Semua Bab The Mafia King’s Forbidden Wife: Bab 11 - Bab 20

Chapter 11“Dante paid for my life?”The words left an awful taste in my mouth. I backed away from Matteo, coming into contact with the hard edge of his desk. I couldn’t make sense of anything.Dante killed my father, saved me, took a bullet for me at the altar, and kept a picture of me taken when I was eighteen.“He hired a ghost squad to block the hit squad from entering our perimeter.” Matteo’s tone became rough and soft at the same time. “He has been following your footsteps since the night when father died. Why do you think you have survived until now while almost no one in our family survives beyond thirty?”I swallowed hard, my hands clinging to the back of the mahogany. “If Dante has been protecting me for six years… then who ordered the snipers to shoot me at the cathedral yesterday?”Matteo did not reply immediately. He walked over to his bottle of whiskey, pouring himself two fingers of it as his hands shook. He drank it all in one swift swallow.“It wasn’t just you, Fina,”

Chapter 13Chapter 13: The Question“Mama?”I did not bother waiting for an invitation. I opened up the heavy wooden doors to the sanctuary of my mother’s private quarters, my heart pounding like crazy inside my chest.Elena Moretti was sitting in her luxurious, high-backed chair by the huge arch window. Her face was delicate and vulnerable, encircled with the light of the afternoon that was coming in through the lace curtains. She was wearing her custom black silk clothes and a heavy silver rosary in her hands, but there was pain written all over her face.“Serafina,” she whispered, her voice as thin as paper as she looked up. There wasn’t any attempt at a smile from her. Instead, she motioned to the tea set sitting on the marble table next to her. “You shouldn’t be wandering around these halls. The place is filled with armed men. It’s not safe.”“Safe?” I snorted a dry breath as I shut the door behind me with an echoing clunk. “Mama, we haven’t been safe in six years now, and you’ve

Chapter 15“Get your hands off me, Dante!”I wrenched myself away from him as soon as we got to the end of the long east wing hallway. The air at the estate was thick with the suffocating tears of my mother and twenty years’ worth of blood-stained lies.He paused, turning around to confront me behind that unshakeable façade of his. “We will return to the penthouse. The convoy is waiting.”“No way am I going anywhere until you tell me what she meant!” I yelled, invading his personal space with my trembling, furious, scared hands. “My mother fell to her knees and begged me never to ask about what you did to survive the night your family died in flames! What did you do after my mother left you in that driveway, Dante?”But Dante wouldn’t respond to me. He only stared down at me, his black eyes unreadable. He put one hand on my chin, his long fingers holding me by the face and preventing me from uttering another single word.“You’re not prepared for that story yet, Fina,” he growled, his

Chapter 17The dry snap of the red wax seal shattered like a shot fired in the hushed room.Trembling, I removed the heavy parchment sheets from the leather case. The room became suddenly silent, save for the sound of the rain beating down on the large glass windows behind us.“Read it, Fina,” Valeria whispered in the dark shadow, her voice devoid of any sarcasm. “Page three—twenty years ago.”My eyes scanned rapidly across the yellowed piece of paper. It was not new information gathered by the espionage companies. The initial pages contained digitized versions of previous surveillance records scraped from the rubble of the De Luca compound twenty years ago.Timestamp: October 14, 2006—23:42 PM.Subject: Moretti Envoy Entry.I felt like my breath stopped in my throat. My hand flattened on my chest as I tried to make the cold nausea in my gut go away.“It’s the night when your family burned,” I gasped out as my eyes ran over the blurred photos of black-and-white scenes stuck to the pap

Chapter 19“He ordered you to kill him?”I couldn’t believe what I just heard. My entire life, everything I have ever known and done and seen and bled for in this city is a lie.“He did not want to die in vain, Fina,” Dante answered in his soft voice, staring deeply into my eyes. “Your father knew that if the city believed I killed him, De Lucas would take his territory and form a shield around you against the real threat.”“The real threat,” I repeated, panting heavily with ragged, uneven breaths that seemed to come from someplace else. “My mother… and the Shadow Court.”Dante stood up and lent a hand to help me up. He then moved towards his desk and tapped the screen of his tab. A soft display glowed with the projections of various digitized documents from years gone by.“Here,” Dante whispered, gesturing me closer.I bent down over the desk and felt my heartbeat echoing in my chest like a frantic beating of wings. These papers were not war diaries or battle plans. These were thirty