Alle Kapitel von The Vitale Brothers Ruined Me, Then Made Me Their Queen: Kapitel 91 – Kapitel 100

The lock clicks shut.I am trapped.I slide down the door until I hit the floor. The wood is cool against my back, but my skin is burning.Aureliano thinks I am a thief. He thinks I am a grifter who played a long con to steal three million euros.He thinks I am trash.Rotten blood.The words echo in my skull.He doesn't know about the baby. He was so blinded by the money, by the "inheritance" note, that he missed the biological truth staring him in the face.I should be relieved. The secret is safe.But I am not relieved. I am furious.I am furious because he is right. The blood is rotten. But not because it is mine. Because it is ours.He called me an embarrassment. He called me a stain. He looked at me with the same aristocratic disgust his grandfather used on my mother twenty-five years ago.He thinks I am just a greedy girl from the gutter.He has no idea who I am.He has no idea that the blood he hates is the same blood that pumps through his own veins.I stand up.I walk to the

The hallway is silent.Aureliano is frozen on the stairs. He is holding the banister with one hand, his knuckles white. His other hand is pressed against his chest, as if he is trying to hold his heart inside his ribcage."You're pregnant," he said.The words are still hanging in the air, heavy and absolute.But his eyes aren't on my stomach anymore. They are on the diary lying open on the floor of the hallway behind me.He walks up the last step. He moves like a man in a dream. Or a nightmare.He walks past me. He doesn't look at me. He looks at the book.He crouches down.He picks it up.His hands are shaking so hard the pages rustle. Crinkle. Crinkle.He reads the entry again.December 1998. He found the letters. He knows I am pregnant.He looks at the date. He looks at the handwriting. He looks at the crest on the cover.Then he does the math.I can see it happening in his eyes. The cold, brutal calculation.December 1998: Maria is pregnant. August 1999: Graziella is born.Eight m

The study is a tomb.The curtains are drawn, blocking out the moonlight and the sea. The air is thick with cigar smoke and the sharp, medicinal tang of expensive scotch.Aureliano sits behind his desk. He is still wearing the ruined suit from the hallway confrontation. His tie is gone. His shirt is unbuttoned to his sternum, revealing skin flushed with alcohol and rage.He is drinking straight from the bottle.Glug. Glug.He slams the bottle down on the mahogany. It leaves a wet ring on the wood.The door opens.Ciro enters first. He is limping slightly, favoring his left leg—a phantom pain from the crypt, or maybe just the weight of the night dragging him down.Spadino follows. He looks anxious. He is chewing on his thumbnail, his eyes darting around the room, looking for the threat.They stop in front of the desk.They look at their brother. Their King.They have never seen him like this.Aureliano is usually a statue. Cold. Immovable. Tonight, he is a ruin. His eyes are bloodshot.

The house is divided.It isn't a line drawn in chalk. It isn't a barricade of furniture. It is a wall of silence so thick it muffles the sound of the ocean.Aureliano has moved.He didn't just move out of his office. He moved out of the West Wing entirely. He took his suits, his files, his bottles of scotch, and he retreated to the East Wing—the guest wing, the wing where the dead ancestors hang on the walls.He has ceded the main house to us. To the bastards.I stand in the doorway of the library. It is empty. The desk where he used to work is bare, stripped of papers and pens. The chair is pushed in. It looks like a museum exhibit. Here sat the King, before the fall.I walk to the window.Below, in the driveway, Aureliano is getting into his car. He is surrounded by guards. He doesn't look up. He doesn't check the window where I am standing.He gets in. The door slams. The car drives away.He is gone.He goes to the office in the city every morning at 6:00 AM. He returns at midnight

The partition is made of silence, but it is reinforced by glass.I am standing at the window of the West Wing suite. It is late. The house is quiet, settled into the uneasy truce of the night.Below me, the garden stretches out towards the cliffs. It is a dark, tangled landscape of shadows and wind-whipped roses.But there is a light.A single, burning point of orange in the darkness.Aureliano.He is standing on the stone terrace, his back to the house, facing the sea. He is smoking.I watch the cherry of his cigarette brighten as he inhales. Fwoosh. Then dim as he exhales a plume of grey smoke that is instantly snatched away by the wind.He looks destroyed.Even from this distance, even in the dark, I can see the slump of his shoulders. The way his head hangs heavy on his neck. He isn't the King tonight. He is a man standing in the ruins of his own kingdom.I press my hand against the cold glass.I miss him.It is a physical ache, a hollow space in my chest that throbs with every be