Alle Kapitel von Entwined With You : Kapitel 31 – Kapitel 40

Roderick stopped five feet from the desk — he had learned, over five years, to read the landscape before advancing further. "Um... It's yours, sir." He cleared his throat. "Your mother ordered me to pick it up for you."Of course she did.Alessandro leaned back in his chair. The leather sighed beneath him. "How long have you been working for me, Rod?""Um. Five years.""Five years." He let that sit. "And in all that time — five years of working in very close proximity to my person — have you ever, even once, seen me wearing something like that?" He gestured toward the tuxedo with an expression that would have been appropriate for something found on the underside of a shoe."No, sir.""Then why," Alessandro said, with the patience of a man who was not feeling particularly patient, "did you not tell her how hideous it is?"Rod blinked. Once. Twice. He looked down at the tuxedo on his arm as though he was only now truly seeing it. "I... She asked me what your favourite colour is."Alessa

The familiar scent of makeup remover filled the small bathroom as Maya dragged a cotton pad across her cheek, watching the day dissolve onto the white cloth in streaks of foundation and mascara.It had been a long evening at her parents' restaurant — the kind that left her feet aching and her smile muscles sore — and the quiet of her room was a relief she hadn't realised she'd needed until she was standing in it.Almost done, she thought, reaching for a fresh napkin. Then bed.That was when she heard it.The soft but distinct sound of her bedroom door swinging open — and then clicking shut. No footsteps followed. No voice called out. Just silence, thick and deliberate, pressing against the walls.Maya's brows furrowed. She stood still for a moment, head tilted, listening. The room didn't creak or settle in ways she hadn't learned to recognise over the years. That sound was something else entirely. Someone else.Someone's in my room.She tossed the napkin into the waste bin beneath the

There were very few people or things that made Alessandro Guidotti nervous.His father was one of them.Giovanni Guidotti had a particular way of occupying a room — not loudly, not theatrically — but with the quiet, immovable authority of a man who had never once doubted his own significance. Alessandro had spent the better part of twenty-one years learning how to breathe normally in his presence. He was still learning.But tonight, it was not his father making his pulse unsteady.Tonight, it was her.Viviana.The name alone did something unflattering to his composure. He sat rigid in the back of the car, dressed in a custom-tailored black tuxedo that fit him like a second skin, and felt, with some private humiliation, like a sacrificial lamb being chauffeured to the slaughter. The bowtie at his throat was immaculate. It was also strangling him.It feels like a noose, he thought grimly, resisting the urge — for the fourth time since leaving the estate — to reach up and tear the thin

He pulled back from her like she had burned him.And perhaps she had. Because something was burning — spreading outward from the point of contact with an efficiency that had nothing to do with shock and everything to do with the white, clean heat of fury. Alessandro was not a man who lost his composure easily. He had sat across tables from people who wanted to dismantle everything he had built, had fielded his father's silences and his mother's manipulations, had navigated crises that would have unmade lesser men, and through all of it he had remained — at least externally — unshakeable.Viviana Geralt had managed it in under thirty seconds."What the hell, Viviana?"The words came out harder than he intended, which meant they came out exactly as hard as he felt, which meant his composure was currently somewhere on the driveway behind him and he was not entirely sure he cared.She didn't flinch.Of course she didn't flinch. He watched her, jaw tight, and felt the specific frustratio

They arrived at ten minutes past seven.Alessandro Guidotti and Viviana Geralt came through the bronze doors of The Aurelia Grand with the practised ease of two people who had, somewhere between the Geralt driveway and the hotel entrance, negotiated a ceasefire. It was not a warm truce. It was not even a particularly comfortable one. It was the kind of arrangement two people arrive at when they are intelligent enough to recognise that the alternative — open hostility in front of three hundred witnesses — serves neither of them, and practical enough to set aside their considerable personal feelings for the duration of a public appearance.Alessandro had made his terms clear in the car, in the tone he reserved for conversations that were not, in fact, conversations."The moment the photographs are done, " he had said, his eyes forward, his voice carrying the flat finality of a man reading from a document he has already signed, "you will disappear from my sight. I don't want to see you.