Sold To The Mafia's Boss

Chapter Four:The Woman In Pale Dress

Carmela's POV

Leave.

The note slipped from my fingers and landed face-up on the rug, the dark stain glaring against the cream paper like something still wet. I didn't sleep after that. Every creak in the old estate made me flinch — the settling of old wood, the distant clink of a guard's boots on stone, even the wind finding gaps in the window frames. The elegant handwriting, the rust-colored bloom soaked into the corner of the page — it all felt too personal, too intimate, like whoever wrote it had wanted me to feel their breath on my neck even from a distance. Someone had slipped past Giovanni's security, past the locked door, and stood right beside my bed while I slept. The thought made my skin crawl in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

Fear had gripped me for hours, cold and suffocating, pressing down on my chest until I could barely draw breath. But as the sky outside lightened to a pale, washed-out gray, that fear hardened into something else entirely — pure, burning anger, the kind that made my hands stop shaking and my spine straightened.

I refused to be a sitting target in this golden cage.

I threw on a cotton robe over my nightgown and snatched the note off the floor before I could talk myself out of it. My bare feet were silent on the marble as I moved through the east wing, past portraits whose painted eyes seemed to track me in the half-light. The house felt alive now, watching me. Every shadow along the corridor seemed to breathe in time with my own ragged pulse.

Giovanni's study door stood slightly ajar, a thin blade of lamplight spilling into the hallway. Low voices rumbled inside — his and Enzo's, clipped and urgent. I didn't knock. I pushed the door open and stepped in without waiting to be invited.

Giovanni sat behind the massive oak desk, sleeves rolled up to his forearms, dark circles under his eyes that hadn't been there yesterday. Enzo stood opposite him, a stack of documents fanned across the desk between them. Both men looked up sharply when the door creaked.

I crossed the room without hesitation, my bare feet silent on the rug, and dropped the note onto the desk between them. "Someone left me a gift last night."

Giovanni picked it up. I watched his expression transform in real time — the casual exhaustion sharpening instantly into something colder, his dark eyes narrowing, his jaw tightening into granite the moment he saw the stain bleeding through the paper.

Enzo leaned forward, his voice low. "Where exactly?"

"On my pillow. In my locked bedroom." My voice stayed steady, but I could hear the anger bleeding through every word. "Your security is clearly flawless."

Giovanni's gaze flicked to Enzo, sharp as a blade drawn in a dark room. "How the hell did this happen?"

"No one should have accessed that suite." Enzo's jaw was tight, his composure fraying at the edges. "I posted two men personally. The cameras were running—"

"Review every frame," Giovanni cut in, his voice dropping into something low and absolute. "Lock the estate down. No one in or out. All staff remain on the grounds. Family included. Full sweep of every room, every corridor, every outbuilding. Now."

Enzo nodded once and left, already issuing orders into his radio before he'd even cleared the doorway. The door clicked shut behind him, leaving Giovanni and me alone in the sudden quiet.

He set the note down on the desk carefully, almost reverently, like it might still bleed if handled wrong. "Are you hurt?"

"No." I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly cold despite the robe. "But someone wants me to think I will be. Soon."

He came around the desk, his steps unhurried but deliberate, stopping close enough that I had to tilt my head back to hold his gaze. This close, I could see the tension coiled in his shoulders, the restraint it was costing him to stand still instead of doing something with his hands. "I'm not going to let anything happen to you."

"You keep saying that." My voice cracked despite myself. "You still haven't told me why anyone wants me gone badly enough to leave blood on my pillow while I slept three feet away."

Something flickered behind his eyes — calculation, maybe guilt, maybe both tangled together in a way he didn't want me to see. "Not yet."

"Giovanni—"

"Not yet, Carmela." His voice dropped lower, rougher, edged with something that sounded almost like a plea. "Trust me on this one thing. Please."

I wanted to argue, to push until the walls he kept building around himself finally cracked. Instead, I just stared at him, furious at how badly I wanted to believe he meant it, furious at the way his voice softening made my anger falter even when it shouldn't have.

The family gathered in the main salon an hour later for the lockdown announcement, the air thick with whispers that died the moment Giovanni walked in. He stood like a king at the center of the room, voice clipped and authoritative, every word landing like a verdict. No one was to leave the estate. Extra security had been brought in overnight. Investigations were already underway. The chandeliers overhead seemed to hum with the same tension humming through the room.

Luca leaned against a marble pillar near the window, trying to ease the mood with his usual loose grin. "Forced family time. How romantic. We'll play board games and share our deepest, darkest secrets."

Aunt Valeria's lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. "This is absurd. All this drama over what is probably nothing more than a jealous servant's prank."

"Prank?" I couldn't hide my disbelief, my voice was rising before I could stop it. "Someone left a blood-stained warning on my pillow while I was sleeping."

She gave me a cool, dismissive look, the kind reserved for people she considered beneath the effort of real concern. "Servants have strange ways of expressing themselves, dear. You'll learn that, in time."

Isabella sat near the edge of the room, twisting her hands in her lap, glancing away every single time our eyes happened to meet, her face pale in a way that felt less like fear and more like guilt trying to disguise itself as fear.

Then Elena entered the room — Giovanni's mother, the same woman from the portrait in the east wing, the one whose painted eyes had seemed to follow me. She moved with an elegant, unhurried authority, silver threading through her dark hair, her sharp gaze sweeping the room and cataloguing every face before it settled, briefly, on mine.

Giovanni crossed the room and handed her the note without a word. She read it carefully, her expression composed, controlled — and for one brief, unguarded moment, something unreadable crossed her face. Recognition. Calculation. Something that looked almost like satisfaction before she smoothed it away.

"Troubling," she said softly, passing it back to him with two fingers, as though she didn't want it touching her skin any longer than necessary. Her gaze lingered on me a second too long, long enough that I felt the weight of it settle somewhere behind my ribs.

Enzo returned just as the gathering began to disperse, his expression grim. "We found something near the north tower. One of the night guards — Marco — was attacked. Beaten badly. He came briefly before he passed out again."

Giovanni's entire posture went rigid, his hands curling into fists at his sides. "What did he say?"

They moved together into an adjacent side room, and I followed close enough to hear. Marco lay on a chaise, his face swollen and discolored, one eye nearly shut. His voice came out as a broken, painful rasp.

"Caught someone... sneaking near the east wing." He coughed, wincing. "A woman. Pale dress. Dark hair." Another cough, wetter this time. "She smiled at me right before she hit me again."

A chill raced down my spine, settling cold and absolute in my stomach.

Sleep remained impossible that night, no matter how many times I closed my eyes and tried to force my body into stillness. I paced my room until the walls felt like they were closing in around me, then finally drifted to the tall window overlooking the moonlit gardens below, desperate for air that didn't feel locked in with me.

Below, among the rose bushes, a figure caught my eye and froze me in place.

A woman in a pale, flowing dress, dark hair shifting gently in the breeze, stood utterly still among the hedges — looking up. Straight at my window. Straight, somehow, at me.

I blinked hard, my heart slamming against my ribs. When I looked again, the garden was empty. Nothing but silvered roses and silent fountains, moonlight pooling undisturbed across the grass.

But the uneasy feeling lingered long after, wrapping around me like something that refused to let go.