CLAIM ME, DON のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 31 - チャプター 40

Three days after the library he asked me to do something I hadn't seen coming.I was in the armchair reading when he appeared in the doorway and I looked up the way I always did when he appeared, that awareness in my chest that I had completely given up pretending wasn't there."I need you at dinner on Friday," he said."I'm at dinner every night.""Not like this one." He came in and sat at the reading desk and looked at me the way he looked at things he needed me to understand completely. "Allied family heads. Six of them. They need to see that I am not distracted."I looked at him. "And bringing your captive to the table fixes that?""Bringing the woman I chose to bring here fixes that," he said. "There's a difference."The woman he chose to bring here.I sat with that for a moment because it landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to land."Just be who you are," he said quietly. "That's all I'm asking."I looked at him across the library and thought about what it meant to sit beside D

The guests left at eleven.I heard the cars on the gravel, one after another, and the house settling back into its nighttime quiet and I stood at the dining room window with a glass of wine I had been holding for twenty minutes without drinking and thought about Rafael's smile.Footsteps behind me.I didn't turn around because I already knew them.Dante stopped somewhere behind me and for a moment neither of us spoke and the room held the particular silence of a space that had been full of people and was now empty of everyone except us."He was watching you all evening," he said."I know," I said. "I was watching him watch me.""And?"I turned from the window. He was standing near the table still in his dinner clothes, jacket on, looking at me with that steady dark attention that I had stopped being able to pretend didn't affect me."He's intelligent," I said. "More than he wants people to think. And patient in a way that has nothing casual about it."Dante looked at me for a moment.

Three days after the key everything felt different.Not dramatically. Just quietly and fundamentally different the way things felt when something significant had settled into its permanent position and stopped being uncertain. We moved through the estate together with a new ease, dinners that ran late, evenings in the library, mornings where he appeared in the doorway with coffee before I had fully woken up and sat at the reading desk while I came back to life in the armchair.It was good.It was the best thing I had experienced in longer than I could honestly account for.Which was exactly why what happened on Thursday hit as hard as it did.I had been in the garden with Nico doing the eastern path when I decided to ask the question I had been carrying since Chapter Nine. Since the phone call. Since my father's voice going strange and careful and reaching for a word like sweetheart that didn't belong to him."Dante knows something about my father," I said.Nico was quiet for a moment

I ate breakfast in my room.Elena brought the tray without comment, which told me she already knew everything, which meant the estate knew everything, which meant the next few days were going to be exactly as uncomfortable as I intended them to be.Good.I wasn't ready to sit across from Dante Marchetti at that long dining room table and eat food he had paid for in a house he owned and pretend that everything I had learned in the last twenty four hours hadn't fundamentally rearranged the furniture of my entire life.I needed distance and I was going to take it.Day one I stayed in the library. Not because it was his mother's room and not because I was making a point about it but because it was the place I thought most clearly and right now clear thinking was the only tool I had. I read three chapters of the same book without absorbing any of it and then gave up and sat in the armchair and thought about my father instead.Carlo Russo. Quiet man. Good father. One catastrophic decision m

Things were almost normal for four days.Not completely normal because nothing in this house was ever completely normal but the closest version of it we had managed since the alley. Dinners that ran long. Evenings in the library. The easy quiet of two people who had said the difficult things and come out the other side of them still standing.I had stopped counting the days somewhere around day thirty and hadn't noticed until now.That felt significant.It felt like something I should probably examine more carefully and kept choosing not to.Thursday morning started like any other. Coffee at six. Nico at the side entrance. The eastern path with the mist still low on the grass and the birds making their unreasonable amount of noise in the cypress trees. I was halfway through the second circuit when Nico's phone buzzed and he looked at the screen and his face did the thing it did when information arrived that required immediate management."What," I said."Give me a moment," he said, al