All Chapters of Contracted to My Fiance’s Mafia Don: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Elara The FBI didn't knock. They announced themselves from the front entrance with the kind of volume designed to establish control before anyone had a chance to think clearly, and then they were inside—dark jackets, vests, weapons drawn, voices overlapping and loud in the marble foyer. *Hands visible. Stay where you are. Alexander Thorne, show yourself.* I was in the kitchen with a cup of coffee that hadn't fully cooled yet. I set it on the counter with both hands because my hands needed something to do, and I stood completely still and listened to the sound of my new life coming apart at four hours old. *This is not happening.* It was happening. A woman appeared in the kitchen doorway. Forties, sharp-featured, dark jacket with the three yellow letters across the chest. She looked at me with the specific assessment of someone who had already decided what they thought and was checking it against reality. "Elara Thorne?" The name landed wrong. I hadn't used it yet, hadn't pra

Elara Sleep didn't come. Alexander breathed steadily beside me, one arm loose at his side, his face in sleep carrying none of the controlled authority it held during the day. He could rest the way soldiers and survivors do — completely, without argument, whenever the opportunity existed. I lay beside him and envied it and stared at the ceiling and turned two words over and over in my mind until they were worn smooth. *However necessary.* I knew what they meant. I wasn't pretending otherwise. I had signed a contract with a man who had told me directly that he had ordered deaths, that the foundation of everything around me was built on choices that would not survive scrutiny. I had said I could handle the truth. I had asked him to stop protecting me from it. And now the truth was sitting in my chest at three in the morning, and I couldn't breathe around it. David was his son. Damaged, cruel, desperate, destructive — all of those things were true about David. I had lived the evide

Elara The waiting room smelled like antiseptic and recycled air and the particular staleness of a place where people sat for hours doing nothing but waiting. I had been sitting in a plastic chair for two hours. I was still in the sundress from yesterday. Still barefoot — I had left the estate without shoes and hadn't noticed until I was already in the SUV with Alexander's blood on my hands. I had found it under my fingernails when I sat down, dark and dried, and I had pressed my hands between my knees and kept them there. I had felt his heartbeat against my palms in the back of the SUV. Faint, present, real. I had pressed harder and told him not to leave, said it enough times that my voice gave out and I was just mouthing the words when Marcus pulled up to the emergency entrance. Marcus paced the length of the waiting room in front of me. The man who had not changed expression through federal raids and Vincent Moretti arriving at the wedding was pacing with his suit still stained

Elara The recovery room was too quiet. Alexander's heart monitor beeped its steady count. Outside the window, the Las Vegas afternoon moved forward without any awareness of what was happening inside this room — the city's permanent, indifferent forward motion that I had once found comforting and now found unbearable. I sat in the chair with my hand gone still in his and his words sitting in the air between us like something that had been released and couldn't be recalled. “Isabella shot me. She put a bullet in my chest and then put one in her arm.” I knew he wasn't lying. I had spent two years with David developing a precise sensitivity to the texture of dishonesty — the way it sat slightly wrong in the mouth, the way the eyes moved. Alexander wasn't lying. He was doing the thing I had asked him to do, the thing I had pushed for at three in the morning: telling me the truth without editing it for my comfort. I had asked for this. "Why didn't you tell me before?" I said. "When

Alexander Leaving the hospital was a decision that every medical professional within a thirty-meter radius wanted to document their objection to. The nurse who had been managing my IV removal looked at me with the specific expression of a person who had taken an oath and was watching it be disregarded in real time. The surgeon came down to the parking bay in his scrubs and stood beside the SUV door and told me in clinical detail what internal bleeding looked like when it progressed without monitoring. Marcus stood with his arms crossed and said nothing, which was worse than the surgeon. I got in the car. "Where are we going," Marcus said. Not a question. He knew. "Elara's apartment." "You have a drain in your chest cavity." "Then drive carefully." The city moved past the tinted windows. I kept my right hand pressed flat against the bandaging and felt the warmth of seeping blood and noted it and did not change my mind. The pieces of what Elara had found out tonight — what Vivia