Todos los capítulos de After Death, I Chose The Mafia Don: Capítulo 61 - Capítulo 70

Alessandro had never once needed a reason to invite both of them into the same room before, and Blair watched the particular, careful way Lorenzo and Massimo settled at opposite ends of the table now, close enough to work, far enough to make the distance between them feel deliberate. Neither one pulled out his own chair until the other had already sat."The chapel has two entrances," Lorenzo said, spreading the layout across the table like nothing at all had shifted between them in the last week. He smoothed the paper flat with one hand and weighted a corner with his coffee cup. "Main doors, and the side door the priest uses. We cover both, or we don't bother covering either.""Agreed," Massimo said. He leaned forward to study the page, tracing a line along the courtyard wall with one finger. "I'd put two men on the bell tower as well. It's the only elevated position with a clean line on the whole courtyard."Blair watched Alessandro's jaw tighten at that, the same calculation crossin

Alessandro hadn't said a word since dinner, and Blair had learned by now not to fill that particular silence with questions — some nights the weight of everything sitting on him needed room to exist before it needed words. He'd left his plate half finished and hadn't reached for his phone once, which was its own kind of warning.She found him on the balcony, staring out at a harbor he'd spent his whole life either protecting or bleeding for, his hands braced on the railing, and stood beside him without touching him at all, letting the quiet do whatever work it needed to do first. Below them a single boat moved slowly out past the breakwater, its light small and steady against the dark water."Two and a half weeks," he said eventually. "I still don't know which of them it is. I still don't know how to keep you safe in a chapel I can't fully secure, from a man I can't predict, using men I can't entirely trust." Something raw had crept into his voice, more exposed than she'd heard it in

Lorenzo was back at the head of the table like he'd never left it, and Blair watched something settle more naturally into his shoulders now that the suspicion had finally landed somewhere other than on him."We give Massimo a version of the security plan that's wrong in exactly the ways that matter." He spread a second layout beside the real one, close enough to pass a glance, different enough to matter under pressure. "The bell tower he suggested — we tell him it's manned. It won't be. We move the real coverage to the choir loft instead, somewhere he's never once mentioned.""And the entrances?""Real on the layout. Wrong on the timing." Lorenzo tapped the page. "If Renato plans around a changeover at ten, and the actual rotation happens at nine-forty, he's walking his people into a gap that isn't there."Alessandro studied both layouts side by side, something grim and focused in the set of his jaw."How do we get it to Massimo without it looking planted?""You mention it in passing,

The text arrived at half past midnight, from a number Blair had never seen before, and she knew who it was from before she'd even finished reading the first line.Fourteen days. I hear the bell tower will have a nice view of everything. Give my condolences to the Don — this year's memorial is going to be one he actually remembers.Her hands had gone cold around the phone before her mind caught up to the fear at all, old instinct outrunning thought the way it always did whenever his name attached itself to anything. She read it four more times, as if the fifth reading might change what it said, and it never did.For a moment she was eighteen again in every sense that mattered, not the version who'd learned to hold a knife steady or read a room full of mourners for threats, just a girl staring at a phone screen with her whole body remembering exactly how small he'd always managed to make the world feel.* * *Alessandro was awake within a minute of her call, and read the message twice o

Dario looked like an entirely different person than the one Blair had first watched through a car window months ago, sweating and shaking over a crate he'd been gripping too hard — steadier now, color back in his face, something like a future visible behind his eyes that hadn't been there the first time she'd seen him."You look well.""I feel like a stranger wearing my own face some days. Good strange, mostly." He offered her the chair across from him, unprompted, a small ordinary courtesy that seemed to matter more to him than it should have. "They tell me another six weeks here, if I keep doing what I'm doing. I didn't think I'd ever get to a place where six more weeks sounded like a gift instead of a sentence.""How are the cravings?""Quieter than they were. Loud enough some nights that I don't sleep much, but quieter." He said it plainly, no shame folded into it, the way she'd taught herself to hope he might eventually be able to say it. "The counselor here says that's honest pr