Semua Bab BLOOD & JUSTICE: Bab 61 - Bab 69

It was well past midnight when someone paused at the threshold of Nonna’s room.One hand braced against the wooden frame, the other hanging loose. She stood there watching the old woman sleep—Nonna Sveta’s breath unhurried, the remnants of a smile still etched at the corners of her lips, refusing to dissolve even as consciousness had drifted away.She sealed the image into her memory like a traveler pocketing forbidden souvenirs, knowing the weight would cost her at the border.Then she drew the door shut.Her throat was dry.She needed water.✘   ✘   ✘The kitchen light buzzed to life—And her heart nearly stopped.“Shit—”Elena was already there.Leaning against the counter edge, arms folded, one ankle crossed over the other. Not surprised. Not suspicious. Just watching, with the flat, direct gaze that could strip a carefully constructed plan apart befor

Dante had been rooted in front of his study window since six in the morning.Four hours. His feet anchored to the floor, shoulders locked, eyes fixed on one point in the back garden. Outside, the leaves of the old oak moved lazily in the wind, as though the earth had received no word that yesterday a permanent axis had snapped somewhere inside this mansion. The trees kept swaying. The world had not stopped spinning just because one life had reached its end.The world was never designed to care.The funeral yesterday had taken place beneath a half-hearted gray sky—the kind that refused to release rain yet wouldn’t allow sunlight through. At his side, Lorenzo had wept without pause from the moment the silver coffin was lifted until the first clumps of earth buried its surface. Even this morning, as Dante passed, the sound of sobbing still filtered from behind his brother’s bedroom door. Dante had stopped. His hand had hovered in the air, poised t

Two women stepped out of a black SUV in front of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II carrying an atmosphere too deliberate for ten in the morning.Elena stepped out first. Cream wool coat cinched at the waist, dark auburn hair in a low chignon with two strands left loose to frame her cheekbones—a detail that had required a precise fifteen minutes in front of a mirror. Behind her, Suede Brown wore a cream dress beneath a long camel coat, its hem falling exactly two centimeters shorter than Elena’s. A small cream ribbon in her contrasting black hair. Her gaze was flat, composed—and if anyone held it for more than three seconds, they’d catch something behind her eyes that refused to bend to the coquette aesthetic. A discipline born in training barracks, not inherited drawing rooms.Dante’s bodyguard stood three meters back, arms folded, wearing the expression of a man who had missed breakfast and considered happiness an additional work assignme

The Salon Privés of the Casino de Monte-Carlo operated on a single unwritten law, worn into its velvet carpet through decades of quiet ruin: the most dangerous people in the room were always the ones who received their losses with a straight spine and a steady breath.Elena locked that understanding into place the moment her heels struck the heavy mahogany threshold. The baccarat tables had been arranged with an intimidating precision—row upon row, leaving just enough aisle space for two bodies to pass each other without shifting their shoulders. Above them, amber light smoked through the air, engineered specifically to kill the awareness that a different world was spinning outside on a different clock. The air was thick with premium tobacco, bespoke cologne, and something older beneath it all—a residue that existed in places like this: ambition handed down so many generations it had started to smell like authority.Dante stopped three meters from th