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หน้าหลัก / Mafia / Bound by Blood / บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 29

บททั้งหมดของ Bound by Blood : บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 29

29

Trust

ELARA’S POVI stopped waiting for explanations that never came.The penthouse had changed in how it felt to move through it. Not because anything visible had changed, but because I now paid attention to everything. Footsteps. Timing. The way staff shifted positions when Dante entered a room.Morning light spread across the long dining table. Dante sat across from me, focused on his tablet, turning a page now and then as if nothing unusual had happened the night before.I watched him until he finally looked up.“You’ve been staring for a while,” he said.“You said people are coming for me.”He paused just long enough for me to notice.“I didn’t say it like that.”“You said it.”He set the tablet down.“What do you want from that statement?”“The truth.”A few staff members moved out of the room one after another, leaving space between us and the rest of the house.I noticed that quickly. Too quickly.“Who are they?”His expression changed slightly, enough to signal the conversation had
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Sealed

### ELARA’S POVThe photograph felt entirely too heavy for a piece of glossy paper.I looked from the image to Dante, then back again, my eyes tracing the stark details captured under the harsh glare of a camera flash. Rain streaks on metal. The looming shadows of shipping containers. Heavy floodlights cutting through the dark.And me. Standing right beside him.This wasn't a snapshot of the night we met at the gala. It couldn't be. In the photo, I wasn't looking at him with the guarded curiosity of a stranger. I was standing beside him with an easy, chilling familiarity. Like I already knew him. Like I belonged there in the dark at his side.My fingers tightened around the edges of the print, bending the paper slightly. "What is this?"Dante didn’t answer. He just stood there, his silence stretching out until it became a heavy weight in the room.My pulse began to thud, a low, rhythmic drumming in my ears. "What is Witness Seventeen?"His gaze stayed locked on mine, completely unread
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Stonewall

ELARA’S POVThe words didn’t make sense at first.They hovered on the screen like a different language, something my mind saw but refused to read.*Recovery Protocol for Subject Elara Santos.*I stared until the letters blurred.“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, Dante, that’s not real.”My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded thin and uncertain.Dante didn’t move or blink. He kept the phone angled toward me, showing a document neither of us could ignore.“You’re reading it wrong,” I said faster, panic rising in my throat. “This is a setup. Someone is trying to confuse me.”“To confuse you?” he cut in.His stare felt heavy, like pressure against bone.“Yes,” I whispered, but it came out weak.Dante let out a short, rough breath. “Elara. This file didn’t get leaked to confuse anyone.”He lowered the phone, letting the screen glow fade from my face.“Kovac doesn’t make mistakes,” he said. “If this is out, he wanted it out.”My throat felt tight. “You keep saying names like I’m supp
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Nightfall

ELARA'S PovThis apartment always felt too safe. That was the first lie Dante built into this place. It wasn't about the expensive floors or the huge glass windows. It was just the quiet. It was the kind of deep quiet that made you think nothing bad could ever happen up here unless he said it was okay.I stood by the edge of the living room with my arms wrapped tight around myself. I was trying hard not to think about how I got here. He brought me here against my will. I kept trying not to think about Matteo, or the blood on the floor, or the cold way Dante had looked at me. He looked at me like I was just a thing he owned now. I am a nurse, so I know what bad situations look like. But this was different. This was just a man using quiet to hide a trap.Across the room, Dante stood by the big glass window and talked into his watch. His voice had no feeling in it at all. He just asked if the outside was clear. A tiny voice came back through the static and said yes. Dante did not rel
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Ghost

