บททั้งหมดของ The Don's Wife, The Brother's Whore: บทที่ 81 - บทที่ 90

Damien POV I woke before the light fully settled into the room. For a moment, I didn’t move. Lilith was still asleep beside me, one arm draped across my chest like she had fallen there and never thought to move again. Her hair was a mess against the pillow, her breathing even, her face softer than I had seen since she arrived yesterday.Her face was calm. I watched her longer than I should have, and that was the problem. Not because she distracted me, not because she made me careless, it was because she had changed the way I made decisions. That was worse. I shifted slowly, careful not to wake her. Her arm slid off my chest as I sat up, and for a second, she stirred—barely—but didn’t open her eyes. I stood, grabbed my shirt, and pulled it on without looking back again. If I stayed, I wouldn’t leave. And I needed to think. The underground room was already active when I walked in. Screens lit up the walls, maps layered with markers, movement patterns, incoming intel feeding in

Lucian POVNight suited my office better than daylight ever did.The city outside had gone darker, the windows across from mine turning into scattered squares of yellow and white, each one hiding some smaller life that had nothing to do with power and would never understand the cost of keeping it. I sat alone with a drink in my hand and the reports spread across my desk, though by now I knew every number on those pages well enough to recite them without looking.The warehouse loss still hadn’t settled properly. One shipment recovered, another delayed, two routes compromised, and too many men speaking to me with the careful tone people used when they were afraid of saying the wrong thing. The fight between Damien and Sokolov had reached me days ago. I had listened to the report without interrupting, then asked for it again from a different source just to hear whether the details changed.They didn’t.Damien had gone after Victor like a man who had forgotten his own limits. Victor had

LEO POVThe office was quiet enough that I could hear the low electrical hum behind the screens.I preferred it that way.Noise distracted weaker men into believing activity was the same thing as progress. Silence forced precision. Silence made people reveal themselves if you waited long enough.I sat behind the desk with one hand resting near the keyboard and my eyes fixed on the largest screen in front of me. The image was grainy in places, the kind of feed pulled from distance and angles not meant for comfort, but it was clear enough.Lilith.She moved through Damien’s training space with the stubborn focus of someone who had already made peace with pain before stepping into it. I watched her fall, catch herself badly, rise again, adjust her footing, then go back in when a smarter person would have asked for a minute to breathe.Maleek circled her with that patient brutality men like him mistake for kindness. He wasn’t going easy on her, which I like. Going easy on her now would on

Damien POVThe map on the table was small enough to look simple, and that was the problem.Brooklyn spread out under my hand in quiet lines and controlled marks—streets we owned, streets we tolerated, and the ones that pretended not to belong to anyone until you stepped into them and realized too late that they belonged to someone very patient.“This one,” I said, tapping the corner of the grid.Rafe leaned in slightly. Maleek stayed where he was, arms folded, eyes already moving ahead of the conversation.“A courier point,” I continued. “Not a base. Not a command center. It’s where they pass things through. Instructions that don’t get written down twice.”One of Rafe’s men shifted his weight, attention sharpening.“Light presence?” he asked.“It should be,” I said.That word stayed in the air longer than it needed to.Lilith stood across from me, quiet, watching the map instead of me. That was new. A few days ago, she would have interrupted, questioned, pushed. Now she listened first

LUCIAN POV The car moves through the city without interruption, steady in a way that feels deliberate rather than slow, and I let my attention drift past the glass, watching reflections slide over the window instead of the streets themselves. The rhythm of it is familiar, controlled, predictable, and for a moment it almost feels like everything is exactly where it should be. I could have sent someone. There are men who would handle this without question, men who know how to apply pressure without overdoing it, how to say just enough to make someone fold, how to extract exactly what I need without wasting time. It would have been clean, efficient, and finished in less than an hour. But Sophie isn’t a situation that benefits from distance. She needs to see me. I already know what I’m walking into. I don’t need to guess, don’t need to prepare for anything unexpected, because Sophie has never been difficult to read in the ways that matter. She reacts first and thinks later, and when