ACCIDENTAL ALLIANCE

A DARK MAFIA, AGE GAP, SECRET BABY ROMANCE

MAFIA LORDS OF SIN

AJME WILLIAMS

Copyright © 2026 by Ajme Williams

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of authors imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The following story contains mature themes, strong language and sexual situations. It is intended for mature readers only.

All characters are 18+ years of age and all sexual acts are consensual.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ajme Williams writes emotional, angsty contemporary romance. All her books can be enjoyed as full length, standalone romances and are FREE to read in Kindle Unlimited .

Mafia Lords of Sin (this series)

Tangled Loyalties | Savage Devotion | Bulletproof Baby | Cursed Confessions | Borrowed Bride | Hidden Heir | Dangerous Deception | Veiled Vows | Malicious Marriage | Twisted Trust | Feral Fiance | Hostile Husband | Guilty Guardian | Captive Crown | Poisoned Promise | Bound Bride

Vows of Violence

Stolen Bride | Ruthless Claim | Secret Heir

The Dante Dynasty

Banished Sinner | Lawless Protector | Righteous Enforcer | Unforgiving Heir

Bonds of Betrayal

Silent Vows | Forbidden Vengeance | Auctioned Innocence | Twisted Trust | Ignited Secrets

The Naughty List: Mafia Edition

Mafia Daddy’s Christmas Bride | Secret Baby for the Mafia Don | Mafia Prince's Christmas Triplets | Mafia Don's Twin Surprise

Kingdom of Sinners

Crown of Smoke | House of Soot | Throne of Fire | King of Ashes

Dynasty of Deception

Merciless King | Ice Princess | Lost Prince | Stolen Queen | Triplets for the Mafia Prince | The Godfather’s Christmas Twins

Shadows of Redemption Series

Soldier of Death | Queen of Misfortune | Prince of Darkness | Angel of Mercy

Check out Ajme’s full Amazon catalogue here.

Join her VIP NL here.

DESCRIPTION

The ruthless mafia underboss kidnapped me.

He has no idea the little boy he's keeping prisoner... is his son.

Eight years ago, Luca Moretti promised me forever.

Then my father was murdered...

And Luca chose his family over me.

So I disappeared.

Changed my name.

Raised our little boy alone.

I thought the mafia would never find us.

I was wrong.

Now I'm locked inside Luca's compound...

Accused of betraying the very family that destroyed mine.

He watches me.

Protects me.

Claims me with every touch...

Like I never stopped belonging to him.

Then he starts noticing the little boy by my side.

The dark hair.

The familiar stare.

The questions he can't stop asking.

Because the child he thinks belongs to another man...

Is his.

And when Luca finally learns the truth...

No one is taking his woman.

No one is taking his son.

Not even the mafia.

1

ELIO

I stand in the shadowed alcove of the old banquet hall unseen, my eyes roaming the space in front of me leisurely.

Expensive cologne drifts through the room in thick, cloying waves every time another suited man brushes past my hidden spot, each one muskier than the last and pungent enough to sting the back of my throat.

Beneath it comes the sweeter, powdery weight of perfume from the women draped over their arms like jeweled ornaments, all silk skin and rehearsed laughter, their smiles polished to a shine that never quite reaches their eyes.

Lurking beneath their glamour, like a body rotting under freshly poured concrete, is the smell of the food—butter, garlic, seared meat, the salty fragrance of warm hors d’oeuvres balanced on silver trays by waiters who move with their chins tucked low, careful not to meet the eyes of the wolves circling the room.

It is always the same at gatherings like this. Gold on the surface, blood hidden underneath.

The chandeliers hanging overhead cast everything in a honeyed glow, softening the age of the cracked ornate crown molding running along the ceiling and the water stains hidden high in the corners.

From a distance, the hall still looks grand and prestigious, but standing where I am, half swallowed by the dark, I can see the truth.

Time has been chewing away at this place for years now.

The floor beneath their polished shoes warps in places, causing guests to stumble without warning, convincing them that they’ve consumed one too many glasses of champagne before moving on to the next circle of oligarchs to schmooze.

