All Chapters of Captive To The Mafia Lord: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Jovan's POVI won at approximately two in the morning and nobody was awake to congratulate me.Lorenzo was on the couch.I had done that. Me, with no tools, no resources, and nothing but the specific commitment of a man with a very clear agenda and absolutely nowhere to be. I lay in the middle of his bed and smiled into his pillow and felt genuinely accomplished in a way I had not felt about anything in recent memory.The couch was complaining. Little creaks and shifts, the sound of expensive decorative furniture being asked to do something it was never designed for. Lorenzo was not a small man and the couch was not a functional one and the combination of those two facts was producing a symphony of quiet suffering that I was enjoying thoroughly.I gave it twenty minutes, relishing in my victory before I proceeded to the next step on my plan.I got up.The trick with sleepwalking was that you had to mean it. Half commitment read immediately as performance and Lorenzo was not a man you

LORENZO'S POVThe room was very quiet.Ferrante looked at the entry then back at me. "That was a liquidity management exercise. Completely standard practice for an institution of our—""It's not standard practice," I said. "It's standard disguise. There's a difference and you know there is."One of the junior staff shifted in his chair. The other one looked at the window. Ferrante sat very still with the expression of a man calculating how much I actually knew versus how much I was inferring and whether the gap was large enough to work with."Mr. Ravello," he said carefully. "Jovan trusts this institution. He built it from—""I know what he built," I interrupted. "I'm trying to find out what someone else has been doing with it." I closed the file. "I'll need the VC-09 origination trail, the full Luxembourg thread, and the last six months of internal transfer authorisations. Today.""Today is—""Jovan signed the document," I said simply. "Today."Ferrante looked at me for a long moment

Lorenzo's POVWhen Ethan left for the second time, he thought about what he said and he wasn't wrong.If I was going to be able to convince the council that I had everything under controlI told Jovan about the meeting on Thursday morning.He was on the sofa with his feet up and my remote in his hand, with a bowl of popcorn by his side."You want me to go to a meeting?" he asked flatly."I want you to sit in a room and answer questions about your bank," I answered. “That shouldn't be hard right?”"That sounds like a meeting," Jovan said. “And I don't think I have the energy to sit through any meeting.” He replied between mouthfuls of popcorn."Jovan.""Who are these people?”"Associates of a man named Caruso. They have interests connected to Meridian and they have been asking questions about the ownership structure." I looked at him. "Questions that require you specifically."He was quiet for a moment. "What kind of questions?”"The kind that gets asked when someone wants to know if t

JOVAN'S POVLorenzo went inside to answer it and I stood on the terrace with his whiskey while my mind drifted to my bank which was not good tonight. The forged signature was sitting in my chest like something that had been placed there carefully and was waiting to see what I did about it. Vael's name was sitting next to it. Ethan's eyes on the table were sitting next to that.My chest was crowded.Things I knew about the forged signature. It was good. It was not perfect but it was good enough that it had convinced Greco's people and Greco's people were not unsophisticated.Whoever made it had access to multiple samples of my signature across different contexts. They understood how I signed things I cared about versus things I was processing quickly versus things I was signing under pressure.Three different signatures. The list of people who knew about the three was short and every name on it was a choice I had made deliberately and I was standing on a terrace going through that list

JOVAN'S POVOkay so here is a complete inventory of my options at one in the morning in an apartment that Leilani's people could find in four minutes.Call the police. Excellent idea except I was a man with a forged signature attached to his bank and a woman bleeding on a hotel room floor and the police had a way of making those two things into one conversation I was not ready to have.Call Lorenzo. Absolutely not. The entire point of leaving was not calling Lorenzo.Pack and leave. This was the one that made sense and this was the one I was doing.I moved fast. Documents first, the ones that mattered, the ones registered under names that needed to stay registered under those names. Cash from the drawer in the study, the specific amount I kept there for exactly this kind of situation because I had always known there would be a situation. My laptop. Two changes of clothes because more than two was optimism I did not have time for.I was almost done when I heard the footsteps from outsi