All Chapters of Sold to the Mafia king: The De Luca Bride : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Luca's pov My father had never once lied to me with his face. He lied with his silences, with the long pauses he used like walls, and I had grown up learning to read the shape of what he refused to say. So when I walked into his study just before midnight and spoke the name Chris Arcuri, I was not watching his mouth. I was watching his hands.They stopped. The pen he had been holding hovered above the ledger, and the ink gathered into a slow, fat bead at its tip and fell onto the page. Gilbert De Luca had ruled this family for thirty years, and in all that time I had never seen him spill anything."Where did you hear that name?" he asked, without looking up."Sophia found it on a piece of Adrian Rossi's letter." I closed the door behind me and stayed near it, giving him room to feel cornered or to feel safe, whichever he preferred. I had learned long ago that my father revealed more when he believed he controlled the space. "Someone tore the rest away and took it from her room. They

Luca's POV Sophia came home at dusk with a green folder pressed against her ribs and her chin lifted like a challenge. Dante followed three paces behind, looking like a man who had survived a war and did not intend to discuss it. She walked past me without a word, climbed the stairs, and I heard her door lock. The click went through me like a blade.I stood in the hall with my bandaged hands curled into useless fists, and I let her go. I had spent the day learning that I could not cage her, and that every order I gave her only sharpened the distance between us. *Maledizione.* I had faced men with guns who frightened me less than my wife's silence.I was still standing there when Marcello, the doorman, appeared with a message. Elena Marino was at the gate. She had come alone, without her driver, and she was asking for me.I almost refused. I was tired and my hands throbbed. My father had looked at me the night before like a man staring at his own grave, and the scorched paper in my po

The call came while I was standing in my study, staring at Elena's phone and trying to decide whether the hand that had written those messages belonged to a man I had eaten dinner with. Marcello's voice cracked through the intercom. The signora had gone after her aunt. She had taken the black sedan. She had taken Dante, but she had not taken my permission.I do not remember crossing the house. I remember the cold slap of night air in the courtyard, the engine of my car already roaring, and Vincent sliding into the passenger seat with a pistol in his lap and no questions on his face. He had been downstairs with the laptop when Marcello called, and he moved the way he always moved in a crisis, without waste."The coast road," he said. "Dante's phone shows them heading toward Capaci.""How far ahead?""Ten minutes. Maybe less."I drove. The Via Libertà blurred past in a smear of lamplight, then the city thinned into dark hills and the black shine of the sea. My bandaged hands screamed ag

Sophia's POV The hospital smelled of bleach and old fear. I sat in a plastic chair outside the surgical ward with my blouse stiff with dried blood, and I watched the doors that had swallowed Rosa an hour ago. A doctor had stitched the graze on my shoulder in a curtained cubicle, six neat stitches and a lecture about how lucky I was. I had heard none of it. I kept seeing my aunt's face in the headlights, and hearing her voice in her room. Let the dead stay dead.She had run from me. She had looked me in the eye, packed her rosary, and fled into the night rather than tell me the truth, and men with rifles had come for her anyway. I did not know whether I wanted to hold her or shake her. Worse, I did not know which was more frightening, that she was guilty of something terrible, or that she was innocent and the truth was still so dangerous that she would rather risk death than speak.Dante had been taken in for his leg. Matteo was safe at the house with two guards at his door. And Luca

Sophia's POV The scream woke me before I knew where I was. For a moment I thought it was my own, dragged up from the tunnels and the ditch and the bright, terrible moment when I saw a gun swing toward my aunt's car. Then I realized I was still sitting upright in the plastic chair beside Enola's bed, my neck stiff and my shoulder throbbing beneath its bandage, and the sound had come from somewhere down the corridor. A nurse was shouting for a doctor. Boots pounded past the door. My heart hammered, and I was on my feet before I understood why."Easy." Luca's hand closed around my arm. He had been standing against the wall all night with his arms folded, a silent, unsleeping shadow in yesterday's shirt, and I had pretended not to notice him. "It is not Enola. A man in the east wing pulled out his IV and tried to leave. It is nothing.""You don't know it's nothing.""I know, because I have four of my own men on this floor and Bellini's six at the stairs. Nobody walks into this room witho