Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 121 - Chapitre 130

Sophia POVThree days after signing the divorce papers.The pen was still sitting on the coffee table where I'd left it.I hadn't moved it. Hadn't been able to. Every time I looked at it—that slim silver thing, elegant and indifferent—I felt the cold ghost of its weight between my fingers again. The scratch of ink across paper. The finality of a signature.I pressed my forehead against the glass and let the chill seep in."Maria. It's always been Maria."Vito's words hadn't faded. If anything, they'd sharpened overnight, the way a bruise deepens before it finally yellows and disappears. Except I had a feeling this particular bruise wasn't going anywhere soon.You knew, I told myself. You knew from the beginning what this was.But knowing a thing and feeling it are entirely different animals. I'd known our marriage was a contract. I'd known he was in love with a ghost—some memory of a girl who'd saved him, a debt he'd been repaying in loyalty ever since. I'd known Maria stood between u

Sophia POVParis. Day three.I noticed it first with the coffee.The apartment had one of those single-serve machines, sleek and European, and I'd turned it on out of habit—the same way I'd been doing everything these past three days, on autopilot, going through the motions of being a person. The pod clicked into place. The machine hissed. And then the smell hit me like a wall.I made it to the bathroom with approximately two seconds to spare.Afterward, I sat on the cold tile floor and told myself it was stress. Grief did strange things to the body. I'd seen it in patients during my hospital rotations—cortisol disrupting digestion, anxiety manifesting as nausea, the physical self staging its own protest against what the mind was refusing to fully process. Perfectly explainable. Completely normal.I'd been telling myself this for three days.But I was sitting on a bathroom floor in Paris at seven in the morning, and I was a doctor, and doctors are supposed to be honest with the eviden

Vito POV"Boss.""Tell me.""Isabella." He stopped. Cleared his throat. "She's gone."The room went very still."Gone?""The overnight man reported in at six. Routine. Everything was fine." Tony's jaw was tight. "We pulled the footage from the building's external cameras at seven. She left through a side exit at eleven-forty-three last night. There was a car waiting two blocks north. She got in." He paused. "We haven't been able to trace the vehicle."My hand closed around the glass on the desk.The crack was sharp and sudden. Tony took a step back. "Get me a towel," I said.Tony handed me one from the side cabinet without a word. I wrapped it around my hand, applied pressure, and kept my voice level."No one speaks about this outside this room. Not to the staff. Not to the other families." I looked at him directly. "Not to my father.""Your father is going to find out. When he does—""When he does, I will handle it. Until then, nothing."Tony nodded, once, and I could see him doing t

Vito POVDay Fifteen.Tony set the seventh report on my desk at nine in the morning. I didn't touch it.I already knew what it contained — the same careful language wrapped around the same essential truth. Nothing. No confirmed sightings, no financial activity linked to any identity we could trace, no footprint in any of the networks I'd spent fifteen years building. She was gone the way people go when they are very smart and very determined and have been paying close attention to the shape of the cage around them.I had let her leave. That was the part that sat in my chest like a stone I couldn't move.She was always smarter than you gave her credit for, I thought. That was your mistake.I left the report on the desk and walked to the window.The commotion reached me before Maria herself did.It was mid-morning. I could hear her voice in the corridor — that particular register she used with the household staff, the one that landed somewhere between a request and an instruction. I rec

Maria POVWhen I first heard Isabella had disappeared, I spent about ten minutes pretending to look concerned. Then I went back to my room and slept better than I had in months.She was gone. Actually gone. No more shadow hanging over every conversation, no more watching Vito's eyes track across a room looking for her the way they always did, even when he thought he was being careful. The estate felt different without her. Lighter.Mine, something in me said quietly. Finally.The housekeeper called me "Miss Maria" the first week. By the second week, it was "Miss Castellano." Now it was just "Miss Maria" again, but the tone was different. Luciano noticed too. He started requesting my presence at his dinners.We were useful to each other, Luciano and I. He needed someone to manage Vito's domestic life while Vito was preoccupied and unreachable. I needed someone to make sure my position here calcified before anyone could question it. Neither of us had to say any of this out loud. That w