Lahat ng Kabanata ng bound to the ruthless mafia king: Kabanata 41 - Kabanata 50

Nobody moved for a moment. The car sat on the road and the three of us looked at the empty window and the empty window looked back and the house stood there in the grey morning light looking like a place that had decided to stop being a ruin and hadn't quite finished deciding what to be instead. "We go in carefully," Luca said. "Enzo takes the left, I take the right, Isabella you stay at the entrance until we've cleared the ground floor." I didn't argue. That was how he knew something was wrong with me. I always argued. We got out. The morning was cold and still and our footsteps on the ground sounded too loud. No other vehicles anywhere. No signs of movement outside. Just the house and the light and the feeling of being watched by something that wasn't showing itself yet. The front door had been repaired. New hinges, the frame straightened. Luca tried it and it opened cleanly and we went in. I stopped just inside the entrance. The last time I'd been here it had been dark and

ISABELLAS POVWe were out of the motel before the sun finished rising. No discussion about it. Luca had said move and we moved and within ten minutes the three of us were in the car with whatever we'd come with and the motel was behind us and the road was in front of us and the gathering was hours away. I watched Luca drive. Something had changed between last night and this morning. He was contained the way he was always contained but differently. Like a man who had made a decision somewhere between three in the morning and now and was carrying it quietly until the right moment. I didn't ask. Enzo was in the back going over logistics. Timing, arrival order, which family heads had confirmed attendance, what the security arrangement at the venue looked like. Useful and practical, filling the silence with things that needed to be said. I listened and watched the road and thought about the photograph still in Luca's jacket pocket. His father. My mother. Thirty

Nobody moved.The room that had been fracturing two minutes ago was completely still now. Every person in it frozen in whatever position they'd been in when Silvio's arm went around my throat.The gun was cold against my temple.I couldn't breathe properly. His arm was too tight around my neck and I had to make a decision to take very small careful breaths and stick to them and not do anything that could be interpreted as movement.I was terrified.I want to say I was thinking clearly and calculating and holding myself together but the truth is my heart was going so fast I could feel it in my teeth and the metal of the gun against my head was the only thing my brain could fully process.Luca was across the room.Two of Silvio's men had moved in front of him the second Silvio grabbed me. He hadn't tried to push through them yet. He was standing there looking at me. He stared at me like he was planning something. He looked sad, like he'd let me down, like he'd betrayed me and for the fi

I woke up before him. The room was grey and still, early light coming in thin through the curtains, and for a moment I just lay there and let myself feel the absence of dread. No car to get back into. No road to watch. No mirror to check. Just a room and a bed and the sound of someone breathing beside me. I turned my head. Luca was asleep. Actually asleep. Not the sitting-in-a-chair-by-the-window version I'd seen in every motel and borrowed flat. Properly asleep, on his back, one arm across his chest, his face doing nothing at all. No jaw working through a calculation. No eyes processing a room. Just his face, still, and he looked younger than I'd ever seen him look and I didn't stare but I noticed. I got up quietly and went downstairs. The kitchen was clean and stocked and the morning light came through the window above the sink and I stood in it for a moment and then I made breakfast. Real breakfast. Eggs that weren't Enzo's, toast that wasn't motel bread, coffee that didn't t

I woke up, and he was still there.That was the first thing. Every other morning, he'd been up before me, already somewhere else in the house or already on his phone. This morning, he was just lying there beside me, looking at the ceiling. I watched him for a moment without moving. He turned his head and looked at me. "Heyyy, you're staring," he said stretching a little. "I'm looking," I said. "There's a difference." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. He looked back at the ceiling. We lay there. Neither of us got up. The morning light came in slow through the curtains, and the house was quiet around us, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd been in a bed and felt no urgency to leave it. "Tell me something, hmm, about the café," he said. I looked at him. "What about it." "What was it like?" I thought about it. "Small. Six tables inside, two outside when the weather was good. The owner was a woman named Rosa who came in every morning and tasted the coffe