All Chapters of CLAIM ME, DON: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

We left at six in the morning.The estate was still dark when Elena pressed a flask of coffee into my hands at the side entrance and squeezed my wrist once without saying anything. From Elena that was the equivalent of a lengthy emotional farewell. Nico loaded two bags into the car. Dante was already outside talking quietly to one of the guards.I stood at the door and looked back at the house one more time.Three stories of pale stone in the early morning dark. The fountain still running. The library windows on the second floor were quiet and dark.I turned away and got in the car.The safe house was an hour outside the city on a road that got narrower and quieter the further it went from anything recognizable. The sea appeared on the left eventually, grey and wide and entirely indifferent to everything happening on the shore beside it, and the property sat on a clifftop above it.Stone walls, low and old. A wooden door that needed lifting slightly to open properly. Three bedrooms, a

He knocked on my door at five.I was reading in the sitting room when I heard it and looked up and he was leaning in the doorway with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled and that particular quality of stillness that meant he had finished everything that needed doing for the day and had arrived somewhere else."Come with me," he said."Where," I said."Outside," he said. "Just outside."I put the book down and followed him.He took me to the cliffside.Not the part I walked during the day, the open grass path that curved along the top of the cliff above the house. Further along, where the path narrowed and the land dropped more sharply and there was a flat shelf of rock that jutted out over the water like a natural platform someone had built specifically for sitting on and looking at things.The sun was going down.Not dramatically. Not the kind of sunset that looked like a painting. Just the real version, the light going amber and then deep gold and then something closer to copper,

I woke up first.The room was full of early light, the particular kind that came off the sea in the morning, softer and more diffuse than city light, filling the room without edges. I lay still for a moment just breathing it in and then I turned my head and looked at him.He was asleep.I had never seen him sleep before. Not properly. Not like this, on his back with one arm still loosely around me and his face completely unguarded in a way that waking hours never allowed. The controlled precision was gone entirely. He just looked like a person. Younger than usual. The lines that lived around his eyes smoothed out, the jaw unclenched, all the careful management of how he presented himself to the world simply switched off.I looked at him for a long time.I had been falling for him in pieces for weeks, one small honest thing at a time, and I had been managing that falling the way I managed most things, carefully and with both eyes open. But lying in the early morning light looking at Da

I found out about it the wrong way.Marco told me, which meant Dante hadn't told me, which meant it was either something Dante was still processing or something he had decided I didn't need to know, and I had been here long enough to understand that those two things were very different situations requiring very different responses.Marco appeared in the library on a Tuesday afternoon with two cups of coffee and the expression of a man who had been sitting on information and had finally decided that sitting on it any longer was going to cost someone something.He handed me a cup and sat in the reading desk chair and looked at me directly."I'm going to tell you something," he said. "And I want you to know I'm telling you because you have a right to know, not because I'm trying to cause problems."I put my book down. "That's a concerning opening.""Yes," he said. "It is."He told me.Sophia had contacted Viktor Renko. Not a casual contact, not something that could be explained away as

The letter arrived on a Friday morning.Not through the post. Slipped under my bedroom door sometime between midnight and six, which meant someone inside the estate had put it there, which meant the security breach that Viktor had been working toward had arrived quietly and without drama while everyone was sleeping.I found it when I got up at six thirty.A single folded page. No envelope. My name on the outside in handwriting I didn't recognize.I stood in the middle of the room in my cardigan and read it.It was from Rafael.Not threatening. Not dramatic. Written in the careful measured language of a man who had thought very precisely about every word before committing it to paper. He wrote that he understood my situation better than I might think. That what looked like a choice from the inside was not always a choice when examined from the outside. That he had resources and connections that could provide me with something Dante Marchetti fundamentally could not.Freedom. Real freed