All Chapters of The Don's Ruthless Empire: Chapter 421 - Chapter 430

POV: Isabella"That was never entirely my choice to make," Dario said, and the words hit me harder than any blade could have, because they meant that everything I feared about the council was already true and I had only just learned it.Matteo did not move at first. I saw the exact moment his hand found mine in the dark, cold and steady, though I could feel the tremor underneath it that he would never let anyone else see. Gabriel stepped closer to Dario's other side, and behind us Sofia was already calling Camilla's name into the grey morning air, her voice cracking with something between fear and fury."Whose choice was it, then?" I asked, though I already suspected the answer would only open a door none of us were ready to walk through.Dario looked at me for a long moment, and something in his face softened into an exhaustion I had not expected from a man who had just spent eleven days holding another woman prisoner in a cellar. "You would not believe me if I told you," he said. "I

POV: Isabella"That describes almost everyone standing in this room," Camilla said, and I felt the words land on every person present like a slow, spreading chill none of us could shake off.No one spoke for a long moment. I watched Sofia's eyes move instinctively toward Nico, then catch herself and look away, ashamed of the suspicion even as it rose in her. I understood the impulse completely, because I felt it too, an ugly, involuntary calculation running behind my own eyes as I looked at each familiar face and asked myself, silently, could it be you."We are not doing this," Matteo said firmly, before the silence could curdle into something worse. "We are not going to sit in this house and accuse each other based on a symbol and a confession from a man who kidnapped an innocent woman. That is exactly the kind of fracture someone like this would want.""Then what do you suggest," Camilla said, her voice tight. "That we simply wait for the next disappearance and hope we are faster th

POV: Isabella"I have never wanted so badly to be wrong," I said again, as though repeating it might make the impossible arrangement of facts in front of me finally make sense, though it did not, no matter how many times I turned it over.Matteo took the photograph from my hands gently, studying it with the same disbelief I felt settling cold in my chest. "A funeral without a body," he said slowly. "Do you remember if there was one?"I tried to reach back through twenty two years of memory, past the grief and the smoke and my father's stern, unreadable face at the graveside, and felt a fresh chill work its way down my spine. "I do not remember," I admitted. "I was sixteen. I remember the casket. I do not remember anyone opening it.""The fire was hot enough to destroy a stone cellar," Gabriel said quietly. "It is entirely plausible there was nothing left to identify. Which means it is also plausible there was nothing in that casket at all."Camilla had gone very pale, sinking slowly i

POV: Isabella*Tell Isabella the vineyard was never the last place I intended to find her.* I read the line three times before the words fully settled into my chest, cold and deliberate, exactly the kind of patience Dario had warned us about in the dark before dawn."He is watching us," I said quietly. "He has been watching us this entire time, hasn't he.""It would explain how he knew about the cellar records," Salvatore said grimly. "And how he found Adrian, of all the young men in this house, to plant his question with."Matteo took the note from my hands, his jaw tight with a fury I could feel radiating off him even without looking directly at his face. "We increase security around everyone in this room, starting tonight. Camilla, your children as well, whether you believe you need it or not.""I do not need you deciding what my family needs," Camilla said sharply, though the edge in her voice wavered under real fear rather than pride. "But I will not refuse the offer either. Not

POV: Isabella"Which is exactly why it cannot go wrong," Matteo said, and I watched him say it with the particular certainty of a man trying to convince himself as much as anyone standing beside him.We waited in the study, the four of us, Camilla pacing near the window, Gabriel bent over the photograph of Renzo as though staring at it long enough might reveal some new detail, Matteo standing perfectly still beside me in the particular way he always did when action was impossible and patience was the only weapon left. I found myself watching the clock above the fireplace, each minute stretching longer than the one before it, the way they always seemed to during the worst nights of my life."Tell me about him," I said quietly, breaking the silence more for my own sake than anyone else's. "Renzo. What was he like, before?"Gabriel looked up from the photograph, considering the question carefully. "I only met him a handful of times, when I was young. He was quiet. Watchful. The kind of m