The mafia king's forced bribe

Chapter 4:Digging into her

Morning came too slowly, dragging its feet across a city that didn't care about the passage of time.

Alessandro sleep had been nothing more than a failed attempt at distraction, a luxury he couldn't afford when his mind refused to quiet down.

The city outside his penthouse was completely drenched in rain, Moscow buried under a heavy, oppressive gray sky that matched his mood with unsettling perfection.

He stood by the massive floor-to-ceiling glass wall of his private office, his arms loosely crossed behind his back. His dark eyes scanned the sprawling concrete jungle below like it belonged to him because, in every way that mattered, it did.

The Bratva didn't just rule the shadows of this city; they owned the foundations it was built upon, and Alessandro was the apex predator holding the leash.

But his mind wasn't on the empire he had spent his youth bleeding for. It wasn't on the shipping manifests waiting for his signature, or the rival syndicate heads trying to carve out a piece of his territory on the docks.

It kept drifting back to the night before.

A small, suffocatingly quiet house on the edge of the district. A girl who looked too fragile to survive the harsh winters of Russia, let alone the wolves disguised as human beings roaming its streets. Wide, terrified, yet inexplicably defiant eyes that looked at him like he was something she couldn't quite classify. A monster, perhaps. Or a savior. She hadn't been able to decide, and frankly, neither could he.

"Isabella"

The name felt heavy on his tongue, even unspoken. He exhaled slowly through his nose, a puff of warm air fogging the glass for a split second before dissipating into nothingness.

She's just Luna's bestie,nothing more

But his body clearly didn't agree. The tight coil in his jaw, the restless energy humming beneath his tailored suit, the way his pulse spiked every time he recalled the trembling, delicate weight of her chin in his hand,it all pointed to a reality he wasn't ready to admit.

A sharp, rhythmic knock interrupted his thoughts, cutting through the silence of the room like a blade.

"Come in," he said flatly, not turning around.

The heavy mahogany door groaned as it opened. Xavier walked in, holding a thick, matte-black folder under his arm. His usual playful, borderline obnoxious energy was entirely missing, replaced by a subdued, quieter demeanor that immediately put Alessandro on high alert. When Xavier stopped joking, it meant the world was about to burn.

"Don’t say I never do anything for you," Xavier muttered, his voice echoing slightly in the vast room. He walked over to the desk and dropped the file onto the polished surface. It landed with a heavy, ominous thud.

Alessandro didn't move immediately. He remained frozen against the glass, watching the rain streak down the exterior like tears on stone. He just stared at the reflection of the folder in the glass.

"Twenty-four hours," Xavier added, pulling out a silver cigarette case before remembering where he was and sliding it back into his pocket.

"That’s what a standard background check takes on civilians with no footprint. I delivered in twelve. You owe me lunch… or a very expensive therapist."

Alessandro ignored the jab entirely. Slowly, deliberately, he uncrossed his arms and turned away from the window. The room felt noticeably quieter the closer he got to the desk, the air growing thick, suffocating, and heavy with anticipation. Like even the walls were waiting to see what was buried inside those pages.

He placed one large, scarred hand flat on the cover of the file. The cardboard was cold beneath his palm. Then, he opened it.

The first page hit him instantly, a stark white sheet contrasted against the black binding. A photograph was clipped to the top right corner. It was a school ID photo, taken a year ago. Isabella. Her dark hair was pulled back, her smile small and forced, but her eyes even through a grainy, low-resolution print held that same haunting, trapped expression that had halted him in his tracks the night before.

"Isabella Rossi"

*Age:21

*Status: Student (Senior Year).

*Guardianship: Sofia and Mikhail Rossi

His eyes narrowed slightly, the dark irises hardening into chips of flint. He began to flip the pages, his movements methodical and dangerous.

School records,academic excellence, She's the tier of her class, tracking toward a full scholarship at Moscow State University. Perfect attendance despite living on the absolute poverty line in one of the roughest zip codes in the city. She was smart. Brilliant,gosh that's my Queen he smirked.

Then came the medical notes and the financial records. And that was where the air in the room died.

Alessandro’s hand froze over the edge of the paper.

Minor untreated fractures left radius, age fourteen. Noted as "accidental fall."

Repeated lacerations and contusions inconsistent with normal adolescent activity. Chronic stress indicators noted by the school nurse. Neglect flagged multiple times by local clinic staff, later dismissed.

Alessandro’s jaw tightened so hard a muscle ticked violently beneath his tan skin.

The gold fountain pen resting on his desk blotter looked like a weapon he wanted to snap in half. He didn't realize he was gripping the edges of the folder so tightly that the heavy paper was beginning to tear under his fingertips.

He turned another page, digging into the financial audit Xavier had attached.

A confidential report from a municipal social worker dated two years prior highlighted a systematic draining of Isabella’s late parents' insurance money. The fund had been completely bled dry within six months of the aunt taking her in. But it wasn't spent on luxury.

It was spent on debt.

"This isn't just standard domestic neglect," Alessandro whispered, his voice dangerously low, a soft growl vibrating deep within his chest.

"Not even close," Xavier corrected from across the room, leaning against a leather armchair with his arms crossed. All the humor was gone from his face now.

"The aunt is the ringleader here. The uncle is an alcoholic waste of space, but she’s the one pulling the strings and she’s drowning. She’s been taking out massive, high-interest back-alley loans from rival territory syndicates. When the insurance money ran out, she couldn't pay the interest. So, she started paying in cooperation. She traded Isabella's safety, her inheritance, and her home to keep the enforcers from breaking her knees. Those old abuse complaints?

The local precinct captain buried them because those same syndicates bought him off."

Alessandro stared down at the ledger of debts, the financial reality sinking in. Isabella wasn't just trapped in a bad home; she was living inside a house that had been completely collateralized by enemy syndicates. Her aunt had sold her out, bit by bit, to cover her own gambling and bad blood.