The velvet drapes pulled over the far windows have begun to fray at the hem. Even the marble pillars that line the walls bear hairline cracks if you know where to look.

Beautiful things always tend to break, I’ve found.

Much like the men gathered here who build empires around the illusion of permanence, still believing themselves to be different from their predecessors.

They wrap themselves in their tailored suits, family crests, old names, and expensive women, believing any of it can keep the end from finding them as it does us all.

They laugh too loudly, drink too freely, speak in veiled threats, all the while pretending violence is just another form of diplomacy.

Half this room has ordered killings with those same manicured hands now wrapped around crystal glasses.

I know because I have done worse with mine.

Tonight, I keep them tucked behind my back.

My expression remains unreadable, my shoulders relaxed in a way that if anyone were to glance in my direction, they would find my posture casual.

My father always says calmness frightens people more than rage ever can.

Rage is sloppy and typically predictable, but remaining outwardly unbothered never fails to make most wonder what you are willing to do and how much it might cost them by challenging it.

From my place in the alcove, I have a clean view of nearly the entire hall.

The older families cluster where they always do, near the center of the room where they can be seen.

The ambitious ones hover at the edges, hungry and smiling, desperate for a nod from somebody whose last name carries weight.

The guards are easier to spot than they believe.

Their thick necks, cheap suits stretched over broader frames, eyes that move too often, and hands that stay too close to their jackets are what give them away every time.

A few of them scan the room with veiled discipline, but most are already growing lazy under the haze of music, alcohol, and the false sense of security this place pretends to offer.

Amateurs.

A string quartet plays somewhere off to the left, their music floating through the hall in smooth, elegant notes that barely soften the ugliness of the guests attending this event.

In my opinion, it only makes it feel more obscene.

Violence always has a tendency to wear its nicest face at events like this.

Men toast one another beneath candlelight, then send someone to a basement before sunrise to have their teeth pulled out one by one for speaking to the wrong contact and fumbling a deal.

I let out a short breath before rolling my shoulders back.

I know if I were to step out into the light, all eyes would fall on me immediately.

At thirty-three, this city already knows my name like a prayer it fears whispering too loudly, superstitiously believing invoking it would lead to an automatic death sentence.

Elio Conti—my family’s underboss, my father’s right hand.

The man sent when negotiations fail and examples need to be made. In the streets, in the clubs, in back rooms where men swear loyalty with one hand and hide knives behind their backs with the other.

My name travels ahead of me like the smell of smoke before the sight of fire.

People hear it and lower their voices, they straighten in their seats and think twice before pulling the trigger.

I am the blade that never misses.

The cold-blooded son of a dynasty old enough to have roots in every judge’s pocket and every ballot box that matters.

Men twice my age flinch when I enter a room because they know I have buried men older, richer, and more protected than they are.

They know I do not bluff.

They know I learned young that hesitation gets you killed and mercy is never an option.

Fear is a useful language in this city.

Women, I’ve found, feel it too, though usually in a different dialect.

The smart ones avoid my eyes entirely, sensing the violence in me the way prey animals sense a predator lurking nearby.

The foolish ones are the ones who linger.

They smile too long and brush past me in dresses that cost more than most people make in a month.

They let their perfume trail behind them like an invitation, thinking danger can be flirted with, seduced, made gentle by a soft mouth and a willing body.

They look at me the way moths circle a live flame, dazzled by the heat, too stupid to understand that fire does not love what it burns.

Normally, none of it touches me.

Indifference has always clung to me like a second skin.

However, tonight, that armor has begun to wane.

Because she is here.

Even thinking her name feels dangerous. Like pressing on a bruise I know better than to keep touching.

From across the banquet hall, I track her without meaning to when she finally comes into view.

The disciplined part of myself that should know better by now refuses to cooperate.

This room is full of threats and shifting alliances that could redraw the shape of this city by morning.

Ones I should be paying attention to. Any other night, that is exactly what I would be doing. Instead, my eyes find her and refuse to turn away.

