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Home / Mafia / The Don's Wife, The Brother's Whore / Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

All Chapters of The Don's Wife, The Brother's Whore: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

70 Chapters

Chapter 61

Lilith POV The first thing I did was open every window immediately I got to the mansion Lucian signed for me. I went room by room, pushing sashes up, letting the October air move through the hallways the way it wanted to. The house was large, too large for one person, really, with high ceilings and wooden floors that creaked in specific places I was already memorizing. That was the thing I kept running into, room after room. The absence of an instruction. The absence of a correction waiting around the corner. I touched the walls as I walked. No cameras. No guards are stationed in the hallway outside. No sound from the next room that I needed to calculate and respond to correctly. I stood in the kitchen for a while, not doing anything particular, just standing in it. Sunlight came through the window over the sink at an angle that hit the countertop in a long stripe. I watched it move slightly as clouds went past outside. My phone buzzed. I looked at it without urgency. A bank

CHAPTER 62

Lilith POV Lucian hadn't moved from the center of the room. He stood there with his brandy glass like he'd been invited, like the house was still his by some understanding we hadn't gotten around to formalizing, and looked between Damien and me with the unhurried interest of a man watching something he'd already seen the ending of. My heart was going too fast. I could feel it in my throat. "Lucian." My voice came out steadier than I deserved. "I can explain." He tilted his head. "Started today, did it?" "Yes." The lie left my mouth before I could weigh it. "Yes. Today." He made a sound that was almost a laugh. He swirled the brandy once, watching the glass rather than me, and the casualness of it was worse than shouting would have been. "Really." "Yes." "Interesting." He looked up. "Then Sophie must be lying." The name landed like something dropped from a height. I heard myself say it before I understood why. "Sophie? Why would Sophie tell you anything?" His smile widened

Chapter 63

General POV The dining hall was elegant. Leo Rosetti ate slowly and said almost nothing. Victor Sokolov had expected aggression. He had prepared for it, had arranged his words to absorb it and redirect it, had reminded himself on the drive here that dangerous men were most manageable when their emotion was running hot. Heat made people predictable. Leo was not running hot. He sat at the head of the table with his phone beside his plate, and every few minutes his eyes dropped to the screen. Two photographs. A girl — maybe seven, maybe eight, dark hair, an expression that looked directly at the camera with the particular defiance of a child who had learned early that the world required this of her. Beside it, a woman. Same jaw. Same eyes. Same quality of looking at something and not flinching from what it showed her back. Serafina Rosetti, who died along with his father and brother. Her only daughter, alive and in New York. Leo had not said much since Victor laid it out. He had

Chapter 64

Damien POV The club was exactly the kind of place I would normally avoid. Too loud, too visible, the particular performative darkness of somewhere that wanted you to feel like you were hiding while making sure everyone could see you doing it. But that was also why it worked tonight. Lucian's men were checking my properties, my routes, the restaurants I used, the contacts they had names for. They weren't checking places I had no reason to be. I'd been moving for two days. Different locations, phone off except for thirty-minute windows I kept irregular. Not because I was afraid of Lucian, I knew my brother's tempo, knew he was methodical rather than impulsive, knew the hunt would be organized and thorough and give me time to think inside it. But Lucian when he'd decided to finish something was a different proposition than Lucian when he was managing competing problems, and the look on his face in Lilith's house had been the look of a man crossing something off a list. I sat in t

Chapter 65

Lucian POVMy study room was quiet the way I preferred it, no staff, no movement, just the low light and the particular silence of a building that knew better than to make noise when I was thinking.I poured another drink and didn't touch it yet.Sophie had called three times in the last hour. I watched her name appear on the screen the fourth time and felt the specific irritation of a useful thing that had started requiring maintenance. "Stai diventando pesante." She was becoming heavy. That was the problem with women who believed proximity to power entitled them to a portion of it. They started calling. Started needing. Started becoming the kind of complication that required management rather than simply use.I turned the phone face-down and drank.The security feed was open on the second screen. I'd pulled it up twenty minutes ago without fully deciding to, and now I couldn't stop returning to it. Lilith's room. She was there, sitting on the edge of the bed, not moving, not doing

