Lahat ng Kabanata ng Beautifully Ruined : Bound by The Mafia's Debt: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

Marchetti drove with both hands on the wheel and his eyes moving constantly between the road ahead and the mirrors, a rhythm Elena recognized within the first ten minutes as something closer to surveillance than caution, and understood, watching him check the mirror for the fourth time in as many minutes, that at least half of what he was watching for sat in the back seat beside her father, not behind them on the road at all."You're not going to relax the whole drive, are you," she said, mostly to fill a silence that had started to feel too heavy to sit inside."Not my job to relax," Marchetti said, not unkindly. "My job's to get you there and back inside these walls again, in exactly the condition you left them. Mr. Moreau was specific about that.""I'm not going to run.""That's not for me to assume either way." He glanced at her once in the mirror, something almost apologetic in it, the closest thing to warmth she'd get from him on this particular subject. "Nothing personal, Elena

The world came back to Elena in pieces, sound before sight, sight before feeling, each sense arriving separately and without any clear order to make things easier. She heard shouting first, several voices overlapping, none of them Marchetti's steady, controlled cadence from before the impact. Then the sharp, close crack of gunfire, close enough that she felt the concussion of it in her chest before she registered the sound had come from directly beside the car. Then, finally, pain, a deep, throbbing ache along her ribs where the seatbelt had caught her hard in the collision, and a warm, wet trickle above her eyebrow that she understood, distantly, was blood. "Elena." Her father's voice, close to her ear, low and urgent. "Elena, stay down. Don't move." She turned her head slightly, enough to see him crouched beside her in the wreckage of the back seat, the door on his side already hanging open at an unnatural angle, and understood, through the fog still clouding her thoughts, th

The call came through at 4:47 in the afternoon, and Elias would remember, for a long time afterward, the exact way the number on his phone had looked lit up against the dim interior of the meeting room, ordinary, unremarkable, nothing in its shape to warn him what waited on the other end of it."Report," he said, stepping away from the table where Luca sat still finishing the details of the day's negotiation, expecting a routine confirmation, Elena delivered safely, the visit concluding without incident, Marchetti's usual clipped efficiency relaying nothing more urgent than travel time.What he got instead was a voice ragged with pain, barely holding together, sentences that rearranged the entire shape of the afternoon before Elias had even finished processing the first of them, and a name, delivered with the flat, uncomplicated certainty of a man who had seen exactly what he claimed to have seen.Elias's hand went very still on the phone. Across the room, Luca had been reviewing a c

The house came apart floor by floor, and with every room that turned up empty, the cold, controlled version of Luca that had walked through Dante's front door an hour ago began, piece by piece, to erode. "Clear," one of his men called from the top of the stairs, emerging from what had once been a study, smoke still curling from somewhere behind him. "Nothing up there but paperwork and a safe we haven't cracked yet." "Leave the safe." Luca didn't slow down, already moving past him toward the next hallway, Elias a step behind, both of them ignoring the last scattered gunfire still cracking from the wings of the house where a handful of Dante's men, leaderless now, were making their final, doomed stand. "I don't care what he's hiding in it. Find her." They cleared the second floor next, room after room, guest bedrooms untouched by the chaos elsewhere in the house, a library, a private office with a half-finished drink still sitting on the desk, as though whoever had been sitting the

The drive back to the mansion passed in near total silence, Elena wrapped in a blanket one of Luca's men had produced from somewhere, sitting in the back seat while Luca rode up front beside the driver, his phone pressed to his ear for most of the journey, issuing clipped, businesslike instructions about cleanup, about Marchetti and Torres at the hospital, about a dozen small logistical fires that apparently required his attention more urgently than the woman he'd just pulled out of a bunker four floors beneath a dead man's house.Elena watched the back of his head for most of the drive, the tension still visible in his shoulders even now, hours after the gunfire had stopped, and told herself it didn't matter, that she hadn't expected anything different, that a man who'd introduced himself by informing her she was a debt rather than a person was never going to suddenly transform into something softer simply because she'd nearly been lost to someone else.She almost believed it. The a