All Chapters of The Mafia Boss’s Deadly Little Secret : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

~~Evans~~I felt something go very still and very cold in my chest, the particular stillness I only ever felt right before I did something I couldn’t take back.“Pull every man who requested transfer to the villa in the last three months,” I said. “Every single one. I want full histories, financials, family, everything, on my desk by tonight. And find out who Delgado was talking to before he died. I don’t care what it costs or who you have to lean on to get it.”“Already moving on it.”“And Marcus.” I dropped my voice lower, glancing back toward the kitchen where I could just barely hear the clink of a fork against a plate, Felix still sitting there, still waiting for me, still completely unaware that somewhere out past the walls of the villa I’d built for him, a war he didn’t remember starting had just escalated in a way that could reach him faster than I was prepared for. “I need this handled quiet. He can’t know. Not the shipment, not Delgado, none of it. If he finds out Reyes made

~~Evans~~“I can’t let you go back to work.”I said it flat, no cushioning soft lead-in, because I’d spent the entire walk back from the garden trying to find a gentler way into this conversation and every version I built in my head fell apart before I even opened my mouth. Some truths don’t have a gentle door. You just have to walk through the ugly one.Felix stopped halfway through pulling his jacket off, turning to look at me with that same sharp, assessing expression he’d been wearing at me all morning, like he’d already half expected this and was just waiting to see how I’d phrase it. “Excuse me?”“I’m sorry.” And I was, genuinely, more than he could possibly know standing there with a rose still tucked behind his ear that I’d cut for him twenty minutes ago like a man who had any right to that kind of tenderness right now. “But I can’t let you go back. Not yet.”“That wasn’t a request, Evans.” His voice had gone quiet in that particular way that used to make grown men in his orga

~~Evans~~The car was quiet except for the low hum of tires on asphalt and Marcus’s voice occasionally crackling through on speaker from headquarters, running down the last of the transfer names before I arrived to go through the rest in person. I had my eyes half closed, rehearsing the morning’s conversation with Felix on a loop, still turning over exactly how much of that ceasefire was real and how much was him simply regrouping for a better angle, when my phone buzzed against my thigh.Unknown number.I almost let it go to voicemail. Almost. Some instinct, the same one that had kept me alive through fifteen years of exactly this kind of business, told me to look anyway.It was a video.Eleven seconds long, no caption or context, just a file sitting there in the message thread like a small black rectangle waiting to detonate. I told the driver to pull over. He didn’t ask why. Good man. I waited until the car had fully stopped at the shoulder of the road, engine idling, before I let

~~Felix~~I woke up to an empty bed.Thank God no kisses this morning~~ no ambush of affection dragging me out of sleep, just cold sheets on his side and a silence in the house that felt different from the usual quiet, like the whole villa was holding its breath about something. I lay there a minute, staring at the ceiling, waiting to see if he’d walk in with some excuse about an early call or a garden he wanted to show me, and when nobody came, something in my chest, unexpectedly, dropped a little.Don’t do that, I told myself. Don’t get used to him being there. It has only being forty- eight hours and I’m already acting like this… oh help me lord~~I got up anyway, and standing in front of that ridiculous walk-in closet full of clothes apparently curated for a life I couldn’t remember choosing, I found myself needing, suddenly and completely, to be somewhere that wasn’t this house. Somewhere that didn’t smell like staged candles and rehearsed affection. Somewhere real.I got dressed

~~Evans~~I turned that house inside out first, every scorched room, every collapsed doorway, calling his name until my voice went raw and the silence answering back started to feel like something with weight to it, something pressing down on my chest hard enough that for a full minute I couldn’t get a proper breath in.No blood. That was the only mercy I let myself hold onto standing in the wreckage of his childhood home. No blood, no sign of a struggle, nothing but ash and his phone lying face down like it had simply fallen out of a hand that stopped being able to hold it.I called Sanders from the driveway, voice flat and controlled in the specific way I only managed when the alternative was falling apart entirely.“I need every man we have. Now. Full city search.”“Sir, if he’s been taken, we don’t even know the direction—”“I don’t care what we don’t know. I care about what we’re going to find out in the next hour.” I was already back in the car, engine turning over hard. “Pull t