All Chapters of The Don's Forbidden Claim: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The silence was worse than the gunfire had been.I stood at the shattered bar cart, surrounded by broken crystal and the metallic tang of spent ammunition, and listened to the penthouse breathe. Dante's men moved in quiet currents around me—sweeping glass, securing the hallway, dragging the last of Enzo's failed assault team toward the service elevator. No one spoke to me. No one looked at me directly. I was the Don's woman, and the Don was gone, and that made me something between royalty and a widow in waiting.My hands had stopped shaking ten minutes ago. I didn't know when they'd start again.Marco appeared at my elbow, his blocky frame radiating the kind of steady exhaustion that came from decades of loyalty. "The extraction team hit the warehouse six minutes ago. Radio silence until they're clear, but the initial breach was clean. Lila's intel on the east loading bay held up.""Any word on casualties?""Too early." He hesitated, and I saw something flicker behind his professiona

The name hung in the air like smoke. Alessio Moretti. Dante's dead brother. Alive. Watching me for eighteen months.I hadn't said it back. He'd laid his heart at my feet, and I'd kissed him instead of speaking, and now he was holding a folder that proved someone had been stalking me since before I ever walked into the wrong suite. The guilt and the fear tangled together in my chest until I couldn't tell them apart.Dante set the folder on the console with exaggerated care, the way a man handles a bomb. His face had gone to stone—not the Don's cold authority, but something older and more brittle. The mask of a man who'd buried his brother twenty years ago and was only now discovering the grave was empty."How is this possible?" I asked. My voice was steadier than I felt. "Isn't he dead? You held a funeral.""We held a funeral for an empty casket." Dante's hands were flat on the console, his weight braced against them. He wasn't looking at me. He wasn't looking at anyone. "My father exi

I didn't leave the bedroom for two days.Not because I was hiding. Because I was thinking. About DNA tests and half-million-dollar payoffs and a mother who'd sold my future for a lump sum. About Alessio's flat, dead eyes when he'd called me "little sister." About Dante's face when I'd flinched from his touch—the way hope had drained out of him like blood from a wound.He kept his word about sleeping elsewhere. I heard him sometimes, moving around the penthouse at odd hours, his voice low on phone calls that never seemed to end. Marco Castellano had been informed about Alessio's reappearance. The other families were "concerned." Enzo had vanished from his exile location. And somewhere in the city, Alessio was waiting for the chaos he'd planted to bear fruit.Marco brought me meals I barely touched. "You need to eat, Miss Kane.""I need to understand how my mother took half a million dollars and never told me who my father was."He had no answer for that. Neither did I.On the third mo

Enzo was my brother.Not my boyfriend. Not my enemy's son. My mother's child. Lorenzo Moretti's bastard, hidden under an alias for a decade, placed in Dante's household as a wolf among sheep. The man who'd tried to use me as bait, who'd sent assassins to the penthouse, who'd stood on a pier and offered to let me walk away—he shared my blood.I stared at the photograph until my vision blurred. The baby in my mother's arms had Enzo's dark hair, Enzo's storm-gray eyes, Enzo's particular curve of the mouth. Two years older than me. Born before the payoff. Born before my mother disappeared with half a million dollars and left one child behind while keeping the other."She kept him," I heard myself say. "She left me in an empty apartment with a sandwich on the counter, and she kept him."Lila's face had gone white. "Essa, I didn't know. I swear I didn't know about any of this. Alessio never told me about Enzo's real identity.""Enzo knew." Dante's voice was hollow, the voice of a man who'd

The kitchen smelled like cinnamon and regret.My mother sat across from me at a scarred wooden table, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea she hadn't touched. Up close, the years had been cruel in ways that went beyond wrinkles. Her eyes had a hollowed-out look, the look of someone who'd been running so long she'd forgotten what she was running from. The flour on her fingers was from a pie crust she'd been crimping when I knocked. A pie crust. Like this was just another Tuesday night."You've been ten minutes away," I said again. The words came out flat, but my hands were shaking under the table. "The whole time.""Not the whole time. I moved back three years ago." She wouldn't look at me. "After I heard you'd started dating Enzo. I wanted to be close. In case something went wrong.""In case something went wrong." I let the words hang. "You knew he was my brother. You knew I was dating my own brother, and you didn't think to warn me?""I couldn't." Her voice cracked. "Alessio made i