《Contracted to My Fiance’s Mafia Don》全部章節：第 61 章 - 第 70 章

Elara I didn't sleep that night. The reply had come forty minutes after I sent my two-word question, and when I read it, I sat completely still for a long time before I could move again. *Someone who has been waiting a long time.* That was all. Seven words, calm and patient and deliberate, and somehow more unsettling than a direct threat would have been. I sat in the dark of the hospital room with Michael sleeping in his bassinet and Alexander breathing steadily from the bed and tried to think clearly about who could have sent it. I ran through every name, every face, every person who had moved through the chaos of the last year with enough knowledge of our lives to know what they knew. Vincent's men had scattered after his death. Francesca was in federal custody. Marcus was gone. David was somewhere in a witness protection arrangement that made him unreachable by design. Someone had used the initial A. I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the window and watched the

Elara Alexander said no. He said it immediately, completely, and with the kind of certainty that told me he had already made up his mind before I had finished the sentence. "Absolutely not," he said. "Not under any circumstances." "You're not actually listening to what I'm proposing." "I heard every word. I don't agree with any of them." "Alexander, think about what I'm saying before you—" "You're suggesting you walk into Lorenzo Moretti's reach as bait." He stood from the edge of the bed, the movement careful but driven by a restlessness I recognized. "My wife. The mother of my child. The answer is no." "We're already in danger," I said, keeping my voice level. "All three of us, right now, in this hospital room. That's the reality whether I do something about it or not. And if there's a way to control how this plays out rather than waiting for Lorenzo to decide the timing for us, then I need you to actually consider it." "By offering yourself to him? That's not a plan, Elara

Alexander I crossed the basement floor and knelt down beside Elara before Lorenzo had finished falling. "Are you hurt?" I kept my voice steady, because the alternative was letting the fear that had been building since I watched Lorenzo's hands close around her throat take over, and that wasn't useful right now. "I'm fine." She pushed herself upright, one hand braced against the concrete floor. "Your face is bleeding. Below your eye." "That's from when he hit me. It's not serious." She looked at me directly, the way she always did when she was checking whether I was listening or just waiting for her to stop talking. "I'm fine, Alexander. I'm genuinely fine." I pulled her into my arms anyway. She let me, and she pressed her forehead against my shoulder and I felt her exhale a long, slow breath that told me the control she had been holding for the past two hours was finally releasing now that she had permission to let it. "I thought—" I started. "I know what you thought. You don

Alexander Three days passed, and I found nothing. Seventy-two hours of moving through every channel I had, calling in every favor, applying every resource that remained available to me after a year of attrition and loss. Marcus's old contacts, the federal agent who owed me the outcome of a conversation from months ago, people in the underworld who dealt in information rather than violence and who could be trusted to produce accurate answers when the price was right. Nothing came back. No sighting, no chatter, no trail that led anywhere useful. I watched Elara move through the days with the specific quality of someone who was holding themselves together through the force of their own will and nothing else. She wasn't sleeping. She wasn't eating properly. She sat in the nursery sometimes, in the chair by the window where she had held Michael in the middle of the night when neither of them could rest, and she was quiet in a way that was more difficult to witness than any version of g

Elara David turned himself in on a Tuesday morning. He walked into the police station with a lawyer he had called the night before and asked to make a statement, and he gave them everything. The blackmail. The photographs. The threats. The arrangement with Vincent. The kidnapping of Michael, including the full account of how it had been staged and how he had returned Michael to the estate before going to The Sanctum. He held nothing back, and he asked for nothing in return except the chance to tell the truth without anyone having to pull it out of him. A week later, he asked to see me. I drove to the facility on a grey morning with Vivian in the passenger seat, because I had not wanted to go alone and I had not wanted to bring Alexander, who had his own complicated relationship with what David deserved from him. Vivian sat beside me without saying much, which was the right thing to offer. The visiting room was exactly what I had expected — long tables, plastic chairs, the particu