They always do.

Isabella Russo moves through the banquet hall like she is made of light while the rest of us are shadows only lucky enough to be brushed by it before once again being draped in darkness.

Eyes follow her, not because she is trying to be noticed but because no one in this room could stop themselves from doing so even if they tried.

The chandeliers above her catch her long chestnut hair, turning the loose waves down her back into ribbons of warm bronze and amber.

Every time she turns her head, the light shifts with her like it belongs to her more than the ceiling it hangs from.

Her eyes roam over the room with far more awareness than a girl her age should possess.

My hands tighten behind my back before I can stop them.

They are a problem all on their own.

They have never looked at me like everyone else does, nor do they flinch like they’re supposed to.

When those honey-gold irises land on me, it feels less like being admired and more like being known.

There are few things in this life I hate more than the possibility of someone seeing beneath the armor I have spent decades forging, yet from her I crave it.

She is wearing a soft cream dress tonight.

It clings to her slim frame in a way that is almost innocent and makes her seem graceful rather than fragile.

A vision of femininity polished to perfection, all soft curves and elegant restraint.

I know she’s wearing it because I’m here. Not because she has ever told me she wears anything for me. She hasn’t.

Isabella is far too careful for that, and I am much too dangerous to deserve a confession so honest even if she had felt inclined to tell me.

But I know.

I know she wears it only for me.

Maybe that is arrogance, some kind of self-destructive vanity men like me are born with and punished for later.

But I know it all the same with cold certainty because I remember every shade of fabric she has ever worn in my presence, every color, every hemline, every silhouette that has ever draped over her body and made something inside me grow taut and wild.

I remember the deep green silk from the winter fundraiser a year ago, the one that made her look older until she smiled and ruined the illusion completely.

I remember the pale blue dress from a summer dinner at her father’s estate, deceptively modest, that should have been forgettable on anyone else and somehow became unforgettable on her.

I remember black lace peaking out from underneath her cocktail gown once, only a hint of it beneath the tight bodice wrapped around her chest, and how that tiny glimpse of what she had been hiding underneath occupied my mind for three goddamn days like a bullet lodged too close to my brain to remove.

That is the problem with Isabella.

Every image, every single detail about her, embeds itself into my brain stem.

She enters a room and my mind turns into a treacherous minefield, cataloging her with the same ruthless precision I use for my enemies.

Only with her, the instinct is not tactical. It is worse.

It is hunger twisted into need, a private collection of moments I should have discarded and instead have hoarded like a desperate man locking contraband in a safe for his next fix.

She has always had this effect on me, taken every disciplined and carefully sharpened instinct in my body and turned it into something far more reckless.

It is a bone-deep hunger that gnaws at me day and night. My hands itch to touch her.

Not to hurt her, but because I want to drag her out of this room, out of the reach of every gaze lingering too long, out from under her father’s umbrella, out of the game she was born into before it finishes swallowing her whole, and pin her to the nearest surface so I can rip that soft cream fabric off her and see whether she would still look so composed with my hands on her body and my name in her mouth.

Isabella is far too smart to have missed what happens to me when she is near.

Maybe not fully, because I would rather cut off my own hand than let anyone witness me stripped that bare, but enough to know she affects me.

I think some part of her likes knowing.

Because if she truly understands the effect she has on me, then every dress becomes a provocation disguised as elegance, a private message passed across a crowded room with no one else aware a conversation is even taking place.

It means this is no longer one-sided torment, no longer just me standing in the dark wanting what I should never touch.

It means she has been standing in the fire too.

That thought makes my jaw tighten.

All I can think about is ruin—not hers but mine. That is the sickness that lives within me, the contradiction I can’t help but want and crave. It is my one fatal flaw.

I watch as Amos Russo’s arm drapes across her shoulders in a gesture that would look paternal to anyone watching casually, but I know better than to mistake possession for tenderness in rooms like this one.

A man like Amos does very little without purpose.

Even affection becomes strategy when hoarding power is the family business.

