All Chapters of In Love With The Most Dangerous Mafia Boss: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Ryan didn’t come to dinner.Marco arrived at the table with the particular energy of a man who had been in a fight recently and found it satisfying, dropping into his chair with a casualness that suggested violence was simply weather to him — something that happened, that you moved through, that left you hungry afterwards. He ate with appetite and talked with Lila about logistics and occasionally glanced at the empty chair at the head of the table with an expression that said he knew something Dave didn’t.Dave ate quietly and didn’t ask.An hour after dinner he was back in the bedroom, sitting at the window with the city spread out below, when he heard Ryan’s footsteps in the corridor. He recognised them now without thinking about it — the particular weight and rhythm, the way they moved differently depending on what kind of day it had been. Tonight they were slower than usual. Not tired exactly. Deliberate in a way that suggests effort is being applied to steadiness.The door opened

Lila found him in the gallery.Dave had taken to walking it in the late mornings when Ryan was in his study and Elena was occupied with security rotations and the east wing felt too small for the amount of thinking he was doing. The gallery ran along the mansion’s south face, its tall windows letting in long rectangles of light that moved across the floor as the morning progressed. The artwork on the walls was abstract and expensive and Dave had stopped trying to interpret it weeks ago. He walked it for the light and the length of it, twenty paces one way and twenty back, enough movement to keep his body from feeling like it belonged to the room rather than to himself.He was on his third pass when he heard her heels on the marble behind him.Lila fell into step beside him without preamble, her tablet under one arm, her expression carrying its usual professional composure. To anyone watching from the corridor entrance, they would have looked like two people who happened to walk in the

Ryan told him the night before.Not as a question, not as an invitation. He set his phone down on the nightstand and looked at Dave across the bed with that particular quality of having already decided something and now simply informing the relevant party.“Tomorrow you come to the office with me,” he said.Dave looked at him. “The Blood Dominion offices.”“Yes.”“In the city.”“That is where they are,” Ryan said, with the faint edge of dry amusement he occasionally allowed himself in private.Dave looked at the ceiling outside the mansion in Kings City properly, not glimpsed through tall windows or seen from above in the abstract glittering distance but actually entered, its streets walked, its air breathed. Five weeks and four days since he had last stood on a pavement with the city moving around him, and that last time had ended in an alley with three men and an empty bag and everything he owned gone.“Why?” Dave asked.Ryan reached over and turned off the bedside lamp, the room dr

They were back at the mansion by mid-afternoon.The return journey had been quieter than the outward one. Dave sat beside Ryan in the smooth dark interior of the car and watched Kings City move past the tinted windows in reverse, the financial district giving way to wider streets and then the northern roads that led toward the mansion’s high ground. He turned Hargrove’s face over in his mind — the calculation behind the smile, the recognition that had moved across his features at the name Sun before the social manner reasserted itself and covered it over.Ryan had said nothing more about it over lunch.They had eaten at the desk in the office, food brought up by staff who appeared and disappeared with the same practiced invisibility as the mansion’s domestic team, and Ryan had shown Dave the river from the north window at midday as promised — the light on it was worth seeing, a clean silver brightness that made the water look like something deliberate in the city’s grid rather than so

Dave had not planned to go into the study.That was the truth of it, though he knew it wouldn’t sound like the truth if he had to say it out loud. He had been walking the east wing corridor after breakfast, Ryan in a meeting somewhere in the west wing, the morning quiet and long in the way mornings got when he had already read and already walked the gallery and already stood at the window long enough to have memorised which guards were on the early rotation.The study door was open, not fully. A few inches, the way a door sat when it had been pulled without being properly latched, resting against the frame without catching. Dave had walked past it twice before he stopped.He stood in the corridor and looked at the gap.Ryan’s study was the one room in the east wing that Dave had never been in alone. He had been inside it twice, both times with Ryan present, both times briefly. It was a working room — a desk, a laptop, shelves of files and ledgers, a wall-mounted screen showing rotatin