Claimed By The Mafia Don (Ariella and Asher) novel Chapter 252

ASHER

When I woke up the next morning, I was exhausted. My head pounded with a headache so sharp it felt like a punishment, and my body was heavy, as though every muscle remembered last night.

I caught the image of myself in the mirror, my knuckles bruised, the faint ache in my neck a reminder of the fight. Dominic’s face flashed in my mind, bloodied, swollen and for a second, I tried to feel sorry for what I had done.

But there was nothing.

No regret. No guilt. Just a hollow sense of satisfaction. He had betrayed me in the worst way, and I had never once reacted to any of it. Maybe for a moment last night, he had forgotten who I was, what I was capable of. This would serve as a reminder.

I dragged myself into the shower, letting the water pound against me, trying to clear the fog from my head. Afterward, I swallowed two aspirin, sat back on the edge of the bed, and stared at the jacket where I had shoved the papers the night before.

The papers.

I wasn’t a coward. I wasn’t a little bitch who ran from the truth.

I reached into the jacket, pulled them out, and just held them for a few seconds. My hands were steady, but my chest felt like it was full of stones. Then, finally, I unfolded the documents and forced myself to read, forced myself to see whatever truth Luca believed was worth shattering my life over.

I read the papers once. I read them twice. The words sat on the page like lead...familiar, clinical, impossible. For a moment, my eyes traced the lines and understood them; for a longer moment, my brain refused to accept what my hands were holding. My hands trembled.

I called Luca.

He picked up on the first ring. “Yes, Don,” he said, his voice clipped.

“Is this real?” I asked.

“Yes, it’s real, Asher.” Short. Flat. He didn't even ask me what was real. He just knew.

“Did you know?” I pushed.

Not as a friend. Not as a brother. As the Don. As the man whose whole life depended on the answer.

The words slid off him and landed on me like cold rain. Protection. Guilt. Betrayal. All folded into one tidy excuse.

I let the phone fall from my ear and stared at the paper as if it might rewrite itself. The clauses, the signatures, the dates...details that mapped out alliances and promises my father had made. Marriage agreements never lie. Contracts don’t bend.

My chest felt raw. For years I’d carried anger and longing and a dull, stubborn certainty that the small boy, my son....was mine in the way that mattered, not because of ink and bloodlines but because of the way you feel someone inside your bones. I had never allowed myself to doubt that connection. And now doubt crawled in like slow and inevitable.

I could see him....Leon, clearer than anything else in the room. His small fists, the stubborn set of his jaw, the way his eyes held the same stubborn silence I’d always worn. The paper wanted to erase what I knew with my senses. Luca’s evidence wanted to replace feeling with proof. I felt ridiculous for wanting to believe in a look, in a feeling, in a boy who’d stolen all the space in me.

I folded the papers slowly, then slid them back into the jacket. My hands didn’t stop shaking. I poured a drink, then another, and let the burn pull the edge off the noise in my head. Outside the window, the city went on, indifferent, loud, living. Inside, a stack of documents had the power to split my life into pieces.

I thought of Ariella...wet, terrified, bundled in the middle of chaos and of the night that had just been, of the gunfire, of the forest. I thought of Luca’s face when he set the papers down between us in the club, the certainty there, the look of a man who had carried a secret on his shoulders for too long.

I sat on the edge of the bed, the jacket with the papers across my lap, and let the whiskey warm me until the edge of everything dulled. The truth sat there, cold and undeniable. I could let it break me, let it fracture the small, delicate life I was trying to stitch together with Ariella and Leon. Or I could swallow it, hard and sharp, like a pill that would rot me from the inside out.

Either way, nothing would be the same. The papers were not eye-opening. They were a crossroads.