on the floor playing dinosaurs or listening to rambling three-year-old stories about absolutely nothing with the kind of patience I didn't know he possessed, three weeks of careful distance and visible hands and never, ever touching me.He would get close sometimes...close enough that I could smell his cologne, that expensive woodsy scent that used to fill the Marbella estate, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his body, close enough that my entire nervous system would light up with warning signals screaming run run run—but he never actually made contact, never let his fingers brush mine when he handed me something, never let his shoulder bump against mine when we both reached for Marcello at the same time.It was deliberate.Intentiona

THE AFTERMATH~ANYA POV~ I did not know how long I sat in our room with my back against the door and my hands covering his ears while I sang every lullaby I could remember, my voice getting hoarser with each repetition, each scream from the living room cutting through the melody like a knife through silk.The screaming went on for what felt like hours but was probably only twenty minutes, wet sounds of crash punctuated by begging in Spanish that got weaker and weaker until finally there was just rough breathing and then silence, thick and suffocating and somehow worse than all the noise that had come before.I kept singing even after the silence fell, kept holding Marcello who had finally fallen asleep against my chest from sheer exhaustion, his little body going limp with the kind of sleep that comes after trauma, after too much fear for a three-year-old nervous system to process.When I finally stopped singing, my throat raw and my voice barely working, I could hear water running i

THE CONTROL TACTICS 1~ANYA POV~The armed guards showed up on Tuesday, two of them stationed outside the building entrance like silent statues in black suits who nodded at me when I left for work and again when I came home.And I hated them.I hated the way they made the neighbors stare and whisper, hated the way they made it impossible to pretend I was still just Ana Silva, normal single mother, instead of Anya Torres, prisoner with a very expensive security detail.The bulletproof windows were installed on Wednesday, heavy panels that made the apartment darker and more claustrophobic.And when I complained César just looked at me with that patient expression he had perfected and said "Would you rather have regular glass when the next assassin comes?" And I had no answer for that because he was right, because Diaz's man had proven that being connected to César Navarro made me and Marcello targets whether I liked it or not.By Friday the panic room was finished, a reinforced closet

THE BLOOD~ANYA POV~Someone knocked at 11:14 PM. It was a loud knock. I was half-asleep on the couch, reading a book I wasn't paying attention to.I knew it was him before I even checked the peephole. The guards downstairs would have stopped anyone else.I opened the door and César was standing there with blood on his shirt.Not a little blood. Not a nosebleed or a cut from shaving.His white dress shirt was soaked through on the right side, dark and wet, and there were spatters across his collar and his jaw, and his hands were still dripping slightly like he had tried to wash them but given up halfway through."You can't come here like this," I hissed, blocking the doorway even though we both knew I couldn't actually stop him from entering."Where else would I go?" he asked, and he sounded tired, genuinely tired, like whatever had happened tonight had taken something out of him.He walked past me into the apartment, not pushing exactly but just moving forward with the absolute certa

THE MEETING~CÉSAR POV~The meeting room upstairs smelled like fancy cigars and old fancy cologne.I sat at the head of the table with my hands folded in front of me while five men who thought they had power tried to explain why they had let a shipment get blocked by the French authorities.Pathetic.All of them.I could see the sweat beading on Moreau's forehead even though the room was climate-controlled. I could see the way Dmitri's hand kept twitching toward his inside pocket where he probably had a gun he was too scared to actually draw.I could see the calculation in Romano's eyes as he tried to figure out if throwing his partners under the bus would save his own skin."The intel was solid," Moreau was saying, his French accent thicker than usual because fear always made people revert to their native tongues. "We had the routes mapped, the customs officials paid off, everything in place.....""And yet," I interrupted, my voice quiet, "thirty million euros worth of product is no