บททั้งหมดของ The Don's Ruthless Empire: บทที่ 321 - บทที่ 330

POV: Isabella"He talked," Salvatore said, before he had even taken off his coat.I turned from the window where I had been standing since before dawn, watching the gray light climb slowly over the garden wall, and I understood in that single sentence that whatever he had learned had frightened a man who did not frighten easily. Salvatore came back with salt still clinging to his beard, the smell of the harbor still on him, and something in his face I had never once seen there in all the years I had known him. Not fear exactly. Something older and more careful than fear.I met him in the kitchen because the study still smelled like Giovanni's confession from the night before, and I could not bear to sit in that room again until I had slept, though sleep had not come at all, not for a single hour. Rosa was already awake too, pouring coffee she did not drink, her hands steady now in a way that unsettled me far more than the shaking had the night before. There is a particular kind of sti

POV: Isabella"He wants the eastern port fully," Matteo said, sliding the letter across the desk without a word of greeting first.Alvise's letter had arrived before the sun had fully cleared the harbor, and I read the demand twice before I let myself believe a man could ask for so much and still call it a fair trade between honest partners. The paper felt heavier than paper should, the ink pressed hard enough into the page that I could feel the shape of the words with my fingertips, as though the man who wrote them had pressed down with more force than the sentence required, some private anger bleeding through the formal courtesy of the language."Not shared access," Matteo continued, his jaw already tight in the way it tightened whenever a threat arrived dressed as an offer, a particular tension I had learned to read in the first months of our marriage and had never once seen fail to predict trouble. "Full control, in exchange for what he calls continued peace with the consortium. A

POV: Isabella"You should be resting," I said, sitting across from Rosa the way I had that morning, though it felt like a different lifetime already.I did not sleep that night, and somewhere past midnight I found Rosa still awake in the kitchen, the lamp burned low, throwing long shadows across the worn wood of the table, her hands wrapped so tightly around her cup that her knuckles had gone pale in the dim light. The house around us had gone silent in the particular way it only ever did in the deepest hours, every creak of settling wood sounding louder than it should."I have buried a husband, two brothers, and a version of myself that once believed love alone could keep this family safe," Rosa said, not looking up from the cup she was not drinking from. "None of those losses frightened me the way watching my son walk toward that harbor tomorrow frightens me tonight, Isabella. None of them came close."I reached across the table for her hand, the same gesture I had offered that morn

POV: Isabella"They are safe," Matteo said, as much to himself as to me, before I had even fully read the note in his hand.Word came back from Salvatore near midday, delivered by a boy too young to understand the weight of what he was carrying, his small hands trembling slightly as he passed the folded paper into mine. I read it twice before I let the relief in it fully reach me, unwilling to trust good news too quickly after everything this week had already taken from us.Nico and Elena had reached the harbor safely, watched the meeting from a distance, and identified three men Salvatore's contact confirmed as consortium enforcers, none of them yet aware they had been seen at all. It was not everything, but it was breath enough to keep moving forward through the rest of the day.Matteo read it over my shoulder, his hand resting briefly on the small of my back, the two of us standing together the way we had learned to stand through every piece of news this week had delivered, good or

POV: Isabella"You do not have to tell me anything more tonight," I said gently, though something in Elena's face told me she needed to anyway.I pulled her aside once the study had emptied of everyone but the two of us, wanting to hear the rest of it away from the weight of every other face in the room watching her relive it all over again. We sat near the window where the fog outside had thickened into something almost solid, pressing gray and heavy against the glass, muffling whatever sounds the garden might otherwise have offered."I want to tell you," Elena said, and I heard the steadiness in her voice that had not been there the first night Nico carried her brother home, bleeding and afraid. "I have spent my whole life not wanting to see the worst of what surrounds me, the same way my brother did. I do not want to be that person anymore, Isabella. I cannot afford to be, not after today."I reached for her hand, remembering my own first months in this family, learning slowly and