All Chapters of The Mafia King’s Forbidden Wife: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Chapter 32“Open it.”Dante’s voice was raspy, and he looked at me as if the envelope in my hands was a live grenade. His wounded side was forgotten as he stiffened under the lantern’s gaze, his body tense as he stared at the note.“You know what it is,” I said, prying open the wax seal with shaking fingers. “Don’t you?”“I have a guess.” He didn’t come closer. I could see it in his eyes as he watched me, the same look as if I was about to condemn him. “Open it, Fina.”I unfolded the letter, revealing my father's shaky handwriting on the page. It was nothing like the elegant penmanship in the letters and ledgers he used to sign. He wrote this quickly, as if he knew that he only had a little time to write it.I read it out loud to steady my voice. When I had finished, I looked back at Dante, and his mask slipped again this time.“Dante, if you’re reading this, I am already dead, and my daughter is still breathing because of something you did. I know I should never ask this of you, but

Chapter 34“Tell me.”I grip his wrist, digging my nails into the soft skin there, not allowing him to turn back to his usual mask. “You can’t just say something like that and not give me an answer, Dante. Who sent you to the cliffs?”He doesn’t answer me right away. The lamp casts long shadows across the decaying wall behind him, and for a moment, he looks less like the Mafia King that walked through cathedral doors with no fear and more like the sixteen-year-old boy that once stood in the garden.“Your father sent me,” he finally says.I stare at him, turning the words over in my head, seeing if I can find some kind of a trick in them. “My father sent you to protect me.”“Your father had received threats before that celebration.” Dante’s voice is even, like he wants to keep it that way. He wants to keep that same numbness in his chest that’s been there since the night he found me in the garden. “He was told ransoms were being demanded, but they came in the form of business proposals

Chapter 36“Then who?” I demanded, my hands twisting into his shirt, needing him to finish what he'd started before I lost my mind waiting. “If it wasn’t you he feared, Dante, then say it. Stop circling the truth like it’s going to bite you.”“It already has,” Dante said. “For twenty years.”He pulled back just far enough to look at me properly, and something shifted behind his eyes—not the cold calculation I'd grown used to, but something closer to grief, old and buried and finally surfacing.“Your father wasn’t protecting you from me,” he said again, slower this time, like he needed to hear the shape of the words before he could give them to me. “He was protecting me from what you are.”“What I am.” I laughed, short and disbelieving. “I’m his daughter, Dante. I’m a Moretti. That’s all I’ve ever been.”“That’s what he wanted you to believe.” Dante’s hand tightened at my jaw, gentle but unyielding, forcing me to hold his gaze even as everything in me wanted to look away. “The Shadow C

Chapter 38The wax seal cracked beneath my thumb, and for a moment I couldn’t make myself unfold the parchment inside. My hands hadn’t stopped shaking since the letter, since the cliff path memory, since every wall I’d built around my own life had come down in the span of one rain-soaked night.“Read it,” Dante said quietly. “I’ve never opened it myself. Your father made me swear I wouldn’t.”That surprised me more than anything else he'd told me. “You’ve carried this for six years and never looked inside?”“A promise to a dying man isn’t negotiable, Fina. Not to me.”I unfolded the parchment with careful fingers. The ink was old but legible, my father’s hand steadier here than it had been in the letter, like this document had been written long before he knew he was running out of time.It wasn’t a letter. It was a deed.“A vault,” I read aloud, my voice unsteady. “Located beneath the old council chambers. Access restricted to direct bloodline only, verified by—” I stopped.“By what?”

Chapter 40“Supposed to belong to you?” Dante’s voice was ice. “Say what you mean, Lucian. Right now, before I lose what little patience I have left tonight.”“You want it plain?” Lucian's smile had gone cold, all charm stripped away. “Fine. I’ll give it to you plain. Our father knew about that vault decades before Marco Moretti ever sealed his half of the secret. And when Giovanni De Luca sat down to decide who would inherit the claim buried beneath that council chamber, he didn’t automatically assume it would fall to his golden firstborn son.”“You’re lying.”“Am I?” Lucian tilted his head, something almost pitying in the gesture. “Ask yourself why our father kept a second family hidden for years, Dante. Ask yourself why he visited my mother so faithfully, why he funded her disappearance so thoroughly that even your precious intelligence network never found her. It wasn’t guilt. It wasn't romance. It was insurance.”I looked between the two brothers, my chest tightening with dread.