Todos os capítulos de THE DON'S DISCARDED BRIDE : Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

The mole was a woman named Diane.Twenty-six years old. Hired three weeks ago as part of the penthouse housekeeping rotation. She had a clean background check, a solid resume from a hospitality agency in Midtown, and a smile that made the security team lower their guard just enough.She’d been reporting Sophia’s schedule to Marcus for seventeen days. When she ate, When she slept, When she went to the third floor kitchen to bake at 5 AM. Marcus knew everything short of the lock codes and he’d been working on those too. Dominic found out at 11 PM on the night of the gala. By midnight, every member of his staff was confined to the building. By 1 AM, communications were shut down no phones, no internet, no contact with the outside world. The penthouse became a sealed box, and everyone inside it was a suspect. Sophia watched from the kitchen doorway as Dominic’s operation transformed. The casual luxury vanished. The men who’d been eating her cannoli and laughing at Nico’s jokes were suddenly

The woman’s name was Catherine Avery, She was fifty-seven years old. Former federal prosecutor. Retired early after her daughter disappeared eight years ago and the investigation went nowhere and the grief ate a hole through the center of her life that no amount of legal brilliance could fill. Her daughter’s name was Elena Vasquez, Sophia recognized the name instantly. Elena Vasquez the same name from Marcus’s file. The same name she’d asked Gina about. The same name that had been connected to a man named “Mark” who’d vanished from Elena’s life eight years ago, leaving nothing behind but an empty apartment and a child placed in foster care. A child placed in foster care.The room was very quiet. Sophia could hear the blood moving through her own veins, could feel her heart shifting rhythm from steady to something faster and more dangerous, like a train approaching a curve it wasn’t designed to take at speed. Catherine spoke. Her voice was controlled lawyer’s training but the cracks wer

The wedding was at midnight. No flowers. No music. No guests except Nico, who stood by the door in a dark suit with his arms crossed and his face arranged in an expression that was part bodyguard, part best man, part man who was watching his best friend do something stupid and beautiful and couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry.The judge was a woman named Patricia Conway. Sixty-two. Sharp-eyed. She owed Dominic a favor she’d been carrying for nine years, and when his call came at 10 PM asking her to perform a ceremony at midnight, she’d said yes without asking why. In Dominic’s world, people didn’t ask why. They just showed up. Sophia wore white. Not a gown a simple silk dress that fell to her knees, something the stylist had found in two hours that managed to be both understated and devastating. Her hair was down. No veil. No train. Just her, standing in the living room of a penthouse sixty stories above the city, wearing a black diamond ring and the necklace her mother had left he

The Bishop,Dominic didn’t speak for the entire drive back to the city. He sat in the passenger seat with his jaw clenched and his eyes on the road and his body radiating a kind of cold fury that Sophia had never felt from him before not the controlled, surgical anger she’d seen him deploy like a weapon, but something older. Something that lived in his bones.Sophia waited. She was learning that with Dominic, the waiting was part of the conversation. He processed things the way deep water processed storms silently, below the surface, until the current shifted and whatever was underneath finally rose.He spoke at the penthouse. Midnight. Standing in the study with a glass of bourbon he wasn’t drinking and the look of a man staring at a ghost he’d buried fourteen years ago.“The Bishop was my father’s partner,” he said. Silent, Invisible. The man behind the money. My father ran the streets. The Bishop ran the machine that made the streets profitable.”Sophia sat across from him. “You said you

They didn’t make it inside.The rain was cold and his mouth was hot and somewhere between the terrace and the doorway they stopped caring about the difference. His hands found the hem of her shirt his shirt, the one she’d stolen from the laundry because it smelled like cedar and pulled it over her head, and the rain hit her bare skin and she gasped against his mouth and he swallowed the sound like it was something he’d been starving for.She pulled his wet shirt open. Buttons scattered across the stone floor like tiny gunshots. His chest was scarred beneath not just the jaw, but everywhere, a map of violence written across his skin in raised white lines and old burns and the particular patterns that come from a lifetime of being hurt by people who were supposed to love you.She pressed her mouth to the worst scar a thick, ragged line across his ribs. He went still. His hands stopped. His breath caught.“Sophia.”Shut up.”She kissed the scar. Then the next one. Then the burn mark on his sh