Semua Bab Sold to the Mafia king: The De Luca Bride : Bab 21 - Bab 30

The rain had not stopped since we arrived. It fell in thin, cold threads that soaked through my coat and pressed my hair flat against my neck, but nobody moved to find shelter. We all stood there in the mud at the edge of the road, staring at the white sheet like it might change what was underneath it if we looked long enough.Captain Bellini finally gave a small nod to the officer beside him.The officer crouched down and lifted the sheet.I stopped breathing.For one endless second, my mind refused to process what I was looking at, because I had already decided what I would see. I had already built the scream in my chest and the way Rosa's knees would give out and the sound Matteo would make. I had prepared myself for all of it.But the face beneath the sheet was not Enola's.It belonged to a man. Middle aged, gray at the temples, a face I had never seen in my life.Rosa made a sound like she had been holding her breath for hours and only just remembered how to let it go. She swayed

The car was silent as we pulled away from the villa, the gates closing behind us in the rearview mirror. My hands were still cold from the rival boss's words, and I couldn't stop turning them over in my mind."Do you think he meant what he said?" I finally asked, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.Luca kept his eyes on the window, on the dark shapes of the cypress trees sliding past."Men like him never waste words," he said.After that, neither of us spoke. The silence in the car felt heavier than usual, pressing against my chest the entire drive.We were maybe twenty minutes outside Palermo when the explosion hit.The lead car in our convoy lifted slightly off the ground before slamming back down, metal shrieking, and our driver slammed the brakes so hard I was thrown against my seatbelt. Before I could even understand what was happening, gunfire erupted from both sides of the road, sharp and relentless, muzzle flashes lighting up the dark.This wasn't random. The shots were t

The name settled over me like cold water. San Benedetto. I hadn't expected to hear it again so soon, and certainly not attached to the wreckage we'd just walked away from."What did they find?" I asked, stepping closer to Luca."The same marker," he said, lowering the phone. "The one connected to the earlier incident at the church.""So they're connected. This attack and whatever happened there before.""It looks that way." He said it carefully, the way he always did when he was still working through what a piece of information meant before he handed it to me whole.My mind was already moving past the marker, past the ambush, circling back to the question that had been sitting underneath everything since I'd come to Palermo. "Has Bellini found anything about Enola?"Luca's expression shifted, just slightly. "The investigation into her disappearance is still open. That's all I have.""Still open." I heard my own voice rise and didn't try to soften it. "It's been weeks, Luca. Every time

The question haunted me through the night and followed me into the morning, refusing to let go. Do you really expect me to believe you've forgotten me. I never heard Luca's answer. I had stood frozen in that hallway until my legs finally carried me away, and now the silence where his response should have been felt louder than anything he could have actually said.I told myself it didn't matter. Whatever history existed between them was exactly that, history, and I refused to let myself feel anything as small and predictable as jealousy over a woman who clearly enjoyed provoking me more than she cared about winning Luca back. That was what I told myself, at least, as I dressed and went down to breakfast with my spine a little straighter than usual.I kept my distance from Luca that day. It wasn't difficult. I answered him politely when he spoke to me, kept my tone even, and found reasons to be elsewhere whenever a conversation threatened to last longer than necessary. If he noticed, an

I did not sleep. I sat on the edge of the bed with the torn scrap of paper on my knee and the lamp pulled close, and I read the same line of my father's handwriting until the ink seemed to move.The thief had taken nearly everything. What remained was a ragged strip no wider than my hand, torn along one edge so that the words stopped in the middle of a sentence. The paper was thick and slightly yellowed, and it had been folded so many times that the creases had gone soft as cloth. I could see the slant of Adrian Rossi's pen and the way he crossed his sevens. I could also see the name, pressed into the page so hard that I could feel the letters with my fingertip when I turned it over.Chris Arcuri.I knew it at once, the way a person knows the smell of a house she lived in as a child. My fingers went cold. I set the paper on the blanket, smoothed it twice with my palm, and picked it up again.I had not heard that name in twenty years, and yet it did not feel new. I closed my eyes and t