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Home / Mafia / MARRIED TO MY EX-FATHER IN LAW. / Kabanata 101 - Kabanata 110

Lahat ng Kabanata ng MARRIED TO MY EX-FATHER IN LAW.: Kabanata 101 - Kabanata 110

138 Kabanata

WAITING

Third PersonThey come from all over the city. Not in one big dramatic group like something out of a movie. These things are never done that way. They arrive separately, different cars, different routes. Slipping into the neutral venue within a tight thirty-minute window so nothing looks suspicious from the outside. No convoys, no obvious patterns. Nothing that screams what this really is. This is a trial. The venue is an old private members club in Mayfair that has played host to these kinds of secret gatherings before. The entire upper floor is booked under some fake corporate name that only exists on paper. The staff working that floor have been carefully vetted, paid very well, and understand exactly how expensive it would be to open their mouths about what they see tonight. By seven in the evening, the long room is full. Vincent Romano arrives first. He takes the chair at the head of the massive table... the seat tradition always given to the family that’s lost someone. He

RIGHT BACK AT HIM

Ocean's POV I've been in some tough rooms before. Rooms where the odds were stacked against me and the outcome was up in the air. Rooms full of men who wanted things from me I wasn't willing to give. I've sat in those rooms and walked out okay because I know how to read people, how to lay out my case, and how to stay still when staying still says more than any words could. But this room feels different. This one has Vincent Romano at the other end, getting ready to bury his cousin tomorrow. Dmitri Volkov sitting right next to him, smelling blood and territory in every single word. And Michael on my left, saying all the right shit in the exact wrong way. I felt it the second he opened his mouth. The way the whole room shifted after he sat back down, the way some of the neutral guys looked at each other. I've been in difficult rooms before. But I’ve never been in one where I couldn’t fight back properly. Where the one weapon I needed... real proof.. was something I didn’t have. C

JUDGEMENT

Third Person Caruso speaks for four minutes, and that’s all it takes to tear down thirty years of work. He starts with the evidence. Goes through every piece one last time in that flat, clinical voice he’s used all night. The financial records, the communication logs, the weapon, the print. He doesn’t add any opinions, because he doesn’t need to. The evidence speaks for itself. Then he talks about the law of this council. The old, ironclad rule that decides what happens when a family member gets killed without cause and without permission. A rule that’s been around longer than most of the men sitting in this room. A rule that applies to everybody, no matter how powerful, how long you’ve been in the game, or how many careful relationships you’ve built across tables like this one. No one is above it, that’s the whole point of the rule. No one. He looks straight at Ocean when he says it, then he delivers the verdict. “Guilty.” The word hits different people in different ways. F

START TO PLAN

Ocean's POV The car ride home takes twenty-two minutes. Daniel drives. Michael offered, but I told him to go home. The look on his face when I said it was exactly right... concerned, a little hurt, but understanding. I watched him walk to his car and kept thinking about that moment after his speech in the tribunal room. The way the whole atmosphere shifted, the exact kind of doubt he left behind in the air. I thought about twenty years. Then I got in the car with Daniel and I haven’t said a single word since. Daniel doesn’t push. He just drives in silence, and that’s exactly why I wanted him with me tonight. He knows when to shut up and let the quiet do its thing. He doesn’t try to fill it with bullshit that won’t help. We’re on the Embankment when he finally speaks. “What do you need?” he asks. Just that. No “what do we do now” or “how are you holding up.” Straight to it. Immediate and practical. “I need an hour,” I say. “Then I need you back at the house.” He nods. We don

HIDING

Lola's POV Daniel shows up at half past eleven. I hear the knock on my bedroom door and Sophia’s voice in the hallway telling him it’s okay, that he’s one of Ocean’s men. Something in the way she says it makes me sit up straight before she even finishes the sentence. One of Ocean’s men. At half past eleven at night. I’m already out of bed by the time she opens the door. I’ve learned how to read Daniel over the months I’ve been around Ocean’s people. He’s always contained, like the rest of Ocean’s best guys... nothing extra on the surface, every move deliberate. Tonight something is different. He walks in, looks at me, and that contained thing slips just a little. Enough for me to know before he even opens his mouth that whatever he’s carrying is big. “Sit down,” he says quietly. “Tell me he’s alive.” “He’s alive. He’s okay physically, just sit down, Lola.” I sit on the edge of the bed. Sophia comes over and stands right beside me, her hand resting on my shoulder. Daniel s

