All Chapters of Seducing The Mafia Lord's Stepbrother : Chapter 141 - Chapter 150

ANTONIO POVI had won.The thought settled over me slowly in the days following everything that happened at sea, strange and unfamiliar after years of constant vigilance, constant calculation, constant readiness for whatever attack might come next. Enzo was dead. Jeremy was dead. Silvio, from what little intelligence we'd gathered, had gone quiet, likely understanding that whatever war he'd helped orchestrate had ended decisively in my favor, with nothing left to gain by continuing to fight a battle already lost.This war had been brewing since before I could properly remember its beginning - years of sabotage, years of watching my back against a brother who hated me for circumstances neither of us had chosen, years of careful maneuvering just to survive long enough to build the empire I now controlled completely. And somehow, against every probability, I had survived it. We had survived it.I almost didn't know what to do with myself in the quiet that followed.For so long, every wak

AMY POVI couldn't stop crying.Hours had passed since Antonio told me, since those words shattered something inside me I wasn't sure could ever be fully repaired again, and still the tears refused to stop coming, fresh waves crashing through me every time I thought I'd finally cried myself empty. The hospital room felt too small, too white, too quiet except for the sound of my own broken sobbing echoing endlessly against the walls.Our baby. Gone.I pressed my hand against my stomach, the same gesture I'd made so many times since that positive test, except now it meant nothing, held nothing, protected nothing anymore. The emptiness of it, the sudden absence of something I'd only just begun to love so completely, felt like a wound deeper than anything Enzo or Jeremy had managed to inflict throughout this entire nightmare.I thought about the morning I'd found out, kneeling on the bathroom floor with that small stick trembling in my hands, the terrifying, overwhelming joy that had take

AMY POVThe water was warm against my skin, and for the first time in my life, I didn't feel like I had to hold my breath while I enjoyed it.That was the strangest part of happiness — how suspicious it made me. I kept waiting for something to go wrong, for the universe to remember it owed me a debt of misery and come collect. But the days kept passing and nothing came. Just sun. Just the smell of salt and citrus from the garden Madame Loretta insisted on growing along the back fence of the villa. Just Antonio, somewhere across an ocean, pretending he wasn't checking his phone every twenty minutes for a message from me when he absolutely was.I dipped my feet further into the pool and let my head fall back against the tiled edge, watching the clouds shift lazily overhead. It had taken me three weeks to stop flinching every time a door slammed somewhere in the house, three weeks to stop waking at four in the morning convinced I'd hear glass shattering downstairs. Now I just woke up to

ANTONIO POVA week of peace was apparently the most the universe was willing to grant me, because by Monday morning the warmth of the celebration had already given way to the cold, familiar weight of work, the way it always did, no matter how badly I wanted to stay in that terrace light a while longer.“Silvio's been spotted twice this week,” Carlos said, setting a folder on my desk and dropping into the chair across from me without waiting for permission, a habit I'd long since stopped correcting. “Once near the docks. Once outside the warehouse on Fifth.”“My brother's warehouse.”“Was your brother's warehouse,” Carlos corrected, and there was something almost gleeful in the way he said it, the satisfaction of a man who had waited a long time to say those words in the past tense.I opened the folder. Photographs, dates, a man who had once been one of my brother's most trusted lieutenants now skulking around property that should have been buried in legal limbo for months yet, tied up

AMY POVHappiness, I had come to learn, was not a single feeling. It was a thousand small ones stacked on top of each other until they became too heavy to carry quietly, until they spilled out of you in the form of humming while you brushed your hair, or smiling at strangers for no reason, or crying in the produce aisle because a song came on the radio that reminded you of someone who finally loved you the way you'd always hoped someone would.I cried in a lot of produce aisles those days. I'd given up being embarrassed about it months ago."You're doing it again," Ravenna said, eyeing me over the rack of sundresses we'd been picking through for the better part of an hour, her sunglasses pushed up into perfectly styled hair, a coffee cup balanced in one manicured hand. "That dopey little smile. It's honestly a bit much, Amy.""I can't help it." I held a blue dress up against myself in the mirror, turning side to side, watching the fabric catch the light. "Do you think he'll like this