บททั้งหมดของ The Don's Ruthless Empire: บทที่ 251 - บทที่ 260

POV: Isabella"Isabella, if she does not come, we lose everything we bought with those three days." Matteo's voice was calm, but I heard the fear buried underneath it, quiet and sharp, the kind of fear a Don never lets his own soldiers see.I stood beside him in the private room behind the ceremony hall, my hands folded tight enough to hide the shaking, watching the harbor through tall windows while guests filled seats we could not yet see. Rosa sat near the front already, dressed in deep green, her spine straighter than I had seen it in years. Nico stood near the entrance in a suit that finally fit the man he was becoming instead of the boy he used to be. Elena had not left Enzo's side since the warehouse, and I understood now why some wounds only close when someone refuses to let go of your hand."She said three days," I reminded Matteo, though I was reminding myself just as much. "Adriana does not strike me as a woman who breaks her own timelines.""She also does not strike me as a

POV: Isabella"You knew his name for twenty years and you let me believe my father died owing a simple debt." I could not keep the accusation out of my voice, even sitting in my mother's kitchen hours after the ceremony had finally ended.Rosa's hands wrapped around a cup of tea she had not touched once since sitting down, her eyes fixed on the table between us instead of on me. "I knew a name," she said. "I did not know what it meant, not truly, not until today. Vittorio was a shadow in your father's stories, someone he trusted once and stopped mentioning entirely after a certain year. I told myself it was simply a friendship that had faded.""Was it Vittorio who convinced Papa to take the loan that ruined us?" I asked, needing the answer more than I wanted to admit."I do not know," Rosa admitted, finally meeting my eyes, tears gathering in a way I had rarely seen from my mother. "Your father protected me from the details the same way I have spent two years protecting you and Nico.

POV: Isabella"Someone else already knows what is inside that study, and they got there before we did." Camilla's voice shook as she said it, standing in the doorway of her father's ransacked office with papers scattered across the floor like fallen leaves.Matteo moved past her carefully, surveying the damage with the same controlled focus I had learned meant he was cataloguing every detail rather than reacting to any single one of them. Enzo knelt beside an overturned filing cabinet, sorting through papers with quick, careful hands while Salvatore stood near the window, watching the street below for anyone who might still be lingering."Whoever did this knew exactly what they were looking for," Salvatore said grimly. "This was not a random break in. This was someone protecting the same secret we came here to uncover.""Whoever did this knew exactly what they were looking for," Salvatore said grimly. "This was not a random break in. This was someone protecting the same secret we came

POV: Isabella"She is not running from us, Enzo. Look at what she left behind." I held up the folded note I had found on Elena's pillow, my hands trembling slightly as I read it aloud in the empty guest room where she should have been sleeping.I forgive myself for surviving what I survived. I do not yet forgive myself for the small ways I may have failed the people who saved me. I have gone to find proof of my own innocence before anyone has to ask me for it.Enzo took the note from my hands, reading it twice, his face a mixture of relief and fresh terror. "She heard us," he said quietly. "Somehow she heard exactly what we were discussing, and instead of waiting to be accused, she went to prove herself instead.""Where would she go," Matteo asked, already reaching for his coat."The only place that makes sense," Enzo said. "Back to the warehouse. If someone is still watching that location, still protecting whatever the ledger fire was meant to hide, she may believe she can catch them

POV: Isabella"Adriana has been working with him this entire time, and none of us saw it standing right in front of us." I said it quietly, watching the old house rise out of the morning fog as our cars slowed along the gravel road leading toward it.I had barely slept since the ceremony, and the exhaustion had settled into something almost hollow behind my ribs, a tiredness that no longer felt like fatigue so much as a kind of grief I had not yet found the time to fully feel. Matteo's hand found mine as we stepped out of the car, steady despite everything, and I drew whatever strength I could from the simple fact that he was still standing beside me after everything the last two days had cost us both. The property sat far enough from Marabella that the harbor's noise never reached it, surrounded by overgrown gardens that suggested no one had cared for the place in years, though smoke curled faintly from one chimney despite the abandoned look of everything else. Matteo signaled the so