My father sold me to the Mafia King

Chapter 401

Jake’s POV

I walked down the narrow gravel pathway leading to the house, my strides heavy and sluggish under the piercing, freezing morning sun. The sheer weight of last night’s exhausting search pressed down ruthlessly on my shoulders, making every step a battle. But the moment I reached the threshold, the blood instantly froze in my veins.

I stopped dead in my tracks, my jaw dropping. The heavy iron lock had been brutally ripped out of its socket, leaving splintered shards of dark wood scattered across the stone porch like raw shrapnel.

I lunged forward, throwing the fractured door open with a violent shove that made it bang against the wall. Panic seized my chest, ripping a desperate shriek from my lungs that shattered the heavy, morbid silence of the house:

"Steve!.. Julie!.. Where the hell are you?!"

I sprinted into the living room, my boots pounding against the floorboards as I violently kicked open the doors to the adjacent bedrooms one after another. In Julie’s room, the blankets were dragged completely off the mattress, pooling onto the floorboards in absolute chaos but there wasn’t a single soul in sight. My hands shook with a violent, uncontrollable tremor as I aggressively fished my phone out of my jeans pocket. My fingers fumbled frantically over the screen, blindly dialing emergency services through a haze of absolute distraction. The moment the line connected, I panted into the receiver, my voice fractured and raw:

"There’s... there’s a kidnapping in the village! My friend and his sister have vanished under suspicious circumstances, and the front door has been brutally smashed open!"

I slammed the phone down onto the kitchen counter and recoiled backward, my spine hitting the cold plaster wall as I struggled to force air into my burning lungs. I anchored my frantic, wild gaze onto the corners of the room. The furniture remained undisturbed, the dry provisions were untouched, and the television still sat perfectly in its place. I clenched my fists tightly. This wasn’t a pathetic, random robbery, damn it.

I began pacing the length of the room with hurried, erratic strides, my fingers tightly gripping my hair as my mind ruthlessly painted the most horrific, lethal scenarios. Where on earth could they have taken them so quickly?

Right in the middle of my spiral, a cautious, highly guarded voice echoed from the ruined threshold downstairs:

"Is anyone inside the house?"

I whipped around, leaping down the wooden staircase three steps at a time. I skidded to a halt at the bottom to find Mike standing there, his face completely drained of color. Behind him loomed Stella, her hand flying to her throat as her eyes scanned the scattered splinters of wood in sheer terror. I marched toward them, my expression completely grim, and breathed out in a hoarse, ragged whisper:

"Mike... they’re completely gone! There isn’t a single trace of them!"

Stella’s eyes dilated in pure, paralyzing shock. She took a sharp step back, slamming her palm flat over her mouth as she gasped out:

"What the hell do you mean by gone, Jake?!"

I buried my fingers into my hair once more, pulling at the strands in a wave of jangling, explosive frustration.

I stepped right into Mike’s space, pointing a shaking finger toward the ruined entrance as I shouted at them:

"The door is completely shattered in the most brutal way possible, as you can clearly see! Yet all of their personal belongings are untouched inside whoever did this didn’t care about a damn thing to steal. Something incredibly filthy happened here last night, that’s for certain!"

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Robert’s POV

Julie’s gaze dropped with agonizing slowness toward the floorboards, where the white pages lay scattered around my leather boots like a blanket of polluted snow. Her chest heaved in rapid, frantic gasps, her hot, shallow breaths escaping her trembling lips as if the very air in the office were suffocating her. She remained paralyzed in dead silence for a few long seconds. But when her green pupils slowly lifted to lock into mine, they were blazing with every single insult and curse her tongue was too terrified to utter.

I caught the stark whiteness of her knuckles as her fists clenched tightly at her sides. **My eyes drifted down to her mouth, tracking a single, tiny bead of crimson blood that welled on her lower lip—**the result of her biting down ruthlessly to suppress an explosive scream.

I leaned forward slightly, resting my chin casually onto the palm of my hand as I swirled my whiskey glass with a slow, rhythmic click, deliberately watching her internal warfare stretch out.

"Are you going to keep standing there like a statue?" I questioned, my voice a freezing calm.

Julie squeezed her eyes shut with defensive force, a single, rebellious tear escaping to trace a path down her pale cheek. She instantly whipped the back of her hand across her face, aggressively smearing the moisture away. Then, with a slow, thoroughly defeated movement, she bent her torso forward.

She dropped heavily onto her knees directly in front of my desk, her trembling hands reaching out to retrieve the scattered documents one by one from right between my boots.

This was precisely what I wanted, wasn’t it? To see her on the ground, thoroughly humiliated, entirely broken under my absolute authority, and paying the price for her pathetic escape. Yet, as I tracked the defeated curve of her spine and watched the loose locks of her hair cascade down to completely mask her face from my view, a strange, razor-sharp irritation scratched at the back of my throat. I reached over, setting my glass down on the wood with a hard, deliberate thud, forcing my features into a tighter slab of ice to strangle that wretched emotion within me.

Her fingers froze completely against the floorboards just as she reached for a sheet of paper resting a mere inch from my toe. She snapped her head upward, her bloodshot green eyes slamming back into my dark pupils. She rasped in a hollow, broken whisper dripping with pure, unadulterated bitterness:

"Do you feel satisfied now? Does this garbage finally feed your sick, pathetic ego?"

I entirely ignored the sudden, sharp pinch in my chest. I leaned my massive frame down over the edge of the mahogany desk, gripping the wooden rim tightly so that my shadow entirely engulfed her kneeling form. I murmured in a tone devoid of any human warmth:

"We haven’t even begun yet, Julie..." I pointed a rigid finger down at the floorboards. "...collect every single page, and resort them from absolute scratch. And remember one thing: the more you complain, the more your time on your knees doubles."

She rose from the floor with agonizing slowness, her knees scraping against the wood. She marched up to the desk and slammed the recovered bundle of papers flat onto the surface with an aggressive force that rattled the pens. Despite the clear brokenness in her eyes, she thrust her chin upward, her posture stiffening with a defiance that refused to die:

"I will arrange them... Sir. I will execute every single command you invent just to save your pathetic ego." She took a half-step forward, entirely erasing the boundary between us, her green eyes blazing with a final, desperate challenge. "But print this into your mind... I am obeying you strictly because you hold my brother’s life in your hands. You will never, ever possess me again."

The muscles along my jaw clenched violently, a dangerous rush of adrenaline tempting me to sweep everything off the desk and shatter it against the wall. Instead, I maintained my mask of absolute stone, slowly raising my hand and pointing a cold, indifferent gesture toward the files. I spoke in a quiet, deadly whisper:

"Words are incredibly cheap, Julie. Get back to work, and do not test the absolute limits of my patience."