All Chapters of SOLD TO THE DEVIL KING: Chapter 71 - Chapter 76

"Who gave you that key?"Dante stood in the doorway. I closed my hand around the paper."A man who apparently knows more about my father than either of us."His gaze moved to the open ledger on the desk, its worn spine refusing to lie flat. Then to me."Alessia.""Don't."He stopped. He had one foot over the threshold and he simply stopped, and it struck me that this was the first time I had asked him not to come closer and watched him actually listen.I had put myself between him and the desk without noticing. He noticed. He didn't say so.Outside, a guard's footsteps passed the door and faded. The small brass key sat beside the lamp where I'd left it, and I stared at it because it was easier than looking at him."The Council member gave it to me after the hearing," I said. "He said my father trusted someone to keep it safe. He wouldn't say who.""Did he mention Gabriel?""I asked. He denied it.""Did he say how the Council came to have the key at all?""No. He was much more helpful

"You knew my father before the massacre."Dante stopped halfway out of his jacket."Who told you that?"I laid the old photograph on the table. "Does it matter?"He looked at it. For the first time since I'd met him, Dante De Luca seemed to be searching for an answer he didn't have.The house was small, a safe property two hours from the mansion, with one guard walking the corridor and a secured telephone on a bare desk. After the convoy and the fire at Tomasso's, the mansion couldn't be trusted. Marco was running the response from there. We had been given a room furnished for work, not comfort.My father stood in the photograph beside Dante's, a third man half turned between them."That's my father's place," Dante said slowly. "He held meetings there that never went into any record. He took me once and left me in the car." He touched the edge of the picture. "I've never seen this.""Who's the third man?""I don't know.""What did our fathers agree to?""I was never told."I'd spent w

"If you're here to tell us the Moretti family is finished, save your breath."The woman in the doorway had a pistol in one hand and half a piece of bread in the other. I looked at the pistol. Then at the bread."I was going to ask for somewhere to sleep."She didn't lower the weapon. "Then you picked a terrible house."I told her my name. She didn't blink. Plenty of people could say a name, she said. So I told her what my father used to say when he walked a property at night, checking the latches. A door is only a rumor until you lock it. Something moved in her face, and the barrel dropped an inch."Mara," she said. "Don't thank me."The house had been lived in by people who expected to leave in a hurry. A chair faced the front door. One window was papered over so no silhouette showed at night. A kettle ticked on a small stove, and a radio murmured low enough that you could still hear footsteps outside. A man by the back wall watched me without pretending otherwise."Why are you here?