บททั้งหมดของ The Don's Ruthless Empire: บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 5

Point of view: Isabella"Pay by Friday, Miss Conti, or we take the house. Your brother signed this, not you, but the debt does not care whose name is on the paper."I counted the money in the kitchen drawer three times that morning, as if the number might change if I asked it kindly enough. It did not. Two hundred and eleven euros, a house with a leaking roof, and a debt collector standing in my mother's foyer holding a folder with the Rossaro family seal stamped across the top.The house had been beautiful once, back when my father was alive and the shipping business still turned a profit. Now the paint peeled along the hallway ceiling, and the good silver had been sold months ago, piece by piece, so quietly that my mother still asked where it had gone."There is no more money," I told him. "Not this week. Not this month."He smiled the way men smile when they already know they have won. "That is not really my problem to solve."Behind me, my mother gripped the back of a chair so har

Point of view: Isabella"You are not what I expected, Miss Conti. That is not a compliment yet. It is simply true."The woman who said it stood in the entrance hall of the Rossaro compound like she owned the marble floor beneath her feet, arms folded, studying me the way you study something that might bite. Behind her, two guards watched the gate close, and I understood in that instant exactly how far away from my old life I had just walked."I am Carmela," she said. "I run this house. You will learn the rules quickly, or you will learn them the hard way. Either is fine with me.""I would prefer the quick way," I said.That earned the smallest twitch of something near a smile before it disappeared. She led me through hallways lined with paintings older than the city itself, past a study where I caught a glimpse of Matteo speaking quietly with an older man who looked at me with open suspicion as I passed. I kept my chin level and did not look away first, even though every instinct in m

Point of view: Isabella"He used to hide here when our father was still alive and the arguments got too loud. I should have thought of it hours ago."The old boathouse sat at the edge of Conti property, half collapsed and forgotten by everyone except the two of us who had grown up ducking inside it whenever the house upstairs became unbearable. Matteo followed me down the narrow path without a word, his men fanned out somewhere behind us in the dark, close enough to protect but far enough to give the illusion of privacy.The path had not changed since I was a girl, roots pushing up through the dirt in the same places, the same salt smell rolling in off the water. It should have felt like coming home. Instead every step felt like walking backward into a life that no longer belonged to me, with a stranger who controlled more of this city than my father ever had walking silently beside me.Nico was there, curled against the far wall with a bruise blooming along his jaw and fear written i