All Chapters of My Billionaire Ex Or My Mafia Bestie : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Victor's medical kit was better stocked than most emergency rooms I'd been in, which told me something about the life he actually lived beneath the tailored suits and boardroom composure. He worked on Nico's shoulder at the kitchen island under harsh white light, hands steady despite the adrenaline still visibly working through both of them, while I held gauze and tried not to think too hard about how easily this could have gone differently."Through and through," Victor said, cleaning the wound with brisk efficiency. "You're lucky. Two inches left and it's your collarbone in pieces.""Feels lucky," Nico muttered, jaw tight, sweat at his hairline. He hadn't let go of my hand since he'd sat down, gripping it hard enough to hurt whenever Victor's fingers found something raw."Hold still." Victor threaded a suture with the casual competence of a man who'd clearly done this before, for himself or for others, more times than he probably wanted to admit. "You're going to want something stro

We spent Wednesday night in a fourth location Victor hadn't told anyone about — not Marcus, not the CFO, not even his head of security. A rented house two islands over, plain and unremarkable, the kind of place nobody would think to look for a billionaire and a mafia heir hiding a woman they both loved."Feels wrong," Nico said, watching the water from the porch, shoulder still stiff under his shirt. "Sitting here while other people walk into a trap we built.""It's the only way to be sure," Victor said. "If we're wrong about Marcus, better to find out watching from a distance than standing in the middle of it."I sat between them on the porch steps, the test result still unspoken, sitting in my chest like a held breath I didn't know how to release yet. Twice that day I'd almost told them. Twice I'd stopped myself, not out of fear exactly, but because I wanted — needed — this part settled first. I didn't want our child's existence tangled up with a trap for a man who might be selling

The peace of that morning lasted exactly as long as it took Victor's phone to ring.He answered on the second buzz, and I watched his face change in real time — the softness of an hour ago hardening back into the man who ran an empire, jaw setting, eyes going distant and focused all at once. "When," he said. A pause. "Show me."He set the phone on the table between us, screen up, and pulled up a document that made my stomach drop before I'd even finished reading the header."My legal team finished tracing the shell company Marcus named," Victor said. "Took some digging — three layers of holding companies, a numbered account in Zurich, the kind of structure you only build if you're trying very hard to make sure nobody finds the person underneath it." He tapped the screen. "They found the person underneath it."The name meant nothing to me at first. *Aldric Kessler.* But Nico went rigid beside me, all the warmth of the morning draining out of his face in an instant."You know him," I sa

The file Delacroix provided was thin — three years old, incomplete, the kind of intelligence a man gathers when he doesn't yet know he'll need it — but it was enough to start with. A private estate two hours north of the city, walled, wooded, deliberately unremarkable from the road. No name on any registry that led back to Kessler directly. Just another shell company, another careful layer of distance between the man and the violence he funded."Six-person security detail, rotating," Nico said, spreading satellite images across the table in Victor's study. "Minimum. Could be more now — Delacroix's information is old. Perimeter sensors, likely armed response within ninety seconds of any breach.""You're not going in the way you went after Marcus," I said. It wasn't a question."No," Victor said. "This isn't a rescue and it isn't a raid. If we go in guns first, Kessler either dies before we get anything useful out of him, or he's gone before we're through the front gate. Men like him do

The empty floor Nico had chosen sat one level above the penthouse's private terrace, close enough that I could see the glow of the lights Victor had left on — deliberately, a lure, a man appearing to go about an ordinary night while four armed men closed in on him from across the city."You stay away from the windows," said the man beside me, one of Nico's two guards, a broad, quiet presence named Torres who'd said maybe ten words to me all night. "And you stay on comms. If I say move, you move, no questions.""Understood," I said, though every part of me wanted to be down there instead of up here, watching through a sliver of glass while the two men I loved walked into danger I could do nothing about but observe.The radio on Torres's shoulder crackled. Victor's voice, low and controlled. "In position. Building secure. No sign of Kessler's team yet.""Copy," Nico's voice answered, tighter than Victor's, coiled with the particular tension of a man who'd rather be doing something with