All Chapters of The Don's Ruthless Empire: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Point of view: Matteo “Nico,” Isabella screamed, sprinting into the dark before I could stop her, and every instinct I had built over eighteen months of running an empire screamed at me to pull her back while my heart screamed at me to run faster than her toward whatever waited ahead.I caught up to her at the mouth of the warehouse, my gun already drawn, Enzo and two men fanning out silently behind us, their boots barely making a sound against the wet concrete. The scene that greeted us was not the one I had braced for. Nico stood upright against a shipping container, pale and shaking, but very much alive, while a man I recognized instantly from the description Isabella had given me stood several feet away, a gun lowered at his own side.“It was a warning shot,” the man said calmly, before any of us could speak. “Into the water, not the boy. I do not kill children who wander uninvited into conversations that were never meant for them.”“Renzo,” I said, the name feeling strange and h

Point of view: Matteo“Three nights, Isabella. Choose carefully.” I read the message twice over her shoulder, the threat wrapped so thin around courtesy that it barely bothered to hide itself at all.“He is trying to frighten you into staying away from the gathering,” I said, though the words tasted uncertain even as I spoke them. “If you are absent, he can twist that absence into whatever story serves him best.”“Then I will not give him an absence to twist,” Isabella said, straightening beside me with the same fierce steadiness I had watched carry her through every impossible night since she first walked through my gates, her chin lifted despite the exhaustion clearly weighing on her shoulders.The house was quiet in the way only a house can be after a night that has changed everything inside it, every hallway holding its breath along with the people walking through them.We returned to the compound near dawn, Nico finally asleep under guard, Rosa pacing the hallway until she saw he

Point of view: Matteo“Tell your Don to come alone tonight, or the whole coastline learns your brother's real debt.” I read the message over Isabella's shoulder for the second time in two days and felt something in me go cold and very still.“What does he mean, my brother's real debt,” Isabella asked, her voice trembling despite her obvious effort to keep it steady. “Nico's debt has never been a secret, Matteo. Everyone already knows why I am here.”“Then he is bluffing,” I said, though the words felt hollow even as I spoke them. “Or he has learned something we have not yet discovered ourselves.”Salvatore, standing near the war table with the rest of us, went suddenly and completely still, and I recognized the expression on his face immediately, the same guarded stillness he had worn every time Renzo's name entered a conversation over the past two days, the color leaving his face by slow degrees.“Salvatore,” I said sharply. “What are you not telling me now.”My uncle's jaw tightened

Point of view: Isabella"Blood at the harbor" were the only four words I heard clearly. Everything after that turned to noise, and I grabbed Matteo's arm so hard my nails left marks I would not notice until morning."Show me," Matteo said to Enzo, his voice flat in a way that frightened me more than shouting would have. Around us the gathering hall was still murmuring with the aftermath of Dante's humiliation, but none of it mattered anymore. Renzo was gone, and somewhere on those docks was proof that someone had paid for tonight in a currency worse than pride.We drove to the harbor in silence. I kept my hands folded tightly in my lap because I did not trust them not to shake if I let them rest anywhere else. Matteo did not reach for me this time, and I understood why. Whatever waited for us there, he needed both hands free.The harbor at night looked nothing like the postcard version I remembered from childhood trips with my father. The cranes stood black against a sky with no stars

Point of view: Isabella"What if the man who took Renzo already knows more about my father than I do" was the question I could not stop asking myself, even as the house on Miller Street came into view, its porch light burning small and steady against the dark like it had no idea how much danger was circling it.Nico opened the door before I could knock, his face pale, his eyes darting past me to Matteo and the two soldiers Enzo had insisted on bringing despite Salvatore's warning. My brother had always been reckless, quick with a smile and quicker to talk his way out of trouble, but tonight there was none of that easy charm in him. Tonight he looked like the twenty year old boy he actually was, frightened and trying desperately not to show it."Bella," he said, and the way his voice cracked on my name undid something in me I had been holding tightly together all night. I pulled him into a hug before either of us could say anything else, and for a moment I let myself simply feel the re