All Chapters of After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

He couldn't stop counting it. Blair could see it happening even when he didn't say so out loud — some private arithmetic running behind his eyes every time the stalking came up, the same numbers over and over."Eleven minutes," he said finally, one evening at his kitchen counter, apropos of nothing she'd asked. "That's how long it took me to reach you after you called. Eleven minutes, and Andrew had already vanished into whatever hole Renato's money built for him before I'd even gotten the car started.""You got there.""After." He said the word like it tasted wrong in his mouth. "I keep doing the same math on the harbor. On the point. Every single time, I arrive after whatever was going to happen to you had already had time to happen, and the only reason you're still sitting here is that I've gotten lucky more times than any man deserves to.""So what's the alternative? You can't be standing next to me every hour of every day.""No." Something had settled in his face, decided already

There was a knife laid out on the garden table when Blair arrived for the sixth session, plain-handled and unremarkable, sitting next to two glasses of water like it belonged there as ordinarily as the pitcher."We're past hands now?""Hands buy you time. This buys you an ending." Nicoletta picked it up without any of the reverence Blair had half expected, turning it once in her palm, entirely matter-of-fact. "I'd rather you never need it. I'd rather you know how, regardless.""That's not ominous at all.""Good. Ominous gets people killed. Calm keeps them alive." She held it out, handle first. "Take it the way I'm holding it, not the way it looks in films. Thumb along the spine."Blair took it. It felt heavier than its size suggested, or maybe that was only the weight of understanding exactly what it was for.* * *She lost the disarm drill nine times out of ten for the first hour, Nicoletta plucking it out of her grip with a small twist that looked almost gentle and left Blair's wris

Lorenzo listened to the whole report without writing a single note, which Blair had learned by now meant he already believed every word of it."Drugs, moving alongside whatever else that warehouse handles." He said it flatly, already three steps past the observation itself. "Renato's diversified. That is not incidental — men who use on the job are men who will talk for a fix. It is a weakness in his own operation, if we're patient enough to find the right one.""Good work," Alessandro said, and meant it, something warm crossing his face before he had fully suppressed it in front of his uncle.Lorenzo caught the look anyway. Blair watched him catch it."A word, Alessandro. Alone."* * *She waited in the hall, close enough to hear more than either of them probably intended."She is useful. I'll grant you that," Lorenzo said, low. "But that is not the same as safe. Everyone in that room saw your face just now. If I noticed, others will.""Meaning what.""Meaning a don who is soft for on

They drove out past the salt flats this time, to a stretch of scrubland with nothing behind the target but rock and empty sky, and Nicoletta loaded the magazine herself before handing it over."Live, this time.""I noticed." Blair tried not to grimace as a flicker of unease moved through her body.Nicoletta moved to stand behind her watching Blair's expression with barely hidden amusement. Even with how understanding she seemed to be, there was always a bit of amusement in her expression whenever Blair showed her unease around the gun."Good. I'd rather you be aware of it than brave about it." She positioned Blair's stance with two efficient taps, shoulder, hip, entirely businesslike. "Both hands. Breathe out as you squeeze, not before."The first shot went wide enough to embarrass her, the recoil kicking up through her wrists harder than she'd braced for, the sound of it slamming through her chest like something physical.For one disorienting second she wasn't standing in scrubland a

Marco had only stopped the car to let a delivery truck back into the loading lane, nothing more than that, and Blair never did figure out exactly which detail did it — the stacked containers along the dock, rust-streaked and identical, casting long bars of shadow across the asphalt; or the smell of salt and metal thick enough to catch in the back of her throat; or simply an ordinary Tuesday finally giving her mind room to stop outrunning itself.One second she was watching gulls fight over a dropped crust near the curb, half-listening to Marco hum along with the radio. The next, she couldn't get air into her lungs at all.Steel walls pressed in from every side she couldn't see. A single seam of light where the container door didn't quite meet the frame.A man's voice, pleasant, almost bored, telling her exactly how little her escaping mattered to how this ended — the words arriving not as memory but as something happening to her right now, in the car, in broad daylight, gulls still sc