Married To The Ruthless Mafia Lord

Chapter 7

Zane’s POV

Courtney had always smelled like expensive things.

Perfume that cost more than most people’s rent, silk sheets that had to be imported, and the kind of quiet entitlement that clung to her even when she slept.

I used to find it attractive. Tonight, lying in the dark with her arm draped over my chest, I found it suffocating.

I moved her arm off me, sat up, and stared at nothing.

Three a.m. The house was dead quiet, except for the low hum of the security monitors down the hall and the distant sound of rain beginning to spit against the windows.

I reached for my phone on the nightstand. Six missed calls from Bruno.

I set it back down.

Bruno had been calling every day since Dad got shot, every time with a different reason. Too much concern, too much checking in.

That was Bruno’s way — hover, hover, hover, until you didn’t even notice his hands were already in your pockets.

Something about it was starting to sit wrong with me.

I stood, pulling on my shirt in the dark, careful not to wake Courtney, and slipped out of the room.

The hallway was dim, only the low emergency lights tracing the floor. I moved through the house the way I always did at night — quietly, deliberately. I knew every creak in this floor, every shadow this building threw. I’d grown up memorizing this place. Sixteen years away hadn’t changed that.

I stopped outside my father’s study.

It had been untouched since the night he was shot. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to go in, and I wasn’t sure if that made me sentimental or just cautious. The two things had started to feel the same lately.

I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The room smelled like him — cigars and sandalwood and old paper. His reading glasses were still folded on the desk like he’d just stepped away. I stood in the center of it and looked around like the room owed me an explanation.

He’d kept something from me.

That much I was sure of. This whole marriage situation, the urgency of it, the way he’d dangled my inheritance over it like bait — my father had never done anything without reason. He was the most calculated man I’d ever known. Which meant there was something about that woman sleeping down the hall that I didn’t know yet.

I sat at his desk, pulled open the bottom drawer, and started going through what my men had already catalogued. Contracts, mostly. Territories. Old photographs.

Then I found a letter.

I’d seen it before — my men had flagged it when they swept the room. One line, no signature, no date, on a torn piece of paper tucked inside a leather notebook:

The girl is the map. Keep her close. Don’t let Bruno near the necklace.

I’d read it four times already. I still didn’t know what to do with it.

The necklace.

The cheap little beaded thing she’d been clutching like a lifeline since she got here. The one I’d told her was too cheap to wear in my house, just to keep her from drawing attention to it. It hadn’t been cruelty for the sake of it — not entirely.

Don’t let Bruno near the necklace.

What the hell did that mean?

I leaned back in the chair, pressing my knuckles against my mouth. Outside, the rain picked up, tapping steadily against the glass like it was trying to tell me something.

My father had known what was in that necklace. And he’d chosen not to tell me directly — he’d only written it down, hidden, like even saying it out loud was a risk.

Which meant he hadn’t fully trusted who was listening.

Even in his own house.

I was still at his desk when I heard it.

A sound. Light footsteps, barely audible, moving past the study door.

I stood without making a sound and stepped out into the hallway.

She didn’t see me at first.

Clara stood at the far end of the corridor near the tall window that overlooked the garden, wrapped in an oversized cardigan, her dark curls loose and wild around her face.

She was holding the necklace up, turning it toward the faint glow of the outside light, studying it the way you study something when you’ve just realized it’s more than what it appeared to be.

She turned it over. Opened the pendant.

I went very still.

She already found it.

I watched her hold the small key between her fingers, turning it carefully, her brows drawn together. She wasn’t scared. She was thinking. Her jaw was set, her shoulders squared, like she was already building a plan around the thing she’d just found — and that, more than anything, was the part that surprised me.

I had expected her to be afraid.

Instead, she looked like she was about to go to war.

She pressed the key against her palm and curled her fingers around it, then tucked it back into the pendant and closed it quietly. When she turned to go back to her room, she stopped dead.

Because I was standing right there.

The silence stretched between us like a wire pulled too tight.

Her eyes went to mine immediately, searching, trying to figure out how long I’d been there and how much I’d seen. I kept my face blank. I was good at blank.

“You’re awake,” I said.

“So are you,” she replied, her voice low but steady. She didn’t look away.

“What were you doing?”

“I couldn’t sleep.” She responded. “What were you doing?”

Bold. I almost respected it.

“This is my house, Clara. I don’t answer that question.”

I took a step forward, and to her credit, she didn’t step back. She stood her ground, chin slightly lifted, fist still pressed against her cardigan where the necklace sat underneath.

“Go back to your room,” I said.

“I was already going.”

She moved past me, close enough that I caught the faint trace of something soft — shea butter, maybe, something warm. Not expensive, nothing from my collection of things. Just her.

I watched her disappear down the corridor without looking back.

The key.

She didn’t know what it opened. That much was obvious. But she was going to try to figure it out — alone, quietly, without telling me.

And the worst part?

I wasn’t going to stop her.

Not yet.

Because if my father was right, whatever that key opened was the same thing Bruno had been circling around since the day Clara walked into this family. And if I moved too quickly, I’d tip my hand before I understood the full game.

For now, I needed her close.

For now, I needed her to trust me just enough to stay put.

I walked back into my father’s study, sat down, and stared at that torn piece of paper again.

The girl is the map. Keep her close. Don’t let Bruno near the necklace.

I didn’t know what Clara was the map to.

But I was starting to think my father had sent her to me not to protect her.

He’d sent her to protect me.