All Chapters of Entangled with the mafia boss : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Aurora Morning By eight the next morning, I was already sitting behind my desk at De Luca Group. The folder containing the suspicious transactions sat open in front of me. I had barely slept. Every time I closed my eyes, I kept seeing the same names, dates, and figures. Someone had been moving things inside the company. And I was determined to find out who. I pulled up Marcus Vale’s records again. He had been with De Luca Group for almost twelve years. My father trusted him enough to give him access to some of the company’s most sensitive financial information. That made him the last person anyone would suspect. Which made me suspicious. I opened a transaction from three months ago. A payment had been approved through Marcus’s department, but the amount had been changed after the initial approval. I checked the original document. Then the revised one. The difference was small. Small enough that most people wouldn’t notice. But when I checked another

Aurora I didn't sleep. I sat with the contract in my lap until the sun came up, reading Seraphina's signature over and over until the letters stopped looking like a name and started looking like a confession. By nine, I was standing outside her apartment. She opened the door in a silk robe, hair still damp from the shower, looking every bit like a woman with nothing to hide. "Aurora." Her eyebrows lifted. "This is a surprise." "We need to talk." "Do we?" "Now." Something in my voice made her step back and let me in. Her apartment was exactly what I expected. White furniture. Fresh flowers. A view that cost more than most people's yearly salary. I didn't sit. I pulled the contract from my bag and set it on her kitchen island. "Explain this." She glanced at it. Barely. "Explain what?" "Don't." My voice cracked like a whip. "Don't do that. Don't pretend you don't know exactly what that is." Seraphina walked to the counter, poured herself a glass of

Aurora Lucian's office looked exactly the way I remembered it from the one time he'd shown it to me weeks ago—glass walls, dark wood, a view of the city that made everything below look small and manageable. Nothing about it looked like a place where empires were quietly dismantled. He was already standing when I walked in, like he'd been watching the door long before I reached it. No tie tonight. Sleeves rolled to his forearms. For a brief, disorienting second, he just looked like Lucian. The man who apologized when he was five minutes late. The man who'd fastened a four-million-dollar bracelet around my wrist like it was nothing, because giving me things had never been about the price tag to him. Then I remembered why I was there, and the disorientation burned away. "You wanted to talk," he said quietly. "I have questions." "I assumed." I set the folder down on his desk without sitting. I didn't want to sit. Sitting felt like something you did when you trusted the person acr

Chapter 18: What the Old Contract Really Said Aurora My father set the folder down on his desk like it weighed more than paper had any right to weigh. "This is everything," he said. "The original agreement. The amendments. The interest schedule." I reached for it before he could change his mind. The papers inside were old enough that the edges had softened, the ink slightly faded in places, dated a little over six years earlier. I recognized my father's signature immediately on the first page. Careful. Deliberate. The same signature I'd watched him sign birthday cards with my entire childhood, now sitting at the bottom of an agreement with a man capable of ending our family with a single phone call. I read through the opening pages quickly. The loan amount. The interest terms he'd already told me about. The repayment schedule that had come and gone three years ago, leaving us drowning in compounding interest we'd been quietly bleeding money to service ever since. Then I reached

Chapter 20: Closer Than You ThinkAuroraI read the message so many times the words stopped looking like language.Closer than you think.I sat in my car outside my parents' house until the sky went dark, until the porch lights flicked on automatically and my mother's silhouette passed twice behind the curtains, checking, I assumed, whether I'd finally driven away.I hadn't.I was too busy trying to figure out who among the small circle of people who actually knew my life could possibly be the one writing me messages timed with surgical precision, offering Seraphina protection in exchange for information, and now apparently taunting me with how close they were standing.I made a list in my notes app, the way Elena had taught me. Names first. Motives second.Marco. Loyal to Lucian for twenty years, by all accounts. But loyalty could crack, especially if he disagreed with how Lucian was handling things. He'd been standing outside that office the night I left. He'd heard everything.Marc