The Don's Unwanted Prize のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 10

Don De Santis couldn’t handle the fury of the North. Nobody can. He spent a year trying to steal my shipments and take over my streets, and all he got for it was a pile of body bags.He finally realized that you don’t play games with the Vane family. We have owned this city for decades. We are old money built on silence and iron. He is new money, built on noise and chaos. So, he did what all cowards do when they are losing. He crawled to me and begged for peace. He offered me a treaty in the most unlikely way: a marriage. He wanted to tie our bloodlines together so I wouldn’t finish what I started. I’m not entirely sure why I agreed to this charade, but I am a man of my word. If a wedding stops the bloodbath for a while, I will take the deal. But I don’t believe in peace. Peace is just a quiet moment between two wars. It is the time a man takes to reload his gun. I stood at the altar of St. Anne Cathedral, my back a straight line of iron. I didn’t feel like a groom. I felt like a ge

The car ride was a slow descent into a reality I wasn’t ready for. The glass of Silas Vane’s SUV was so thick it felt like it was soundproofing the world, leaving me alone with the man who had just pointed a gun at my family. I slumped against the door, my head resting against the cool window, wishing the Xanax would kick in faster.I kept my Ray-Bans on. They were my only shield. Behind the dark lenses, I could watch him without him seeing the terror in my eyes. He sat there like a king on a throne of black leather, perfectly still, while I felt like I was vibrating out of my skin."You can take the glasses off, Luca," he said. His voice wasn't loud, but it had the weight of a command.I didn't move. I couldn't. "I like the view better this way," I slurred, my tongue feeling heavy. "It filters out the parts of this wedding I didn’t sign up for."He didn't argue. He just reached out. For a second, I thought he was going to hit me. I flinched, pulling back into the seat, but he didn't

I opened my eyes, and for a second, I thought I was blind. Everything was grey. I felt the silence, and it wasn’t the peaceful kind. It was the heavy, suffocating silence of a grave. The pale, ghostly light of Chicago morning was filtering in. I tried to sit up, but my body felt like it had been dismantled and put back together by someone who hated me. My heart gave a dull, stuttering thud against my ribs. Then memory hit me. The bathroom, the pills swirling down the drain, the fire in my chest, and Silas. Silas was holding me down, his face a mask of cold fury as he told me I wasn’t allowed to die. I looked at my arm. There was a small bandage over my elbow. An IV. They must have pumped me full of something to stop the shivering, but it wasn’t the “fruity” high I was used to. This felt…clinical. Cold, very cold. I was alone in the massive bed. Silas was gone. I pushed the sheets back and swung my legs over to the edge. I was still half-naked, wearing only my boxers. I felt raw

Detox wasn’t a ‘journey.’ It was a war. The next three days were a blur of grey walls and white-hot agony. I spent most of it curled into a ball on Silas’s black silk sheets, shivering so hard I thought my teeth would shatter. I pulled the blue robe tighter around my shivering body. Every minute without a pill felt like a slow-motion car crash. My nerves were frayed wires, sparking every time I moved. Silas was mostly there like a silent, dark shadow at his desk, but he never touched me. He sat at his desk, the lamp casting a sharp glow over the folders in front of him. He barely looked at me since he told me I was “the chaos.”“You’re going to a gala,” Silas said, without looking up. I let out a dry, hacking laugh. “A gala? Silas, I can barely walk to the bathroom without the room spinning. I’m pretty sure ‘vomiting on the elite’ isn’t on the itinerary.”“The Board doesn’t care about your stomach,” Silas replied, his voice flat. He finally closed the folder and looked at me. “The

The air in the ballroom of the Vane Estate was thick, unquiet, and smelled of expensive lilies, the scent of a very high-class funeral. The cool brass of the railing biting into my palm, my cigarette holder balanced between my fingers like a conductor’s baton. Below me, the elite of the North Side moved in choreographed circles and whispered secrets over the black-and-white marble. To the untrained eye, it was a celebration of power. But I knew these people. I had built the political foundation they stood upon. They were vultures in tuxedos, waiting for a single drop of blood. They were waiting for Silas to fail. And more specifically, they were waiting for the South Side to show its symptoms. “Elizabeth. You look as formidable as ever.”