Lahat ng Kabanata ng bound to the ruthless mafia king: Kabanata 51 - Kabanata 60

Lucas pov The door was closed. The house was quiet. My men had gone back to their positions and the kitchen was behind me and the hallway was empty and I was standing in it doing nothing which was not something I did. I always had a next move. The next move was the only thing that kept everything from collapsing into itself. Right now I didn't have one. That irritated me more than anything else so I went back to the kitchen and sat at the table and opened my phone. Seventeen things. Calls that needed returning, messages from Ferrante about the restructuring, two family heads requesting contact, a report on Silvio's condition. Seventeen things that needed my attention and I stared at none of them. I was angry. That was the thing I kept arriving at. Angry at Dante Romano for standing in that room and lying to every family head in the syndicate with a straight face and an empty case. Angry at Isabella's mother for running an operation inside my territory like I was a landscape to

Lucas POVI sent the message at six in the morning.Four words. Don't go too far. I put my phone face down on the table before I could think about it for longer than I already had and I told myself it was practical. A precaution. The Vanchis situation was unresolved and she was outside my territory and it was a reasonable thing to say to someone in that position.I knew that wasn't entirely what it was.She didn't reply.I didn't expect her to. I picked the phone up twice in the next hour and put it back down twice and then Ferrante arrived at the door and I put it in my pocket and got to work because work was the only thing that had felt clean in the last four days.Ferrante sat across from me at the kitchen table with his own documents and we went through the restructuring properly. Territory first. What had held through the gathering, what had shifted, what needed to be renegotiated now that the room had seen Silvio for what he was. Three family heads had fallen in li

My mother didn't need to finish the sentence.I saw her face when she turned around from the window and that was enough. I had watched my mother hold herself together through six years of hiding and a gathering that collapsed around all of us and an exile she'd apparently factored into a thirty year plan. I had never in my life seen her face do what it was doing right now.I came fully into the kitchen and closed the door behind me."How long," I said."Since midnight." She looked at her phone like it might have changed in the last thirty seconds. "It's seven now.""Seven hours and you're only telling me now.""I didn't want to wake you until I had something to tell you." She set the phone on the table. "I still don't have something to tell you.""Have you called him.""Since three in the morning. Straight to voicemail every time." She sat down. "I've sent messages. Nothing."Elena was already on her feet on the other side of the kitchen, phone to her ear, speaking quietly and quickly

My father arrived mid morning.He looked worse than he had at the hotel after the exile. The cut above his eye, the careful way he moved through the doorway, like someone who had been in a room with people who weren't gentle and was pretending it hadn't cost him anything.I looked at him standing in the doorway and felt something I hadn't been expecting. Not just relief. Something underneath relief that told me whatever half forgiveness I'd been withholding in that hotel room chair was going to be harder to withhold now that I was looking at his face.I didn't say any of that.I said "sit down" and went to find something to clean the cut above his eye.Elena pointed me to a cabinet in the bathroom without being asked. I came back with what I needed and pulled a chair in front of where my father was sitting and sat in it and started cleaning the cut. He winced once and didn't make a sound after that."Hold still," I said."I am holding still.""You're not."He held still.We didn't tal

Luca POVI left before sunrise.Ferrante was already awake when I came downstairs, which meant he'd either not slept or had slept in the chair in the front room again, which he did sometimes when things were unresolved. He looked at me and at the jacket in my hand and at the keys and said nothing.I said "hold everything until I'm back."He said "how long."I said "I don't know."He nodded and looked at his phone and that was the end of it. That was Ferrante. Twenty years and he still knew exactly when to ask questions and exactly when not to and I had taken that for granted for most of those twenty years and I was aware of that now in a way I hadn't been before everything fell apart.I got in the car.The road was dark and empty at that hour, the city still mostly asleep, and I drove through it and out the other side and onto the long stretch that would take me to her city and I settled in for four hours of driving which was four hours of thinking which was the problem with long driv