All Chapters of CLAIM ME, DON: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

86 Chapters

CHAPTER 31: No Pretense & Second Intimacy

Neither of us moved for a long time.We sat in the dark library with his hand in mine and the fountain running outside and the quiet of the estate settling around us and I thought about Fen in the entrance hall and the way Dante's voice had been so completely still and I thought about all the weight this man carried every single day of his life without ever putting it down.I turned to look at him.He was already looking at me.In the low moonlight coming through the library windows his face was open in the way it only got when he was too tired to manage it and I looked at him for a long moment and then I reached up and put my hand against his jaw.He went completely still.I had touched him before. He had touched me. But this was different, this was me choosing it deliberately with no urgency and no crisis behind it, just my hand against his face in the dark because I wanted it there.His eyes closed briefly.When they opened again something in them had shifted.He turned his face i

CHAPTER 32: The Dinner Party

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

CHAPTER 33: Rafael

Rafael Vega arrived late.Everyone else was already seated when he walked in, unhurried, like a man who understood that making people wait was its own kind of statement. He was younger than the others, maybe late thirties, dark suited, the kind of handsome that came with the full awareness of being handsome and had learned exactly how to use it.He looked around the room when he entered and his eyes landed on me and stayed a beat longer than introductions required.Dante noticed. I felt it in the slight shift beside me, barely visible, the kind of thing you only caught if you had been studying this man for weeks.Rafael sat two seats away and smiled across the table. "I don't believe we've met.""Mia," I said."Rafael." The smile widened slowly. "A genuine pleasure."Dante picked up his wine without a word.The dinner moved through its courses and Rafael was charming in the specific way of men who had practiced it until it became completely effortless. He told stories that made the ta

CHAPTER 34: The Almost

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.

CHAPTER 35: The Key

He found me in the library the next morning.I was in the armchair with coffee going cold and Biscuit heavy on my lap and the kind of tiredness that came from lying awake too long with too many thoughts and not enough answers. He appeared in the doorway and I looked up and he looked at me and neither of us mentioned the dining room or what had been said in it.He came in and sat at the reading desk and put something on the table between us.A key.Small and old, worn smooth from years of use. He slid it across the table without a word and I looked at it and then at him."What is this," I said."The front gate," he said.I looked at it again."You can leave whenever you choose," he said. "The gate opens from the inside and there are no guards between you and the road." A pause. "If you stay it should be because you want to. Not because you have no other option."I want to be something you choose.Last night's words sitting right there in the daylight between us with a key making them r

CHAPTER 36: The Secret About Carlo

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

CHAPTER 37: The Truth About Carlo

I didn't sleep.I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and turned it over and over the way you turned something over when you were hoping a different angle would make it look like something more manageable than what it actually was.It didn't look more manageable from any angle.My father had given information to the Marchetti family fifteen years ago. Information that had consequences he hadn't fully anticipated and had been living with ever since in the quiet guilty way of a man who had made one catastrophic choice and spent the rest of his life being grateful it hadn't destroyed him yet.Hadn't destroyed him yet.Because it had found him eventually. It had found him in the form of his daughter walking into the wrong alley on a Tuesday night and ending up inside the very world he had spent fifteen years hoping she would never know existed.I got up at five because lying down wasn't working.I sat on the floor with my back against the bed the way I had on the first night in this

CHAPTER 38: Three Days of Ice

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

CHAPTER 39: The Apology

It was Marco.He stood in the doorway in yesterday's shirt with his hands in his pockets looking like a man who had rehearsed something and arrived at the door and promptly forgotten all of it."He sent you," I said."He didn't send me," Marco said. "He doesn't know I'm here." He paused. "He would be annoyed if he knew I was here.""Then why are you here."He came in without being fully invited and sat on the edge of the chair near the window and looked at me with an expression that had none of his usual performance in it. Just Marco. The real one underneath all the charm."Because he won't come himself tonight," he said. "Not because he doesn't want to. Because he thinks you need the space and he's trying to respect that and it's costing him considerably more than he's showing anyone."I looked at my hands."And because someone should tell you," Marco continued, "that what happened with your father and the family is not something Dante engineered. He inherited it the same way he inhe

CHAPTER 40: Viktor Escalates

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

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