Dominated By Him のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 161 - チャプター 170

Vito's POVI heard the blade before I saw it.Twenty years of training the rest of my senses to compensate for the blindness I'd been pretending to have—the whisper of fabric, the particular shift in weight distribution when someone moves with purpose rather than habit, the change in air pressure that precedes sudden action—and every one of those senses fired at once.Maria's intention arrived a half second before her body did.I stood.The wheelchair fell backward with a crash that echoed through the stone hall like a sentence being completed. My legs, which had not failed me in two years despite the elaborate theater of their supposed uselessness, carried me across the three steps between us with a speed that came from something simpler than training: Sophia was behind me, and nothing else mattered.My hand closed around Maria's wrist at the apex of the arc. The pressure point was precise—I'd found it from muscle memory, the same way I found everything in the dark. Her grip broke. T

Vito POVShe weighed almost nothing in my arms.I had carried bodies before. I had carried men who'd taken bullets meant for me, men I'd liked and men I'd put a price on within the same year. I knew the dead weight of a person who had surrendered control of their limbs. I did not know this—Sophia asleep against my chest with the warehouse cold still in her hair, one hand curled low against her stomach the way she had held it in the basement, the way she had held it when I crossed the threshold and found her pressed against the wall.The car had been silent the entire drive back. Tony had taken the wheel himself rather than letting one of the men do it, and he had driven with the careful, measured competence of someone aware that his cargo was more fragile than anything else in the vehicle. He had not spoken. Neither had I.She had fallen asleep somewhere between the Hudson and the estate gates. Not the kind of sleep a person chose. The kind that took you when the body finally register

Sophia POVI came back to myself slowly, the way you do after a sleep so deep that your body has had to remember it is a body before it can do anything else.The first thing I registered was warmth. Sunlight, ordinary and benevolent, lay across the foot of the bed in a wide, slow rectangle. It was the kind of light that came in late mornings at the estate—filtered through the tall east-facing windows, softened by the curtains Mrs. Benedetti always left half-drawn—and for a single disoriented moment my body relaxed before my brain caught up, because some part of me had not expected to wake in light again.The second thing I registered was that I was not alone.He was sitting in the armchair he'd pulled up to the bed sometime in the night, sleeves rolled to his elbows, a small porcelain bowl in his hands. The dark glasses were gone. So was the wheelchair—I caught its absence the way you catch a missing piece of furniture in a room you've known for a year. He looked up when my breathing

Sophia POVThe days had begun to belong to us.I had not understood, before, how strange it could feel to wake up without listening for something. For a year I had measured every morning by what was wrong with it—the watcher I could not place, the slip I had to keep from making, the next escalation that might be a week away or might arrive before lunch. My body had learned to wake into vigilance. The first thing it had checked, every morning, was the room.Now, the room was just the room.The October light came in slow and gold across the wide bedroom windows. Vito brought me toast and weak tea before he let me sit up—the same plain ritual every morning, small careful gestures from a man who had spent his life moving entire economies with a phone call and was now apparently content to butter toast. He had told the estate he was working from home. He had told New York that anything that did not require him personally could wait. He had told the council that he would attend their meetin

Sophia POVThe baby was due in nine days.I knew this because the calendar in the corner of the kitchen, the one Mrs. Benedetti had hung up the morning we'd told the staff, had a small red circle drawn around a Tuesday in late January, and because every member of this household had been counting backward from that Tuesday for the better part of a month. Vito had pretended not to be counting. He had been the most diligent counter of all.He was, by any honest accounting, more nervous than I was.I caught him at it constantly. He would be reading the morning briefing across the breakfast table and his eyes would lift, every few minutes, to check that I was still sitting where he had last seen me sitting. He would be on a phone call with a banker in Zurich, his voice doing the cold precise work it did, and he would walk slowly across the study while he spoke so he could put one hand against my shoulder on his way past. He had begun to listen, faintly, for sounds. Once I had dropped a tea