All Chapters of The mafia king’s substitute husband: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

THE LETTERSALVATORE’S POVI know something is wrong the moment the car turns into the drive.Immediately I got in, all the lights in the room were turned up, one of the staff hovering near the door in a way that makes my heart beat so fast before she’s said a single word.“Where is he?”I’m already moving past her, already taking the stairs two at a time. “Where is he?” I said.“Sir, I don’t know, I checked his room an hour ago and ”I won't wait for the rest of it.The bedroom is empty in the particular way a room is empty when someone has genuinely left it, not simply stepped out. The wardrobe stands half open, gaps visible where things have clearly been taken. The desk chair sits pushed back at an angle, like whoever sat there left in a hurry they didn’t bother to disguise.The letter is on his pillow.My hands aren’t steady when I pick it up. I can’t remember the last time my hands weren’t steady for anything, not once in twenty years of a life built specifically so that nothing

NO CLEAN CHOICESALVATORE’S POVThe line goes dead before I can say anything at all, and for a long moment I simply stand there in the study with the phone still pressed to my ear, listening to nothing, the word husband echoing louder in my chest than anything else Dario said.Nico is watching me from across the room, phone still in his own hand, already halfway through some call I haven’t fully registered starting.“Dario Conti.” My voice comes out, stripped of every trace of the drunken grief that had me swaying an hour ago. Something colder has replaced it, something Nico has seen only a handful of times in fifteen years, and each time it’s arrived, someone hasn’t survived what came after. “It was him. All along. Rebuilding, waiting, patient enough to let me marry, patient enough to let me start caring about something before he finally decided to take it.”“I have three locations we’re already checking.” Nico doesn’t waste time on anything else. “Properties tied to what’s left of h

THE STRONGHOLDSALVATORE’S POVThe third location is the one that matters. I know it the moment my men report back, quiet and certain in a way the first two reports weren’t, a warehouse on the industrial edge of Dario’s old territory, more guards posted than the building’s stated.“That’s it,” I say, and don’t need Nico to confirm it. I can feel it, the same way I could feel, years ago, exactly which room in my own childhood house had gone wrong the night my parents died, some old, terrible instinct for where violence is waiting that I’ve never wanted and never been able to unlearn.“It’s well guarded.” Nico spreads a rough sketch of the building across the hood of the car, drawn fast from what their scouts could see without getting close enough to be noticed. “Twelve men, maybe more inside. Dario himself, according to the last count.”“Good.” My voice comes out flat, final. “I want him there. I don’t want to have to hunt him twice.”“Salvatore.” Nico’s voice carries a weight it rarel

WHAT’S LEFT TO HIDEELIAN’S POVI don’t remember deciding to keep pressing down on the wound. My hands simply do it, on their own, some old instinct taking over where the rest of me has gone completely, uselessly numb, and I stay like that, kneeling in a corridor that still smells like gunpowder and blood, shouting for Nico, for anyone, until my voice goes as raw as it did the night I was locked in the dark and screamed for someone to let me out.Nico reaches us first, dropping to his knees on Salvatore’s other side, his hands moving fast and sure in a way that tells me this isn’t the first time he’s had to do this for him.“He’s breathing.” Nico says it more to himself than to me, checking, pressing his own hand alongside mine against the wound. “Keep pressure exactly there, don’t let up, help is already coming, I called the second the shooting started.”“He can’t die.” My voice cracks apart on it, everything I’ve held together for the last two days finally, completely breaking loose

WHAT HE WANTEDSALVATORE’S POVThe pain wakes me before the sun does, a dull, insistent throb settled deep in my shoulder that no amount of shifting seems able to ease. I lie still instead, breathing through it the way I’ve learned to breathe through worse over the years, and it’s only once the worst of it passes that I become aware of Elian, curled close against my good side, still deeply asleep, one hand fisted loosely in the fabric of my shirt like even in sleep some part of him is holding on.I don’t move. I lie there instead, watching him the same way I did that first strange night, weeks ago now, when I told myself watching someone breathe meant nothing at all and knew, even then, that I was lying to myself about it.I think about how close I came to losing this. Not the empire. Not the war with Dario, already finished, already bled out onto a warehouse floor along with everything Dario spent years rebuilding. I think about how close I came to losing the specific, particular wei