The Devil's Possession のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

AlessandroSofia was in the west wing sitting room when I found her.She was dressed for bed. Silk robe. Hair loose. A glass of wine on the table beside her, half finished. She looked up when I walked in, and something moved across her face.Not surprise.That was the first thing I noticed. She looked at me and she was not surprised."Alessandro," she said. Her voice was careful. The careful voice of a woman measuring how much I knew.I closed the door behind me."The east corridor," I said. "This afternoon. When you walked it."She picked up her wine. "I told you. I needed something from my room.""You stopped at the east wing window," I said. "The one at the end. You stood there for four minutes. My guard logged it." I walked toward her slowly. "He did not think anything of it at the time. A woman looking out a window." I stopped in front of her. "But four minutes is a long time to look at a window."She set the wine down. Her jaw was tight. "I do not know what you are suggesting."

AlessandroThe farmhouse corridor was narrow and dark and it smelled like death before I spilled the first drop of it.I moved without thought. Without planning. Without the cold calculation that had kept me alive for twenty years. Something else moved through me. Something I had locked away when I was fourteen years old, sitting in the dark beside my mother's body.Rage.Pure. Unfiltered. Burning.The first man came at me from the left. A kitchen knife. Long blade. He swung wild.I caught his arm. I twisted until I heard the bone break. He screamed. I took the knife from his broken hand and I drove it into his throat. Not clean. Not quick. I pulled it across. His head tilted at an angle that was not natural. Blood sprayed the stone wall.I dropped him and kept moving.The second man had a gun. He raised it. Too slow. I grabbed the barrel and shoved it upward. The shot went into the ceiling. Plaster rained down on us. I headbutted him once, twice, three times until his nose was gone,

AlessandroI had not spoken to her in four days and I told myself this was necessary.Every instinct I had, every habit built over twenty years of running an empire, told me that proximity was dangerous. That distance was the only language I knew how to speak cleanly. That the farmhouse had cracked something open in me that needed to be sealed before it became a problem.The rage. The blind, animal fury of it. I had not killed like that in years. Not since my father. Not since the night I decided what kind of man I would be and built every wall I had from that decision forward.She had undone something.I did not know what exactly. Only that it had come undone in the corridor of that farmhouse when I saw the back of her head between two men and something inside me stopped calculating. The calculations had always kept me alive. They had built my empire, protected my borders, outmaneuvered every enemy who had ever come for me. And in that corridor, with her small figure disappearing thr

AlessandroI was not jealous.I told myself this at seven in the evening when I sat down to review the port contracts.I told myself again at eight when I stood up without finishing them.I told myself a third time at nine when I snapped at Enzo for knocking too loudly on my study door, and he looked at me with the expression of a man who had worked for me for eight years and had never once seen me snap at a knock."Get out," I said.He got out.I sat behind my desk.I was not jealous. I was irritated. There was a difference. Jealousy was an emotion that required a particular prerequisite, caring about someone, and I did not care about Elena Rossi. She was a ward. She was temporary. She was a girl in a borrowed cardigan who reorganised bookshelves and cried in gardens and hummed music she did not know she was humming.She was nothing that should occupy this much of my thinking.Her head on his shoulder.I stood up and walked to the window.The garden was dark. The bench was empty. The

Alessandro"Entertain me." My voice was dark and ugly.The words hung in the dark room between us, cold and sharp and final. I watched her face change. I watched the confusion become understanding and the understanding become fear. Her hazel eyes went wide and her lips parted and her hands gripped the blanket like it was the only thing keeping her upright."What?" Her voice came out small and weak.I saw the fear in her eyes but I did not care. I was too overwhelmed by rage. It had been building for hours, for maybe longer than I wanted to admit, and now it had filled me completely. There was no room for anything else. No room for reason or restraint or the careful control I had spent twenty years building. There was only her and Lucas and the way her head had rested on his shoulder like it belonged there.I walked toward her in steady steps.She scrambled backward on the bed, her back hitting the headboard, her hands coming up in front of her face like she could shield herself from m