All Chapters of SOLD TO THE DEVIL KING: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

"Nobody move."I looked up, and for half a second I thought Dante's gun was pointed at Adrian, still bleeding out against two guards trying to keep him upright. Then I followed the line of the barrel and realized he wasn't looking at my brother at all. He was looking past him, into the mansion, at someone in the doorway I couldn't quite see from where I knelt.Everyone froze. Adrian's breathing had gone ragged, wet in a way that scared me more than the blood itself. Dante's body angled itself between me and whatever he was watching—automatic, unthinking, the way he'd done it since the courtyard weeks ago.I didn't hide behind him this time. I stepped up beside him instead, my shoulder nearly brushing his arm.He noticed. I felt it more than saw it, some small shift in the way he held himself."He's still here," Adrian managed."Who?" Dante didn't look away from the doorway.Adrian's eyes weren't on Dante, weren't on me. They were fixed somewhere past us, toward the house itself."The

"Adrian!"I was already moving before the second shot even finished echoing. Dante's arm caught me around the waist, hauling me back from the doorway."Let me go!""You don't know who's in there.""My brother is in there!"He didn't let go, but he didn't argue either—just pushed past me himself, gun raised, Marco a half-step behind. I stood in the corridor counting seconds that felt like minutes, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth."It's clear," Dante called.I was through the door before the words finished leaving his mouth.Adrian was gone. The restraints on the bed had been cut clean through, the window standing open to the cold night air, curtains stirring. Blood pooled dark on the floorboards—less than I expected, some distant clinical part of me registered, not nearly as much as I'd feared.I crouched beside it before I could think better of it, my fingers hovering an inch from the stain."Don't touch it," Dante s

"That's my bedroom."Nobody answered. The silence sat there, thick and wrong, while I stared at the photograph in my hand.I looked closer. The angle bothered me before I could even say why—too close, too level, not the distant lens of someone shooting from outside a window. Whoever took this had been standing inside the room. I recognized the curtains my mother had chosen the year I turned seven. The bookshelf with the crooked bottom rail. A faint pencil mark on the wallpaper near the door frame that I'd made myself at nine years old and gotten scolded for."You're sure?" Dante asked, stepping closer."I slept in that room for years."Marco turned the photograph over in the flashlight beam, examining the paper stock. "This is old. Not recreated recently. Whoever built this kept it a long time."My hands had gone cold. I looked around the empty room, and it didn't feel empty anymore. Someone had stood in places like this, close enough to me for years, an

"Boss, we're under attack."I was sitting on the corner of Dante's desk with the ring in my palm, turning it over and over as if the engraving might rearrange itself into something that made sense. Dante had a file open across his knees. Neither of us had said anything in ten minutes, and it was the good kind of silence, the kind that had taken us weeks to learn how to share.His phone had been face-down beside him. Now it buzzed itself sideways across the wood, and he had it to his ear before the second ring finished."Where?" he said.Before the voice on the other end could answer, the phone on the desk rang, the landline nobody used, and Marco, who'd been standing at the window, reached over and picked it up without being asked. He listened for three seconds."So are we," he said.Then Dante's phone again. A different voice, louder, a rushing sound behind it like wind or a fire. "They hit the eastern warehouse."Dante lowered the phone slowly. He looked at Marco."How many?"Marco

"We've lost the northern team."Marco said it from the doorway before he'd even fully entered the room, and Dante's head came up fast."How?""Their location was leaked."Nobody spoke right away. I was still holding a cup of coffee I hadn't drunk any of, gone cold in my hand, and I set it down because my fingers had started doing something I didn't like."To who?" Sofia asked.Marco didn't have an answer. That was the part that made the room go quiet in a way that felt different from every other quiet we'd sat through in the last week. He pulled up the communication log on his tablet and scrolled, jaw tight, and I watched him count under his breath, actually count, moving his lips."Five people knew where that team was going," he said finally. "Dante. Alessia." He looked up. "Me. Luca. Sofia.""You're not seriously looking at me," Sofia said."I'm looking at everyone," Marco said, and there was no accusation in it, just exhaustion.Nobody moved. I looked around the room at the four fa