บททั้งหมดของ Sold to the Mafia king: The De Luca Bride : บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 60

We left the farmhouse in eleven minutes. I counted them, because counting kept my hands from shaking. My mother packed a single canvas bag with the speed of a woman who had rehearsed it a thousand times, and she did not cry when she locked the door behind her. She only stood for a moment with her palm flat against the green wood, as though saying goodbye to a friend, and then she turned and walked to the car without looking back.Chris stopped on the way down the hill, at a crossroads where a delivery truck was idling outside a roadside café. While the driver argued with a waiter, he walked past the open tailgate and dropped the little black tracker between two crates of lemons. "Let them chase fruit to Catania," he said when he got back in. "It will buy us a few hours.""A few hours is all we need," my mother said from the back seat. "I know a place.""You always know a place," Chris murmured, and for the first time since I had met them, I saw her almost smile.We drove in silence fo

Sophia's POV I found Luca on the terrace, alone, with an untouched glass of whiskey on the stone rail. The uncles had gone. Down in the courtyard, his mother's car was pulling away, its taillights dwindling to red points. He did not turn when I came up beside him."Do not say you are sorry," he said. "I could not bear it.""I wasn't going to." I leaned on the rail next to him, close enough that our sleeves touched. "I was going to say she is a terrible woman."A laugh escaped him, short and rough. "She is my mother. I have spent twenty-two years imagining what I would say to her. Tonight I said six words." He picked up the glass, studied it, and put it down. "I do not know what she is to me, Sophia.""You don't have to know yet."He looked at me then, and for a moment the mask slipped, and I saw the six-year-old boy standing in an empty hallway. I did not touch him. I was not ready for that. But I let my little finger rest against his on the stone, just for a second, and he went abso

Sophia's POV "The window," Luca said.Smoke was already rolling across the ceiling in thick gray waves, and the heat came through the floorboards like a living thing. Elena was coughing into her sleeve. I snatched the yellow quilt from my old bed, tore it in half, and pushed a piece against her face. "Hold that over your mouth. Breathe through it.""Sophia, the stairs...""There is no stairs. There is the trellis." I dragged the window seat's cushion aside and shoved the sash upward. Cold night air hit my face. Below, the old wooden trellis still clung to the wall, black with ivy. I had climbed down it at fourteen, in secret, just to sit alone in the garden and cry. "I will go first. Elena second. Luca last.""I go first," Luca said."You carry the ledger and you are twice my weight. If the trellis breaks under you, it breaks under all of us. Move."He opened his mouth, closed it, and nodded once. I swung my legs over the sill and found the first rung with my toes. The wood groaned.

Sophia's POV Nobody moved. The corridor was so quiet that I could hear the soft hiss of an oxygen line in a room somewhere behind us. Chris stood frozen at the end of the hall with one hand half raised, and Enola stood in the doorway of room 304 with her fingers white against the wall, and between them stretched twenty years that neither of them had known existed."Rosa," Chris said again. His voice was very low. "Tell me I am wrong."Rosa shook her head. She had slid down the wall until she was crouching on the floor, her cane abandoned beside her, her palm still pressed against her mouth. Tears ran between her fingers. She did not look at him. I think she could not.Enola took one step forward. Then another. She was barefoot on the cold linoleum, and the hem of her hospital gown trembled around her ankles. She stopped three paces from him, close enough to see the gray in his hair and the thin white scar along his jaw."You are Chris Arcuri," she said."Yes.""I am Enola." Her chin

Sophia's POV The lawyer arrived at the De Luca house before the rain stopped. Avvocato Massimo Greco was a short, wide man in a rumpled gray suit with a face like a disappointed bulldog, and he spent his first ten minutes in Luca's study saying nothing at all. He read Bellini's warrant twice, studied the insurance document that had been couriered over from the station, and rubbed his eyes with two thick fingers."This policy was renewed three weeks ago," he said at last. "Six million euros, with a rider covering fire and arson. Both beneficiaries are named. Sophia Rossi and Matteo Rossi.""I never signed anything," I said. My voice sounded thin in the big room. "I have not seen that house in eight years.""Your signature is on page four." He turned the document toward me. The name curled across the line in blue ink, my loops and my slanted *S*, so close to the real thing that my own stomach turned. "The forgery is good. Better than good. Someone had a sample of your handwriting to co