All Chapters of Sold To The Mafia King : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Ivy sat in the back seat with her knees pulled tight against her chest, watching the city slide by through a window that wouldn't roll down. Adrian sat beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off him, saying nothing, checking his phone every few minutes like the last twenty minutes hadn't happened at all.His phone rang somewhere past the second bridge. He answered without looking at the screen first."It's done." A pause. "No, clean. Marlow's out of the city by morning, he won't be a problem." Another pause, longer this time, his eyes flicking once toward Ivy before sliding back to the window. "The girl's with me. Yes, the daughter." Whoever was on the other end said something that made Adrian's jaw tighten. "That's not your concern. I'll handle her the way I handle everything else."Ivy kept her eyes forward, pretending she hadn't caught every word, but her mind snagged on one piece of it and wouldn't let go. The way he handles everything else. Like she was a

Ivy spent the rest of the day avoiding him, not out of anger exactly, more because she didn't trust her own face not to give away how much his words had rearranged her. She walked the garden Marta had mentioned, traced the edge of the pool house, sat under a tree near the far wall until the sun started dropping low enough to turn everything gold.She found a bench near the wall with initials carved into the wood, old, weathered smooth by years of weather. A. V. and someone else's letters she couldn't quite make out anymore. She sat there a long time wondering who he'd been before any of this, before debts and guns and daughters handed over on bleeding study room floors.A gardener working nearby noticed her looking and offered, unprompted, that Mr. Voss used to sit out here as a boy with his mother before she passed. Ivy hadn't expected that, a mother somewhere in his history too, a version of him small enough to need someone the way she'd needed her own mother once. It didn't excuse

Adrian didn't let her see the note again after that first look. He folded it away into his jacket and gave orders instead, calling every man on the grounds inside within minutes, doubling the guard at every entrance, pulling curtains shut on windows that had stayed open since Ivy arrived."Tell me what it said," Ivy said, following him down the hall as he moved from room to room checking locks that were already locked. "All of it. Not the short version.""You heard the short version already.""I want the exact words, Adrian."He stopped in the middle of the hallway, jaw tight, and for a moment she thought he'd refuse again. Instead he pulled the note from his jacket and handed it to her without a word.The handwriting was neat, almost careless in how calm it looked given what it said. Voss. You've grown careless keeping a Marlow under your roof. I'll be collecting what's mine soon enough. Bring her to the old pier by the end of the week, or I'll come for her myself, and you won't like

By morning, Adrian's study had turned into a war room, maps of the docks spread across the desk, three of his most senior men standing around it while he traced a finger along a route marked in red."Halloway keeps two boats at the north end," one of the men said, tapping a spot on the map. "If we go in loud, he'll have time to pull back and regroup. If we go in quiet, before dawn, we catch him before his full crew's even awake.""Quiet," Adrian said, no hesitation in it. "I'm not interested in a fair fight. I'm interested in ending this before it costs me anyone else."Ivy stood near the door, arms crossed, waiting for the moment someone would notice her and try to send her out of the room. It came fast."Sir," the second man said carefully, "should she really be hearing all of this.""She stays." Adrian didn't look up from the map. "We had this conversation already."Ivy caught the flicker of surprise on the man's face and felt something steady settle into her chest despite the fear

Two days into the four Halloway had left them, Adrian's men found the location, a converted warehouse near the old shipyards, guarded but not fortified the way the pier had been. Ivy stood at the edge of the war room table again, watching Adrian trace a new route in red ink, this time with none of the confidence from the first plan."We're not walking into another trap," he said, more to himself than to the men around him. "Whatever we do here, it has to be smarter than last time.""We could wait him out," one of the men offered. "Let him come to us instead. Our walls, our terms.""He gave us four days for a reason." Adrian's jaw tightened. "If we don't move first, he decides the terms of the next confrontation, not us. I'm done letting him dictate the pace of this."Ivy leaned over the map, studying the layout of the warehouse, something clicking into place that made her stomach turn. "There's a smaller building here, behind the main one. What is it."One of the men checked his notes