All Chapters of In Love With The Most Dangerous Mafia Boss: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Ryan was already up when Dave woke.Not gone — still in the room, standing at the window in the grey early light with a coffee cup in his hand, looking at the city the way he sometimes did in the mornings before the day’s machinery started moving. Dave lay still for a moment and watched him. The line of his shoulders. The way he held the cup without drinking from it, just the warmth of it in his hand.He had said tomorrow.This was tomorrow.Dave sat up. “You didn’t sleep.”Ryan glanced at him. “I slept.”“Not well.”Ryan looked back at the window. “No,” he said. “Not well.”Dave got up and washed his face and came back and sat on the edge of the bed. Ryan turned from the window and took the chair, setting the cup on the nightstand. He looked at Dave with the focused steadiness that meant he had been organising what he was going to say for several hours.“The Sun Syndicate,” Ryan said, without preamble. “Your grandfather founded it in the late seventies. It began as a territorial ope

Ryan left at two in the morning.Dave woke to the sound of him moving through the bedroom in the dark, dressing quickly and without the usual deliberateness, pulling on clothes with the focused economy of someone whose mind was already three hours ahead of his body. Dave lay still and watched through half-closed eyes. The room was very dark. The city outside was in its quietest hours, the light through the windows lower and more diffuse than at any other time of night.Ryan’s phone had buzzed four times in the previous hour. Dave had felt each one through the mattress, Ryan’s body registering each buzz with a slight shift in tension before settling again. On the fourth one, Ryan had gotten up without hesitation and started dressing and Dave had understood that the settling after each previous buzz had been Ryan deciding whether this was the one that required him to move.The fourth one was.Dave sat up. “How long?”Ryan paused in the act of checking something in his jacket. He looked

Ryan was different at dinner.Not obviously. not in ways that anyone who didn’t know him well would catch. He sat at the head of the table in the small east wing dining room, dressed and composed, eating with his usual precise economy, and the conversation moved around him the way it always did — Lila with scheduling updates, Marco with a brief security report, Victor smooth and attentive at the far end of the table.But Dave felt it.The quality of Ryan’s attention had changed. It was harder tonight, less filtered, the way metal felt different in cold weather — the same material but with less give. He had been back from the city for less than twenty-four hours and something from the thirty-six hours before that had not fully left him.Dave ate quietly and watched and said very little, which was normal enough that no one commented on it.Victor said something at the end of dinner that Dave didn’t catch, something light and smooth about a scheduling matter, and Ryan looked at him acros

It was raining.Dave had noticed the weather changing the night before, the sky over Kings City losing its usual sharp clarity and thickening into something low and grey, the kind of cloud cover that settled in and stayed. By morning the rain was falling steadily against the tall windows, running in thin lines down the glass, and the garden below was empty of guards who had moved their rotation inside the covered perimeter walkways.Ryan had left early for a meeting at Blood Dominion. Victor had gone with him. Marco was somewhere in the west wing. The mansion had that particular quality it got when its key people were elsewhere — not unguarded, never unguarded, but quieter in a way that changed the texture of the air.Dave was in the library.He had been there since breakfast, not reading, sitting sideways in his chair the way he sometimes did when his mind was too full for a book to compete with. The rain against the windows was good company. It required nothing.He had been thinking

It started quietly.The way most real things started in this house — not with a signal or a warning but with a small ordinary moment that turned out to be carrying more weight than it looked like from the outside.They were at dinner. Just the two of them, the staff having come and gone, the table cleared to wine and the last of the bread and the particular quality of evening light that came through the dining room windows when the city’s dusk was doing its slow shift toward dark. Ryan was talking about something operational — a logistics matter, an adjustment to the Blood Dominion schedule, the kind of thing he discussed with Dave more freely now than he had in the early weeks.Dave was listening and not listening simultaneously.He had been doing that for two days. Since the library, the album and Leo’s name were said out loud in the rain. Since Ryan’s yes, I understand what I’m telling you, which was honest and had not been enough.“Dave,” Ryan said.Dave looked at him.“You haven’