All Chapters of After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The room above the harbor office wasn't one Blair had seen before — no windows, a long table covered in papers and a single map of Trapani with pins in it she didn't let herself look at too closely, three men already seated when Alessandro brought her in."This is Lorenzo." Alessandro nodded toward the oldest of them, silver at the temples like Nicoletta, though nothing else about him carried her warmth. "My uncle. He handles what I don't have time to.""Signorina Capri." Lorenzo's eyes moved over her once, assessing in a way that had none of Nicoletta's fondness in it at all — closer to an audit than a greeting. "I understand you're the reason we're all sitting in this room past midnight.""Lorenzo.""I'm not being unkind, Alessandro. I'm being accurate." He didn't look away from Blair while he said it. "Accuracy is what's going to find whoever's been feeding information out of this family, and sentiment is what's going to get in the way of it. I'd rather start as we mean to continue.

Sofia's mother answered the door, and something careful crossed her face before she called up the stairs — the particular wariness of a woman who'd clearly heard some version of what had happened, even if she didn't know the shape of all of it.Sofia came down slower than she needed to, arms already crossed before she'd reached the bottom step."You have some nerve.""I know." Blair stayed on the doorstep, not pushing further in than she'd been invited. "I came to say I'm sorry. For what happened in that room. I gave them your name, and I didn't think through what that would actually mean for you until it was already happening.""Didn't you?" Sofia's voice had an edge Blair hadn't heard from her before, something harder than fear. "You've been mixed up with those people long enough to know exactly what a room like that does to someone. You just decided it was worth it.""I decided I was scared enough to stop thinking clearly. That's not the same as deciding it was worth it." Blair hel

They'd put her in the back of an empty shipping container, wrists bound in front of her with something plastic that bit if she pulled, and left one man standing near the door who hadn't said a single word since they'd shoved her inside.Blair made herself breathe slowly, counting it the way she'd once counted a patient's pulse in another life, refusing to let the panic climbing her throat turn into anything the man guarding her might read as useful."How long," she asked, mostly to hear her own voice stay steady, "until whoever's paying you shows up?"He didn't answer. Somewhere outside, muffled through steel, she caught the low murmur of a radio — waiting on instructions, one voice said, and something in the flat patience of it told her this wasn't the endpoint of whatever was happening to her. It was a layover.She didn't get to find out how long the wait was supposed to last.The first sound was distant enough that she almost mistook it for a truck backfiring somewhere along the do

He was gone longer than a simple call should have taken, long enough that Blair had moved from the counter to the window overlooking the dark garden by the time she heard his footsteps again."Lorenzo," he said, before she could ask. "Confirming the harbor's been cleared and the story we're giving the polizia holds together. Nothing that couldn't have waited until morning, if I'm honest.""Then why take it?""Because I needed a minute." He crossed the kitchen slower than before, something in his usual certainty gone soft at the edges. "You'd just told me you wanted this to be your problem. I wasn't entirely sure my hands were going to stay where I put them if I sat back down next to you without one."Something about the honesty of that undid whatever caution Blair had been holding onto since the phone had rung.She crossed the last of the distance herself this time, and felt him go very still as she did, giving her every chance to change her mind right up until the moment she clearly

The days after dinner at her parents' house had settled into something Blair almost let herself trust — Marco's replacement parked a discreet distance from wherever she went, close enough to matter, far enough that she could still feel like a person running her own errands instead of cargo being moved room to room.She was three shops down from the pharmacy, comparing ribbon for Fiorella's endless flower arrangements, when she caught the reflection in the glass.Just behind her own shoulder. Just for a second. A shape that had Andrew's height, Andrew's particular way of standing too still, gone the instant she turned to look at it directly — nothing behind her but an elderly man walking his dog and a delivery boy wrestling a crate through a doorway.Her heart took considerably longer to believe that than her eyes did.She told herself it was nerves. She'd told herself that before, she remembered, once on a dark street with nothing behind her either, and it had turned out to mean somet