All Chapters of Marked by Wolves, Owned by the Mafia: Chapter 11 - Chapter 17

POV: Roman KozlovThe cold at four-thirty in the morning was not a problem. Roman's body had learned worse cold than this mountain could produce, and it remembered the lesson the way it remembered most things, without asking his permission.He ran the same five miles every morning before the resort woke, the same loop along the service road and back through the lower tree line, because routine was one of the few tools that had ever reliably worked against the parts of his mind he didn't trust to run unsupervised. His breath came out in even clouds. His feet found the frozen ruts in the gravel without needing to look. Somewhere behind his ribs, in the place he kept things he didn't examine during daylight hours, a memory was already surfacing, uninvited, the way they always surfaced at this hour when his guard was lowest.He was fourteen the first time someone handed him a weapon and told him it was an honor. The conflict he'd been conscripted into didn't officially exist, which meant

POV: Maya WintersKieran phrased it as an offer, which she appreciated even though both of them understood it wasn't really one."I'd like to teach you some self-defense," he said, catching her at the end of her shift, standing at a distance that had become his default around her, close enough to talk without carrying, far enough to leave her room. "There's no pressure. Only if it's something you want."She thought about the sixteen-second voicemail, and the text that had arrived at midnight, and the particular quiet certainty in I always know where you are, and understood that whatever this offer was dressed as, underneath it sat something closer to urgency. It didn't scare her the way it might have three weeks ago."Yes," she said.The first session was at six the following morning, in the resort's small staff gym, empty at that hour except for the two of them and the low hum of the heating system fighting the mountain cold. Kieran arrived in plain clothes, nothing like the delibera

POV: Dante MorettiSofia Moretti had always understood the importance of light.Dante had learned this from her before he'd learned almost anything else, the particular way she arranged a room to be seen in, and even now, seven thousand miles away on a video call from her apartment in Milan, she'd positioned herself in the chair by the east window where the morning sun came in soft and forgiving, because she knew her son read her face for the truth she wouldn't say out loud, and she intended to make that reading as difficult as good lighting allowed.It didn't work as well as it used to."You're not sleeping," she said, before he could ask her anything at all, her voice carrying the faint rasp that hadn't been there three months ago. "I can see it in your eyes even through this terrible connection.""I'm sleeping enough." He kept his own voice level. "How are you feeling?""Well enough." She smiled, and the smile was genuine, which somehow made it worse, because he could see the effor

POV: Maya WintersThe guest suite Kieran had insisted on was larger than her own room, closer to the north exit, and entirely too quiet for the size of what had happened that afternoon.She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her own hands like they belonged to someone she hadn't met yet. They looked ordinary. Unremarkable knuckles, a thin white scar along one thumb from a childhood accident she barely remembered, nail beds still faintly pink from the cold outside. Nothing about them looked capable of what she'd watched them do in the lobby three hours ago.The knock came just after nine.She opened the door and found Kieran standing there in the low hallway light, and something in his face told her immediately that whatever composure he'd been holding through the afternoon's aftermath, through the pack elders' hurried consultation and the careful explanations he'd given her about bloodlines and treaties and the grandmother she barely remembered, had finally run out.She stepped