Lahat ng Kabanata ng Sold To The Mafia Boss: Kabanata 91 - Kabanata 100

ELEANOR~•~The room I was locked in had a window that faced the compound and I'd been sitting at it since before the sun came up, watching the guards move through their rotations below.Matilda was still out there somewhere.That was the thing I kept coming back to. Everything else, Armando, Matteo, the poison, the basement, all of it was sitting right there at the edges of my mind, but Matilda was at the center. My little sister in some room I couldn't picture, with people I didn't know, and a body that was already fighting hard enough without adding fear on top of it.I pressed my forehead against the glass and closed my eyes, trying to hold on a little longer.A tray of food was on the floor near the door where the guard had left it an hour ago but I still hadn't touched it, not because I wasn't hungry. I was. My stomach had been making itself known since last night, but eating felt like the wrong thing to be doing right now.I looked at the tray for a long moment and then I got u

ARMANDO~•~Dante found it in two days.I’d given him a week. Matteo would’ve taken longer, and I’d loved Matteo like a brother, but I wasn’t going to lie to myself about it. Two days. The man walked into my house, got told half of nothing, got handed a mess Salvatore had spent months building, and pulled the first thread loose before I’d finished deciding whether I liked him.He had a map spread out on the study table when I came down, marked up in pencil, folded soft at the creases like he’d been carrying it in his jacket for years.“You found something,” I said.“The driver.” He didn’t look up. “The kitchen delivery I flagged the morning I got here. The one who got swapped with no paperwork.”I crossed my arms and waited.“He’s not a driver. He’s a courier. Real name doesn’t matter, he’s used four. He runs for a freight outfit out east called Brindisi Logistics. On paper it moves produce and dry goods to restaurants. In practice it moves whatever you pay it to move and it doesn’t

ARMANDO~•~Eleanor walked up to the gate alone and I hated every step of it.That was the plan. She walks, they watch, the gate opens for the prize Salvatore had been waiting on, and I come through two steps behind her in the dark with Marco while Dante took the back with the others. Two ways in. One girl to grab. Everybody out before Salvatore worked out he’d been played.It looked good on Dante’s map. On that map everything looked good.But this wasn’t the map. This was Eleanor in a thin coat crossing forty feet of open gravel toward a man who’d already used her once, and me crouched in the tree line with my pulse going hard, telling myself she was bait and not letting myself finish the thought about what bait is actually for.A floodlight snapped on and caught her. She froze in it. I watched her shoulders climb up toward her ears and then come down again, slow, like she was forcing herself steady.“Eleanor.” A voice from the gatehouse. One of Salvatore’s men, not the man himself.

ARMANDO~•~“Choose,” Salvatore said.I’d walked into a lot of rooms in my life knowing the math was bad. This was the worst of them. Salvatore with a gun dead center on Eleanor’s chest. Two of his men against the far wall with theirs leveled on me. The sick kid slumped on the cot behind her sister. And me alone in the doorway with one weapon and a count that didn’t add up no matter how I ran it.So I didn’t run it. I’d learned that much from Dante in three days. You don’t win the room you’re standing in. You win the room the other man thinks he’s standing in.“You’re quiet, Armando.” Salvatore was enjoying himself. The gun didn’t drift off Eleanor an inch. “That’s not like you. The Armando I hear about would’ve done something loud and stupid by now. But look at you. Standing in a doorway doing arithmetic. You know why?” He smiled. “Because of her. One girl off an auction block and she’s turned you into a man who hesitates. You should thank me. A weakness you don’t know about is the o

ARMANDO~•~Eleanor didn’t come back to me for four days.She stayed at the doctor’s place those first nights, sleeping in a chair by the kid’s bed, and when Matilda was stable enough that the staff finally sent her home to rest, she came back to the mansion, went straight up to her room, and shut the door. She wasn’t avoiding me, exactly. She’d nod at me in a hallway. She just had nothing she was ready to say, and I’d learned by now not to chase her for it.So I waited. Me. Waiting. Matteo would’ve found that funny.I spent those four days doing the things a man does after a war. Counting what was left. Burying what wasn’t. Sitting alone in the study with the chair I still hadn’t moved.On the fourth morning Dante came down with his bag packed.He set it by the door the same way he’d brought it in. One bag, no ceremony. He found me at the window, where I did most of my standing around these days.“Rafael wants me back,” he said. “And the job’s done. Salvatore’s in the ground, the kid