Chapter 66

General POVThe jet touched down at LaGuardia airport. He had chosen here for a reason. No ground crew beyond the essential, no terminal lighting directed at the restricted lane, no record in the public system that would survive a casual inquiry. The aircraft rolled to a stop and the door opened and the men who came out first moved with the particular efficiency of people who had done this in enough cities that the city itself had stopped mattering as a variable.Then Leo Rosetti appeared at the top of the stairs.He stood there for a moment, not pausing for effect, just looking. The skyline in the middle distance, the grid of lights, the specific density of New York at this hour. His expression held nothing readable. His eyes moved across the view the way hands moved across a map, not admiring, assessing.The convoy was already waiting. His men lowered their heads slightly as he descended.His underboss fell into step beside him."Capo… la città è pronta." (Boss… the city is ready.”

Chapter 67

Lilith POV The documents were still spread across the table where I'd left them at three in the morning, and I had read every page twice. The massacre. The orphanage records. The falsified death certificate with the date eleven years wrong. The memo in Vittorio Verona's handwriting, not a suggestion, not a proposal, a directive, with my name in it before I was old enough to have a name anyone outside that world would recognize. "The girl is the last heir. Secure her. Her blood is the final key." I had been trying to find the Rosetti family online for the past hour. Vague references to a Florence dynasty, some historical mentions in Italian archives, one academic paper about a powerful syndicate that had effectively ceased to exist after a period of internal conflict in the early nineties. No faces. No current data. No indication that anyone had survived. Like someone had gone through the record and removed the proof of life from every entry. I already knew who would do some

CHAPTER 68

Lilith POVThe air was the first thing that was different.I stepped off the jet and it hit me, warmer than New York, carrying something I didn't have a word for immediately. Old, maybe. The light was different too, even at this hour, a softness to the dark that New York didn't do.I stood on the tarmac and waited for something to resolve inside me. Relief, maybe. Or the specific exhale of someone who had finally gotten far enough away from the thing that had been pressing on them.What I felt instead was disoriented in a way that had nothing to do with the flight.Leo was already moving ahead, speaking quietly to the men who had materialized at the base of the stairs. They were not like Lucian's men. Lucian's men watched everything; you, the exits, each other, the room's potential for violence at any given moment. These men acknowledged. Brief eye contact, a slight incline of the head. One of them looked at me and nodded once.I didn't know what to do with that, so I walked towar

Chapter 69

Lucian POV My office had not been quiet for hours. The calls kept coming, one after the other, all of them carrying some version of the same message. Something had gone wrong. A shipment had gone missing. A warehouse had been hit. Two men were dead. Another route had stalled because someone higher up suddenly wanted reassurance I had no patience to provide. I stood behind the desk, phone pressed to my ear, listening to a man in New Jersey explain why a delay that should never have happened had somehow become unavoidable. “I am not interested in the story,” I said. “Correct it immediately.” He started apologizing. I ended the call before he could finish. Another one came in immediately. Then another. Then Sophie. Her name flashed across the screen, disappeared, and came back again less than a minute later. I watched it long enough to feel annoyed, then turned the phone face down on the desk and reached for the other line. There was no room for her tonight. Not for questions, no

Chapter 70

Damien POV The door closed behind Lucian, but the damage he left behind stayed in the room. For a few seconds, we were rooted to the same position. The house was quiet again, though not in the way it had been before he walked in. Rafe still had his gun raised. Maleek did too, both of them angled toward the doorway as if Lucian might decide halfway down the path that restraint no longer suited him and come back shooting. I stood where I was, tasting blood in the back of my mouth that was not mine, my hand still warm from the strike. My knuckles stung. Lucian’s blood had dried in a dark smear across my skin. Maleek lowered his weapon first. Rafe followed a second later, slower about it, his eyes still on me rather than the door. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. I did not answer him. I walked to the sideboard, picked up a clean cloth, and wiped my knuckles carefully, workin

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