All Chapters of SOLD TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The silence Samuel left behind didn’t fade. It lingered, stretching thin and sharp, like a wire pulled too tight across the room.Stefano was still holding my hand.Only when I noticed how firmly his thumb pressed against my knuckles did I realize he was grounding himself too.“He doesn’t usually drop by unannounced,” Marco said finally, breaking the stillness. His voice was lighter than his eyes. “That alone is… new.”Cassius nodded once. “And he doesn’t warn people unless he’s already decided something.”I looked between them. “Decided what?”No one answered immediately.That scared me more than Samuel’s visit ever could.Stefano released my hand gently, as if afraid I might disappear if he let go too suddenly. He turned toward the counter, poured himself a glass of water, then drank it in one long pull before speaking.“My father doesn’t interfere unless something threatens the structure he built,” he said. “Or someone changes it.”I felt the words settle where my ribs met my lungs

The farther we walked, the more the forest seemed to close in on itself.Branches knitted overhead, blocking what little light the sky still offered, and the dirt path narrowed until it felt less like a road and more like a suggestion. My footsteps sounded too loud in the quiet, every crunch of gravel echoing longer than it should have.Marco walked slightly ahead of me now. Not by much, but enough to notice.“You okay back there?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder.“Yeah,” I lied. Then, softer, “I think.”He slowed without comment until we were side by side again.“That look you’re making,” he said, attempting lightness, “is the same one you had when Samuel walked in.”I huffed. “So I look terrified and pretending not to be.”“Exactly.”We walked a little more before I spoke again. “Do you ever regret it?” I asked.“Regret what?”“This life,” I said. “The power. The danger. The constant… pressure.”Marco didn’t answer right away. His boots scuffed the ground as he walked, slower n

The moment I stepped inside Stefano’s house, the world felt different, as if the night we had just survived belonged to another life entirely and not to the same person who was now standing on polished floors under warm golden lights, surrounded by silence so clean and controlled that it almost felt unreal. The doors closed behind me with a soft but final sound, and for a few seconds I just stood there, not moving, not speaking, letting my body understand that we were no longer in the forest, no longer in that village full of watching eyes and unspoken rules, no longer pretending to be something we were not just to stay safe. Here, everything was solid, familiar, untouchable. This was Stefano’s world, and in his world, nothing happened unless he allowed it.I walked slowly into the living room, my fingers brushing lightly against the back of a chair as I passed, not because I needed support but because I needed to feel something real under my hand, something steady, something that di

The calm did not last.It never really does in Stefano’s world, I realized, because peace here was not something permanent, it was something earned moment by moment, protected carefully, and the second you started to believe in it too much, something always came to remind you how fragile it really was.The afternoon had barely settled when everything shifted.It started quietly, almost too quietly to notice at first, just a change in movement around the house, footsteps that were more frequent than usual, voices that dropped lower when someone passed by, the subtle tension that slipped into the air like something unseen had entered the gates without being invited. I was in the living room when I first felt it, sitting on the couch with my phone in my hand, staring at messages I hadn’t replied to yet because I didn’t know how to explain the night without making it sound unreal.Then Stefano’s phone rang.Not a normal ring, not the casual sound of a message or a call he could ignore.Th

The house did not sleep that night. Lights stayed on in rooms that were usually dark after midnight, voices moved through hallways in low urgent tones, phones kept ringing and stopping and ringing again, and cars came and went through the gates like the night had turned into daytime for everyone who worked for Stefano. The calm from the morning was completely gone now, replaced by something sharper and faster, something that moved like a machine that had just been switched on after being quiet for too long.I sat on the couch but I wasn’t really resting, because every few minutes someone walked past the living room carrying papers, phones, laptops, keys, folders, things that looked important, and no one stopped long enough to sit down.The entire house felt like a command center now, and Stefano was in the middle of all of it, moving from one conversation to another without ever raising his voice, but everyone listened the moment he spoke.Marco came in from outside around midnight,