Beautifully Ruined : Bound by The Mafia's Debt의 모든 챕터: 챕터 1 - 챕터 10

"Look at me when I'm speaking to you."Elena's eyes snapped up before she'd decided to obey. That was the first thing she learned about Luca Moreau, his voice didn't ask twice, and some instinct buried deeper than thought had already understood that before her mind caught up.The car had stopped in front of the mansion twenty minutes earlier, and nobody had said a word to her since. She'd been walked through a hall of black marble and gold light by a man who never introduced himself, delivered to a set of double doors like a package with a signature required, and left standing there, alone, small, still smelling faintly of her family's house, of rain and old furniture and her mother's tears, while the doors opened onto a room that looked like it belonged in a different century.The study was larger than her family's entire house. Bookshelves climbed two stories along one wall, filled with volumes that looked too pristine to have ever been read, and a fire burned in a hearth big enough

"Take off your clothes." Luca's voice was quiet. That was the worst part, he never raised it. He said things the way other men ordered coffee.Elena stood very still in the middle of her own room, hands at her sides, and understood that whatever had been postponed the night before had simply been waiting for this one instead.She'd spent the hour before he arrived trying to prepare herself, though there was no version of preparation that felt like enough. She'd washed her face, braided her hair back out of habit more than choice, sat on the edge of the bed and stood up again three times because sitting felt like waiting and standing felt like bracing, and neither one made the minutes pass any faster.The room itself gave her nothing to hold onto. It was hers only in the sense that her name had been attached to it, a narrow bed, a window that didn't open, a single lamp on the nightstand that Mrs. Bianchi had lit for her without being asked, as though even the staff understood there w

"Good."The word landed in the quiet of the room before Elena had fully understood what she'd done to earn it. ~~~~~She'd simply stayed, eyes open, present, refusing the pull toward that familiar, safer distance, and Luca had noticed. Of course he'd noticed. He noticed everything.She hadn't planned it, not exactly. She'd lain there the following night bracing for another confrontation, another cold correction if her eyes so much as flickered toward that quieter place inside herself. Instead, she'd simply held on. Every time the pull came, she'd forced herself back, fixed on the ceiling, the ache in her own chest, the sound of his breathing, refusing to let herself drift the way she had every night before.It cost her more than she expected. Staying required feeling all of it, in full, without the mercy of distance, and by the time it was over her whole body ached with an exhaustion that had nothing to do with the hour.But Luca had gone still above her at some point, studying he

She was limping, and she hadn't realized it until she saw Elias notice.It was such a small thing, a hitch in her step crossing the kitchen, but his eyes caught on it a moment too long, and something in his face went still before he looked away, back to whatever task had brought him through the kitchen in the first place.~~~The days since the trouble in the east wing had passed the way most things in this house passed once they were over, quietly, without comment, as if the house itself had simply decided not to remember. Nobody spoke the name Kozlov again where Elena could hear it. But something of that night had lingered in Luca regardless, unspoken, the way weather lingers in a room long after the storm itself has passed.She had felt it the evening before, the moment he came through her door. There had been no preamble to it, none of the unhurried patience he usually wore like a second skin, only a tightness in his shoulders that hadn't loosened once through dinner, a silence

"You've got yourself a beautiful little pet."The words landed in the sitting room like something dropped from a height, and Elena felt every muscle in her body go rigid at once, the wine decanter still steady in her hands, her eyes fixed anywhere but on the man who'd said them.~~~~It had been only a handful of weeks since the incident with the guard, since Elias had told her plainly that this house ran on rules nobody bothered to write down, and that she'd need to learn them regardless. She'd believed, until tonight, that she'd already learned the worst of them. Tonight was teaching her otherwise.The visitor had arrived an hour earlier, another man from Luca's world, older, heavier, dressed with the same expensive carelessness as everyone who moved through this house, though something about him felt looser than Luca did, less contained, the kind of danger that leaked out at the edges instead of staying folded neatly out of sight. Elena hadn't been told his name. She hadn't need