"And her parents?" Alessandro asked, flipping aggressively toward the back of the file, expecting to find the root of the rot.

"What did they owe? Where is their connection to this mess?"

"That's the strangest part," Xavier admitted, his posture stiffening. "Look at the end of the file."

Alessandro turned the last few pages. The thick, exhaustive documentation suddenly vanished. There were only three pages left.

A copy of a marriage certificate, a faded utility bill, and a heavily redacted police report from a decade ago that detailed a minor traffic accident.

Nothing else. No hidden assets. No shadowy connections. No debt ledgers.

"This is it?" Alessandro’s dark eyes hardened as he stared at the hollow pages. "There are no phone logs? No bank accounts? No paper trail?"

"It’s a total ghost town, Alex," Xavier said quietly, his voice laced with frustration. "I had people dig through every database from here to the coast. There are next to no substantial leads on her parents. It’s just a handful of small, fragmented crumbs that lead straight into a brick wall.

Either someone went to immense trouble to completely scrub their history from the face of the earth, leaving absolutely nothing behind..."

"Or they were exactly who they seemed to be," Alessandro finished, his voice dropping to a level that made the room grow five degrees colder.

"Innocent bystanders who left their daughter a clean future, only for her aunt to drown her in a pool of debt."

Alessandro’s fingers tightened on the edge of the folder, his gaze dropping back down to the ledger tracking the aunt's mounting financial ruin. A cold realization clicked in his mind as he traced the routing numbers and the shell accounts used for the repayments.

His eyes locked onto a series of coded, high-value transfers at the very bottom of the ledger.

"Xavier," Alessandro said, his voice dropping into a register that made the hairs on the back of his enforcer's neck stand up.

"Look at these transaction logs from three months ago. The bridge loans. Look at the routing signatures."

Xavier frowned, stepping closer to the desk to peer over Alessandro’s shoulder. His eyes scanned the strings of alphanumeric codes, and then he froze. "No way."

"She didn't just owe the rivals," Alessandro said, a dark, terrible smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

"When they squeezed her too hard for the interest, she went looking for a lifeline to cover it. She took a secondary, off-the-books loan. From us

Xavier stared at the paper. "From our front company at the northern terminal. She owes you money, Alex. She’s been paying back a fraction of her debt to our collectors through a blind account, completely unaware of whose throat she was putting her head into."

The puzzle pieces didn't just click together anymore,they slammed shut like a steel trap. Isabella's aunt wasn't just a target of external corruption. She was financially beholden to the Luca empire. She owed Alessandro’s own syndicates hundreds of thousands of rubles, putting her completely at his mercy.

The silence that settled over the penthouse office wasn't peaceful. It was the terrifying, heavy stillness that preceded a Category 5 hurricane. The kind of quiet that meant execution orders were being drafted in a man's mind.

Finally, he closed the file. Slowly. Carefully. With the kind of delicate precision one used when handling live ordnance.

Xavier watched his boss, his own jaw tightening. "You’re doing that thing," he noted, his voice dropping an octave.

"What thing."

"That thing where you stop being human, Alex. Where you look like you're deciding exactly how many pieces a person needs to be cut into before they stop screaming."

Silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating.

Then Alessandro spoke, his words cutting through the room like ice water. "Keep watching them. Put two men on the perimeter of that house. 24/7. If they see so much as a shadow move wrong, I want to know."

Xavier raised a brow. "That’s it? We just watch? Enforcers could show up at that house to collect at any moment, and now we know she’s ducking our own collectors too."

"If they touch her again..." Alessandro didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. The unspoken promise of violence hung like heavy smoke in the air. "They want to collect those loans? They can come to me. And as for the aunt... she belongs to me now. Her debts are my leverage. I'll pay her balance in blood."

Xavier understood perfectly. For once, he didn't make a joke. He simply nodded, a soldier accepting a holy mandate, and slipped out of the room, closing the door soundlessly behind him.

ISABELLA’S POV

Isabella stood in front of the cracked, warped mirror in her tiny bedroom, trying to adjust the collar of her faded clothes. Her fingers were trembling slightly, making the simple task frustratingly difficult.

But her mind wasn't on her classes or the impending dread of walking downstairs to face her aunt.

She was stuck,utterly stuck on him.

On the memory of the sleek, terrifying black car pulling up to her curb. On the oppressive, commanding silence that seemed to follow him like a physical presence.

On those bottomless, midnight eyes that had looked at her for far too long, reading her secrets like they were written in bold ink across her skin.

She pressed her palms flat against her chest, right over her heart, trying to force her breathing to slow down. Her heart was hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

"Why him"

The realization hit her like a splash of freezing water, a knot of confusion and guilt tightening in her stomach. He wasn't just a stranger. He was her best friend's older brother.

The looming, untouchable figure her friend always spoke about in hushed, guarded tones,the one who kept his distance, shrouded in dangerous rumors and absolute power. He was supposed to be a ghost in the background of her life, someone completely out of her orbit.

And yet, his touch had felt entirely too real.

"You’re being stupid," she whispered to her reflection, her voice cracking in the empty room.

"He was just a dangerous man who got lost. He doesn't know you. He doesn't care about you. You're just his sister's friend. You're nothing to someone like that."

But even as the words left her lips, a cold shiver ran down her spine. Downstairs, she could hear the sharp, angry tone of her aunt's voice on the phone, arguing about extensions and percentages, a reminder of the unseen walls closing in on her every single day. She had no idea the receipts of her family's ruin were already sitting on a billionaire mafia boss's desk, that her parents' silent past was a total dead end, or that her aunt had accidentally signed their lives away to the very man she was trying to force out of her head.