HOLD ON

Lola's POV The safe house is a little cottage. That’s the only word that fits. Small, made of stone, sitting at the end of a long private road with open fields on three sides and a thick wood on the fourth. It looks like something your grandmother might own, except for the heavy reinforced door and the two serious-looking men who step out to meet the car the second we pull up. We get there at two in the morning. Daniel gives us the quick tour. Kitchen, two bedrooms. A sitting room with a real fireplace that actually works. A bathroom that’s been fixed up recently. Everything is clean, simple, and totally anonymous. “There’s food already stocked in the fridge,” he says. “The doctor will come here to check on you, same guards rotating as before. Nobody comes near this place without clearance.” “How long?” I ask. “We don’t know yet.” I nod and he leaves before the sun comes up. Hannah claims the bedroom closest to the front door without even asking. I take the other one that has

EVERY SINGLE SECOND

Ocean's POV The property is in Surrey. It’s big enough to be comfortable but small enough to feel like a fucking cage. Three bedrooms, a study, and a garden that backs onto private land with a high perimeter wall. That wall isn’t there to keep people out, it’s there to keep me in. There are four guards on rotation at all times. Two from Vincent’s side, two from a neutral family. No Dmitri’s men. That was one of my conditions and it stuck. They’re professional. They don’t talk to me unless they have to, they don’t chat much with each other either. They’re here to do a job, and that job is making sure I stay put. I stay put. For now. They let me have one phone, monitored. Every call logged. I’m not allowed any contact with my organisation except through approved channels. Daniel is my legal representative, so he can visit twice a week under supervision and we get one thirty-minute phone call a day. Thirty minutes. I used to run an entire empire through encrypted lines and priva

HOLDING

Lola's POV Three weeks in the cottage. I know because Hannah has been marking the days on an old calendar she found in the kitchen drawer. It’s from a previous owner and the year is wrong, but she uses it anyway. She puts a neat little cross through each day before bed. I’ve started avoiding looking at it. The crosses pile up too fast and too slow at the same time. The morning sickness came back hard. I thought it was getting better, two weeks ago I had four good days in a row where I woke up feeling normal, ate a proper breakfast, and actually believed the worst was over. Then week three hit and my body decided otherwise. It’s worse in the mornings and hits randomly in the afternoons. I’ll be fine for hours and then something sets it off. Usually a smell. Hannah cooked with onions on Tuesday and I had to run out of the room fast. I spent twenty minutes standing by the open back door breathing cold air while she stood in the kitchen looking genuinely sorry. “I didn’t know onio

DOCUMENTATION

Ocean's POV Daniel comes on Tuesday and Friday. Those are the days I really work. The rest of the week I’m building everything in my head, turning over every detail, preparing for whatever Daniel brings and what Lilo works through on his laptop while a guard sits in the next room pretending to read a newspaper. Today is Tuesday. Daniel puts the folder on the kitchen table. Guard standing in the doorway like always, door left open. Same routine. “The timestamps,” I say quietly. He slides a page to the top of the stack, legal bullshit on the surface. Underneath, in the margins, in the shorthand we created twenty years ago, the real information. I read it. The access to the secondary node happened three separate times. The timestamps put it on days when the property was running a reduced staff rotation. Days when fewer people were logging movements through the system. Days that were picked very carefully. “Someone knew the rotation,” I say. “Yeah.” “Who sets the rotation?” D

GLOATING

Ethan's POV I've been looking forward to this visit for weeks. The guards at the gate are Vincent's guys, so they search me properly before letting me through. I let them, I’m all cooperative and polite. I’ve got nothing on me they’d care about anyway, and the visit is approved I’m here as Ocean’s son, which gives me access most people don’t get. That’s always been the one useful thing about being his kid. The access. I find him in the garden. Of course he’s out there, he always liked walking in the garden back at the Belgravia house too. Something about needing to move while he thought. I used to watch him from my bedroom window when I was little. Same path, over and over, early in the morning before anyone else was up like the rest of us didn’t even exist yet. He looks up when I come around the side of the house. His face doesn’t change at all. That used to scare me, that total blank look. There was never any reaction for me to grab onto. I spent most of my childhood tryin

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