OWNED BY THE DON

The screen’s blue glow was the only light in Rachel’s apartment. She was in despair. On the desk, her phone buzzed. Antonio Romano. Her father, the desperate CEO of Romano Logistics & Tech, now a man drowning in his own shadow. She ignored it. She would call him when she had a victory to offer. Then, at exactly 2:00 AM, another phone buzzed. Rachel didn’t bother checking the caller ID. She knew the rhythm of this particular haunting. Only one man expected an answer at this hour, and he wasn't the type to ask twice. “Your father missed another payment,” Fabio Castellano said. No greeting, no warmth. His voice held a smooth, terrifying control—the kind of calm that made Chicago’s toughest men sweat. The Punisher. The fifty-year-old mafia kingpin was a ghost she’d never met, yet his name hit like a bullet. Rachel leaned back, her heart hammering against her ribs. “He’s working on it. Give him two weeks.” “You said that two weeks ago,” Fabio replied. A chilling pause followed, heavy with unspoken threats. “And two weeks before that.” Rachel closed her eyes, pressing her forehead against her palm. Her father’s gambling debt was a lead anchor, dragging them both into the depths. With interest compounding faster than she could hack it away, they were drowning. “I can fix this,” she insisted, her voice trembling despite her resolve. “Just give me until Friday.” Fabio laughed—a sharp, humorless sound that chilled the air in the room. “You can’t fix this, Rachel. Only I can.” The line went dead, leaving her in a silence far more terrifying than his voice. The silence that followed was heavy, pressing against her eardrums. Her apartment suddenly felt too small, the walls closing in like a vice. Outside her window, the city was unnervingly still—the kind of quiet that precedes a storm. $2.3 million. That number had been devouring her sleep for six months. Rachel could breach bank vaults, reroute offshore servers, and erase digital identities with a keystroke. But her father’s debt wasn’t digital. It was real, messy, and the kind Fabio Castellano collected in blood. Rachel’s mind drifted to the morning’s grim headlines: The ‘accidents’ at the casinos. The security footage that always went missing. The cold, handsome face of the man who looked like an angel but ruled like a demon. Fabio didn't just break bones, he erased lives. She felt like a ghost already. At 4:02 AM, she finally closed her laptop. Total failure. The debt remained a crushing reality. She pressed her forehead against the cool wood of her desk, her spirit finally breaking. “I’m sorry, Dad,” she whispered. A single tear traced a path down her cheek. “I’m going to die.” _______________________________________ It was 10:00 AM, when Rachel found her father in his home office at the Romano mansion. The air within the mahogany-lined room felt heavy, cold, and as suffocating as a tomb. He wouldn’t look her in the eye, focusing instead on a glass of scotch that shook in his hand. Ice clinked against crystal with every tremor, staining his cuff. “He’s cleared the debt, Rachel,” Antonio whispered, his voice thin and hollow. “Everything. The warehouses, the lawsuits... It’s all gone.” Rachel froze halfway through the door. “How?” Her voice came out too high, too fast. “We didn’t have the capital. Who did you go to, Dad?” When Antonio finally looked up, his face was aged ten years with a coward’s shame. “Fabio Castellano,” he said. “He’s... he’s taken an interest in you. He wants a wife from a ‘respectable’ family. He wants you.” The name hit her like a physical blow. Castellano. The man who owned the city’s shadows and turned men into ghosts. The room seemed to tilt, the walls closing in, the air suddenly too thick to breathe. “No,” she breathed, her voice barely a thread. “No, you didn’t. Tell me you didn’t sell me to that monster.” “It’s a marriage, Rachel! A merger!” Antonio stood up, his desperation turning into a pathetic roar. His hands slammed on the desk, making the glass jump. “It was either this or they find me in the river! Do you want your father dead?” “I want a father who doesn’t sell his daughter!” she screamed. The fire in her was hot and immediate—but it didn’t last. Her knees gave way, hitting the plush carpet with a dull thud. “Please,” she sobbed, the first hot tears blurring her vision. “Daddy, please don’t make me go to him. I’ve heard the stories... he has no heart. He’ll break me.” She clutched her own arms, shaking so violently her teeth rattled. The expensive carpet meant nothing under her knees. Nothing mattered except the sound of her own panicked breathing. She wasn’t just crying. She was mourning the life she thought she had. The grad school acceptance letter in her desk drawer. The apartment she’d picked out. The future where she fixed this herself. In her mind, she could already feel the shadow of the Don falling over her—a man she had never met, but whose name felt like a death sentence. Antonio wouldn’t meet her eyes. He turned toward the window, his shoulders caving in. “He’s coming for you at eight,” he said quietly. Rachel’s head snapped up. “What?” “Dress in something white,” he added, voice flat now, detached. “He likes it when things look pure.” White. For a funeral. The thought hit her before she could stop it. Rachel sat on the floor of her father’s office, phone dead in her pocket, the man she’d spent her life protecting staring at the skyline like she wasn’t there. And outside, the city that belonged to Fabio Castellano was already waiting.