Lahat ng Kabanata ng Encore with the Devil: Kabanata 51 - Kabanata 60

We don’t do it in his office.Not in the room with the drawer and the sealed windows and the ghosts of a hundred quiet negotiations I was never part of.We do it in the small library off the main hall.Sunlight filters through high windows, dust motes drifting over shelves of actual books instead of contracts. There’s a round table in the middle, scarred and solid, the kind that looks like it’s heard arguments for generations.Even here, in the hush of paper and light, I can feel it: the outside world pressing against the glass. Helicopters have thinned, but the war and the watchers haven’t.I sit on one side.He sits on the other.Between us: a plain legal pad, two pens, no lawyers.Mia lurks in a corner armchair, unofficial witness, and sarcasm backup.Luca stands by the door, arms crossed, pretending not to listen.“This is ridiculous,” Dante mutters when he realizes Mia isn’t leaving.“You’re the one who used to tell her to keep something back for herself,” she says. “Consider me

The club doesn’t look like a club.Not today.There are no pulsing lights.No music.No sweating bodies pressed together in the dark.It’s all bright, flat light and cables and tripods. The stage where he’s hosted a hundred nights of curated decadence has been stripped down to a couch, two armchairs, and a small table with glasses of water that no one will drink.The hotel tower looms above us.Rooftop swept.Stairwells sealed.Every window in a three‑block radius is checked and double‑checked by Luca’s people.I can feel them.The guards on the perimeter.The snipers on the roof.Eyes everywhere—some to keep me alive, some to turn me into spectacle.“Five minutes,” a producer calls, voice clipped through her headset.My heart hasn’t slowed since we left the villa.Back there, the air was tense.Here, it’s razor‑thin.Mia fussed with my hair one last time.“Remember,” she says, “you don’t owe them neat arcs. You owe yourself honesty.”“I thought I owed your ulcer more caution,” I say.

I know something is wrong before anyone tells me.I’m halfway down the hall toward the kitchen, thinking about Mia’s promise to bring cake, when a cold shiver runs down my spine hard enough to make my bruised arm ache.The air tastes metallic, like it did on that street in Buenos Aires, right before the van door opened.A second later, Dante’s roar tears through the house.“LUCA!”My heart slams against my ribs.I break into a run.By the time I reach his office, the door is wide open.Luca is on the couch, half‑propped up, shirt torn, wrist wrapped in something improvised—a bar towel, already blooming red. There’s a deep cut along his hairline, blood drying in dark streaks. One eye is starting to swell.Dante stands over him like a storm.“What happened?” I gasp.Luca looks up.Tries to straighten.Fails.“Mia,” he says, voice rough. “They took Mia.”The room tilts.“No,” I say.“Yes,” he replies grimly. “Van. Three, four men. Masks. They knew what they were doing. They were waiting.

Dante hates this.He doesn’t say it outright.He doesn’t have to.It’s in the way his jaw grinds every time Vittorio mentions “maximum visibility,” in the way his hands curl when Luca talks about sightlines, in the way his eyes linger on me like he’s trying to memorize me in case something goes wrong.We’re in a conference room on the top floor of the hotel above his club. Floor‑to‑ceiling windows look out over the city. The stage is two floors down, a dark rectangle on the security feeds.Luca taps a screen, pointing to red zones.“Snipers here and here,” he says. “Our people. Roof, opposite roofs, corners. There is no clean line from anywhere higher.”“And exits?” Dante asks.“Three,” Luca says. “Main backstage. Side door to a secure corridor with cars waiting. Trapdoor below the stage to the service tunnel if we have to disappear you straight down.”“Us,” I correct quietly. “Disappear *us*.”Luca nods once, approving.“One of those comes with ‘only if the building is actually on fi

The blood on his cuff isn’t the only blood.I don’t see it at first.Everything in the room is too bright, too loud—Mia’s jokes, Luca’s low report, the static on Dante’s radio as someone checks in from the port.Then he shifts, just a little, and his hand goes to his side in that way people do when something hurts and they’re pretending it doesn’t.It’s subtle.A tightening around his eyes.A small wince he swallows halfway down.My gaze follows his hand.Sees the dark stain spreading under the edge of his shirt.Not just someone else’s.“Dante,” I say.He looks up.Too slow.Too calm.“What?” he asks.“You’re bleeding,” I say.Silence drops over the room like someone turned down the volume.Mia straightens.Luca’s brows snap together.Dante glances down as if surprised to find red there.“Oh,” he says, like it’s an inconvenience. “That.”“You got *shot*?” I demand.“Grazed,” he says.He tries to brush it off like it’s nothing.Mia is off the couch before I can move, swaying a little