บททั้งหมดของ The mafia king’s substitute husband: บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

THE SILENT ELIAN'S POV I lie down on the bed eventually, though sleep never comes anywhere close. I stare up at the ceiling of a room that used to be mine before it stopped feeling like anything belonged to me at all, and I let the hours pass slow and formless around me, my mind circling the same handful of moments over and over without ever landing anywhere useful. The kiss. The yes I meant with my whole chest. The sudden, unexplained stop that undid all of it in the space of a single sentence.A knock comes at some point, soft, tentative, and I know without needing to check that it's one of the staff, probably with a tray, probably sent because someone noticed I hadn't eaten since the tray I finished this morning. I don't answer. I don't move from where I'm lying, don't so much as turn my head toward the door. I hear a small, hesitant pause on the other side of it, the kind that suggests whoever's out there isn't sure whether to knock again or simply leave, and after a moment I he

THE LEDGERELIAN’S POVThe house doesn’t feel any different without him in it, not at first. The staff still move through their routines. The clocks still tick the same slowly, way through the same slow, patient hours. And yet everything feels quieter.I keep the note folded small in the drawer beside my bed. I didn't read it again after that first day, though I think about it more than I want to admit, the careful, cramped handwriting, the way he wrote I lost my nerve like it cost him something just to put those words on paper. I tell myself it doesn’t matter. I tell myself a lot of things this week that I don’t fully believe.Three days into his absence, I found the ledger by accident.I’m not looking for it. I’m only passing the small study off the kitchen where the household accounts are kept, and I hear one of the younger maids, Rosa, crying quietly at the desk, a stack of receipts scattered in front of her like she’s been staring at them for an hour without finding whatever she’

WHAT HE ASKS INSTEADELIAN’S POVThe door opens slowly, a certain motion I’ve come to expect from him, and Salvatore steps inside already half out of his jacket, tie loosened, looking for all the world like a man coming home rather than a man arriving to collect something he’s owed.He stops the moment he sees me.I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, the gray fabric still folded untouched beside me, my hands pressed flat against my knees to keep them from shaking, though I can tell by the way his eyes move over me that the effort isn’t working nearly as well as I want it to. My whole body has gone rigid in the particular way it used to be on those first nights here, braced, waiting, every old fear standing at attention at once.“Elian.” He says my name carefully, and something in his voice has changed, some instinct in him picking up on exactly what he’s walked into. “You haven’t changed.”“I was going to.” My voice comes out quietly to my own ears. “I just needed a minute.”He doesn’t

WHAT NICO FOUNDSALVATORE’S POVNico doesn’t knock the way anyone else in this house knocks. He simply appears in the doorway of the study, closes the door behind himself without being told to, and that alone tells Salvatore this isn’t going to be a conversation he wants overheard.“Sit down,” Salvatore says, though Nico doesn’t.“I’d rather stand for this one.”Salvatore sets his pen down slowly, giving Nico his full attention now, some old instinct already bracing for whatever’s coming. In fifteen years, Nico has never once opened with hesitation. He’s opening with it now.“It’s about Matteo,” Nico says finally.“Go on.”“He wasn’t taken.” Nico says it plainly, no cushioning around it, because he knows better than most that cushioning only makes Salvatore ask twice. “He wasn’t blackmailed by an outside party, wasn’t running from a debt of his own, none of the things I chased down first because they seemed likeliest. He left because his father asked him to.”Salvatore goes very still

WHAT THE STORIES NEVER SHOWEDELIAN’S POVThe window is higher than I expected, and I have to stand on an overturned crate to see through it properly. My whole body pressed flat against the cold metal siding of the building, I started breathing fast. Trying not to be loud.Inside, the warehouse is lit the same flat, industrial white I imagine every room like this must be lit, no warmth to it at all, only harsh light thrown down over concrete. Salvatore stands near the center of it, jacket off, sleeves rolled, and for a moment I almost don’t recognize him, not because he looks different exactly, but because everything soft I’ve spent weeks learning to see in him is entirely, completely absent from the man standing under that light.A man kneels in front of him, hands bound, head bowed low enough that I can’t see his face. Nico stands off to one side, arms crossed, watching without any visible reaction at all, like this is simply another Tuesday to him, another piece of ordinary busine