Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Ruthless Don and his Assassin Princess : Kabanata 51 - Kabanata 60

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWOCALISTA.He was older than most of the men I had seen moving through the compound, and I didn't really know his name even though I recognized the quiet authority he possessed in the way other recruits moved aside when he passed, and the respect that even Anatoly offered him without being asked."You're the new one," he said, and his voice carried no curiosity at all, as if he already knew everything about me that was important and had simply confirmed it by looking at my face."Yes," I replied, too timid to add anything else."And he's already showing you things in under five weeks? That's quite interesting and not normal for Mikhail,” he said thoughtfully."I'm aware," I replied, even though I didn't really grasp what he was talking about fully."Are you?" the man asked, moving a step closer, quite close enough that I had to fight the urge to retreat. "Let me explain something to you girl, since Mikhail apparently didn't bother. He has tested six recruits this year

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOURCALISTAThe task went exactly as Mikhail wanted it to, and I didn't even know I was expected to react. Dima walked me as far as a narrow street that was two blocks from the meeting point and left me there without even a word of encouragement, and I delivered the false shipment numbers to Petrov in a hidden doorway, word for word, with nothing added and nothing left out. Three days later, word came back through Dima that Falco had moved exactly as the Krest predicted, redirecting his own men toward a dock that held nothing but empty crates, and buying the organization the clean two day window they needed somewhere else entirely.I actually expected something to change after that small victory, but I didn't expect what actually happened. Mikhail summoned me to the map room again a week later, and instead of the cold, businesslike assessment I was prepared for again, he simply told me, without any warning at all, that I was being moved."The general track isn't rigorou

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIXCALISTABy the fourth day at the compound, I had stopped counting bruises and started counting hours between meals instead, because the second number turned out to be more important because Korak ran things on a system he called pairing, and he explained it to the whole group on my second morning, standing in the center of the yard while a dozen recruits stood in a semicircle around him, and as usual, most of them were still looking at me like an anomaly."Two to a pair," he said loudly. "You'll train together, eat together, sleep near each other, and at the end of the week, you'll fight each other…Whoever loses goes home.""Home," one of the recruits said, a short, wiry man near the back, and a few of the others laughed, the same way the woman had laughed at me the night I was beaten into the ground."Home," Korak repeated, giving the word no explanation even though I knew exactly what he meant by home.But I still wanted to hear an explanation. "What does that mean

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHTRHEYESGiovanni had kept his distance since the stable confrontation when I had put my hands around his throat and told him what would happen if he ever came near Calista again. For the weeks that followed, he had been very careful around me…quiet in meetings and dropping his eyes whenever I was around. I believed, maybe stupidly, that the man who had dared to mock and taunt me in front of my father was finally learning his place.But all that quickly changed again the night he came back from Marseille. I heard about the operation before I saw him, just like the way I heard about most things in this house now, secondhand, and filtered through whoever happened to be talking when I walked in. A shipment that had been stuck for months, rerouted twice already by a rival family that controlled half the French coast, and finally cleared through with no losses and no attention drawn from the wrong people. My father's people were calling it a clean and elegant job, which w

CHAPTER SIXTY.RHEYESI found Calia sitting alone in the servants' hall that evening, and her hands were trembling as she folded a stack of clothes that clearly didn't need any folding. From the red circles around her eyes, I could tell that she had been crying for quite a while, which wasn't so surprising given her daughter's disappearance."Calia," I said, stopping in the doorway.She looked up in surprise, immediately adjusting herself and getting rid of the dejected look on her face to replace it with a polite and humble smile. "Don Rheyes," she said. "I didn't realize anyone was coming through.""Are you all right, Calia?" I asked."I'm fine," she said a little too quickly, with her hands still moving over the clothes even though there was nothing left for them to do. "Just tired."I went over and sat down uninvited, something I knew she hated but didn't have the standing to object to due to her current standing in the house at the moment. "Lui made you do this right?" I asked qu