All Chapters of After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Alessandro spent most of the drive back listing names under his breath, crossing each one off almost as fast as he said it, until the list had shrunk down to a handful of people he trusted enough that suspecting them felt like its own kind of betrayal."I can't use Lorenzo to investigate Lorenzo," he said finally. "And I can't use anyone underneath him, because I don't know yet how far this actually reaches.""So who does that leave?"He didn't answer right away, and when he did, something in his voice had gone careful in a way Blair hadn't heard from him before."My mother."* * *Nicoletta didn't look surprised when they laid it out for her, which told Blair, more than anything said out loud, that this wasn't the first time she'd been asked to quietly investigate someone her son couldn't afford to be wrong about."Someone inside the house," she repeated, turning a teacup slowly on its saucer. "With access to logistics. Enough trust that nobody thought to watch him.""You don't sound

Sofia's text arrived just after seven, short enough that Blair read it three times before the shape of it fully landed.He wants to see me. In person. Tomorrow night. I don't know what to do.Blair called her within the minute, and Sofia picked up on the first ring like she'd been sitting with the phone already in her hand."Tell me exactly what he said.""That he's tired of texts. That if I really want him to trust me again, I'll come alone, no phone, nowhere either of us has ever met before." Sofia's voice had gone thin, stretched over something close to panic. "That's not a request, Blair. I know what it sounds like when he's testing whether I'll still do what he says."* * *Alessandro listened to the whole account without interrupting, and by the time Blair finished relaying it, something grim and focused had settled over his face."No phone means no tracking. No familiar location means he's controlling every variable he can." He was already reaching for his own phone, dialing be

Chapter Fifty-Six: A Listening EarSofia laid the small black device on the kitchen table like it might bite her, no larger than a button, the kind of thing you'd never notice unless you already knew to look. The kitchen light overhead made no reflection on it at all. Nobody reached for it right away."He wants it in her room." Her voice had steadied since the meeting, but something in her hands still hadn't. She kept turning her ring around her finger, over and over. "Somewhere it won't be found for a while. He said if I do this, he'll finally believe I never stopped being his."Lorenzo turned the device over once between two fingers, entirely unbothered by what it represented, and set it down again exactly where it had been."Standard audio. Cheap enough to be disposable, good enough to matter." He set it back down. "He's not being subtle anymore. He wants ears in that house badly enough to risk exposing his only asset inside it to get them."* * *Alessandro hadn't touched the devi

Marco was the only name Alessandro trusted enough to say out loud for the job, and even then he said it like it cost him something. He said it standing at the window with his back to the room, and it was a moment before he turned around."He answers to me. Not to Lorenzo, not through the usual chain. If Massimo notices a shadow, I need to know it isn't one of his own people reporting straight back to him.""You think Lorenzo would tip him off?""I think I don't know anything anymore, and I'd rather build this on the one man I'm still certain of." Something tired had settled permanently into his voice over the last few days, the particular exhaustion of a man doing arithmetic that never stopped needing to be redone. He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose and let them fall again.* * * Marco's first report came back two days later, terse and typed, the kind of message that gave nothing away until you read it twice. It arrived at half past eleven, and Alessandro's phone was fa

The device sat somewhere behind Blair's headboard, small and patient, and she'd learned in the two weeks since Sofia planted it exactly how strange it was to perform your own life for an audience you couldn't see."Tell me about your day," she said, too brightly, the way a girl with nothing to hide might actually talk to her boyfriend."Paperwork. A shipment delayed out of Palermo." Alessandro said it with a straight face that had taken him considerably longer to learn than it had taken her. "Riveting, I know.""You could at least pretend to be interesting for whoever's listening.""I refuse to perform excitement about customs delays for Andrew Esposito's benefit."She laughed, real this time, and felt the strange vertigo of a joke that was funny precisely because of how much truth was hiding underneath its performance.* * *They finished the script Lorenzo had helped them build — ordinary, textured, entirely useless to anyone hunting for anything real — and didn't speak again until