Dante's PovThe moment the voice in my wrist comm cut to static, I moved.I didn’t panic. Panic is for people who don’t have a plan, and I always have a plan. I just recalculated.But when I tried to look around, the penthouse didn’t respond. The smart-glass partitions remained frozen and the climate control had flatlined, leaving the air heavy and dead. That alone confirmed what my gut already knew but my mind didn’t want to admit. This wasn’t some amateur hack from the outside. Someone was inside my walls. They had internal access.I stepped through the pitch-black space, keeping my gun leveled and steady. The glass fragments under my shoes crunched softly, each snap sounding like a gunshot in the suffocating silence.“Elara,” I called out once.Nothing.I bit down on my back teeth. The system was never supposed to allow a silent extraction. Every single movement inside this perimeter should have tripped a domino effect of alarms, physical lockdowns, and lethal countermeasures.
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The Hesitation

**ELARA'S POV**The world went white.The sound of the door blowing inward was deafening, a sharp crack of wood and metal that rattled straight through my teeth. Dust and grey smoke flooded the small concrete room, stinging my eyes.Through the haze, a dark silhouette appeared.It was Dante.He didn't look like the man from the penthouse. The elegant, calm billionaire was completely gone. This version of him was terrifying. His coat was stained with soot, his jaw was set like stone, and the heavy black gun in his hand looked like an extension of his own arm. His eyes cut through the smoke, instantly locking onto mine.For a fraction of a second, the entire world went completely still.My heart hammered against my ribs, but it wasn't just from the explosion. I stared at him, and my mind felt like it was splitting in half.I saw the man who had held me gently in his penthouse hours ago.But behind him, the frozen image on the static screen was still burned into my retinas. The younger D
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Dead Twice

(ELARA'S POV)The static from the radio died out, leaving a high-pitched ring in its place. The urgent warning hung in the air, a countdown clock we couldn't see, but Dante didn't move. He stayed frozen on his knees, his eyes locked onto mine, a storm of unsaid words crashing behind his dark irises.For a second, I thought he was going to ignore the radio entirely. I thought he was going to give me the answer that was currently choking him.Then, a distant explosion rattled the foundation of the concrete room. Dust rained down from the ceiling, dusting his dark hair with white ash.The spell broke.Dante lunged to his feet, the vulnerability that had just cracked his features vanishing behind a mask of cold, lethal efficiency. He grabbed my arm, his grip firm but careful not to hurt me."We have to move," he said, his voice dropping an octave, slipping back into the tone of the man who commanded empires."No!" I yanked my arm back, the revulsion sharp and electric. "Don't touch me! I’
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Betrayers

ELARA'S POV The slide down was loud and violent, a dark, suffocating rush of cold metal that scraped my skin before throwing me out onto a heap of heavy laundry bags. I rolled off them onto the hard concrete floor, the air entirely knocked out of my lungs.For a long time, I just lay there in the dark. I couldn't move. My knees were bleeding, my chest felt like it was caving in, and my throat was raw from screaming at him. The air down here smelled like damp earth and stale detergent, this incredibly normal, boring smell that felt completely wrong after all the gunfire and smoke upstairs.I pulled my knees into my chest and just started shaking. It wasn't a normal cry; it was this dry, ugly sobbing that made my whole body ache.*He knew.* He knew the whole time. Every single time he looked at me, every time he acted like he cared or tried to make me feel safe in his house, he knew he was the one who made me an orphan. And the worst, most disgusting part was that I had actually starte
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Denial

ELARA'S POV The car smelled like old dust and burnt rubber, a heavy, suffocating mix that made my stomach pitch every time Sophia took a corner too fast.I kept my forehead pressed against the cold glass of the passenger window, staring out at the blurred streetlights. My hands were shoved deep into my jacket pockets so Sophia wouldn't see them shaking. The adrenaline from the stairwell was totally gone, leaving behind this heavy, hollow exhaustion that made my entire body ache. I felt physically sick, a deep, oily kind of nausea that crawled up my throat every time I remembered the way Dante had looked at me right before I went down the chute.I hated him. I wanted him to pay for what he did. But there was this tiny, disgusting part of me that felt terrified he wouldn't make it out of that building, and that terrified me more than anything else. It made me feel like a traitor to my own blood.Sophia didn't say a word. She just kept her eyes locked on the road, her knuckles white on
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