Claimed by the Don

Elena Moretti learned early that the best view in the house was from the top of the staircase. From there she could see the study door, and the study door was where Damian Rossi stood every Sunday, one shoulder against the frame, a glass of whiskey he never finished in his hand. Her brother Luca laughed too loudly at everything. Damian never laughed. He watched, and when he finally smiled, it was small and rare and worth waiting an hour for. She was seventeen, and she had been waiting for years. "Kid, go to bed," Damian said without looking up. Her stomach dropped. "How did you know I was here?" "You breathe loud when you're spying." Now he did look, dark eyes finding hers through the banister. Her skin went hot. "Go." She went. She lay awake replaying the way he'd said kid, hating it, hating that she'd memorized the exact weight of it. Months passed. She noticed everything: the scar through his left eyebrow, the way men went quiet when he entered a room, the way he'd once stepped between her and a stranger's drunken shout without breaking his conversation. He moved like a man who owned the night. Then, on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, she overheard him on the terrace, speaking low to Luca. "Keep her out of it. All of it. She's the only clean thing in this family." Elena pressed her palm to the cold glass door. Clean. As if she were something to be locked away. She made a decision then, quiet and fierce: she would stop being something he protected, and make herself something he wanted. Behind her, a floorboard creaked. "Elena." Damian's voice, right at her shoulder, much too close. "How much did you hear?"