He keeps her close, not only because she is his daughter, but because she is valuable.

She is beautiful, well-bred, clever enough to be useful, and young enough to still be placed where she can strengthen political ties, repair alliances, or settle debts dressed up as marriage.

The thought blackens my mood instantly.

At nineteen, she should not be here.

She is too young, too bright for the rot wandering around on the marble floors and under the glittering chandeliers.

These halls do not preserve innocence. They stain it, feed on it, and Isabella, for all her intelligence, still carries something in her that has not yet been fully corrupted.

I do not know whether that makes me want to protect it or possess her before someone crueler gets the chance to.

Maybe both.

Then, as if she feels the weight of my stare, her gaze shifts and finds mine.

Something dark and hot unfurls in my chest. It spreads slowly like ink dropped into water.

Around everyone else, desire is simple, a bodily urge with an expiration date. Around her, it becomes something with teeth that sinks in deep and refuses to let go.

Suddenly, I am no longer the city’s most feared weapon, no longer the underboss to one of the most dangerous families on this coast.

For one single moment, I am simply a man standing in the dark wanting something he should never touch.

And worse than the wanting is the waiting. Because that is what this has become between us, hasn’t it?

A long, silent war of glances and restraint.

A series of half-seconds stretched into hours-long torture as I wait for her to look at me.

Waiting for the slightest invitation I can pretend is enough of an excuse to take what I want.

She only holds my gaze from across the banquet hall, her expression composed.

The noise of the room dulls around the edges as laughter turns tinny and far away, and men speaking in low tones about shipments and votes and territory all but vanish.

None of it matters.

Not when her eyes are on me like that, steady and unflinching, fully aware of what looking at me does and choosing to do it anyway.

Then she turns toward her father, leaning in to murmur something in his ear.

Amos glances down at her briefly, too distracted by whatever political parasite is hovering at his shoulder to give her much attention.

He only gives her a brief nod before turning his focus away from her again, and just like that, she slips out from beneath his arm.

My pulse kicks once, hard enough to feel in my throat.

She glides through the crowd without haste, moving as though she is stepping out for a breath of fresh air.

The room moves for her without hesitation, stepping aside as polite smiles are thrown her way.

She leaves no obvious trail of where she is going, yet every instinct in me strains to follow her like a dog that has scented blood.

I wait long enough to know no one is watching, then I go, drawn by the invisible thread wrapped around my neck like a leash.

The corridor beyond the banquet hall is quieter, lined with gilded mirrors and oil paintings of dead men. By the time I find her, the venue feels like another world entirely.

The room she is in has been abandoned.

It is a private sitting room, perhaps once used for receiving favored guests before the main event.

Now it sits empty and moonlit, heavy drapes left half open over floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the gardens at the back of the property.

Silver light spills across polished floors and antique furniture with a cool tone.

Beyond the glass, a fountain glimmers in the center of the grounds, its waters catching the moon and breaking it into a thousand trembling shards.

She stands with her back to the door, unmoving as if she has been expecting me all along.

The door closes behind me without a sound until the lock gives a soft, decisive click against the jamb to announce my presence.

She remains facing the windows, her gaze fixed on the gardens beyond, her arms pulled loosely around her body.

From where I stand, I can see the rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathes, entirely too calm for a girl alone in a locked room with a man like me.

It should irritate me, that calm. Instead, it wrecks me. Fear, at least, would put distance between us. It would keep me in check.

I cross the room slowly, feeling the distance closing like a hand around my throat.

My shoes make no sound against the rug, but she must sense me anyway the same way she had back at the banquet hall.

I stop a few feet behind her, close enough to smell her perfume.

“Running from the old men already, Principessa?” The endearment slips out of my mouth before I can stop it, and I almost curse myself for the weakness of it.

It is ironic, really, that the name has always stuck when Isabella is anything but fragile.

She is no sheltered doll to be placed on a shelf and admired from a safe distance.

There is steel in her.

Intelligence that cannot be dismissed.

A quiet defiance that does not bend to men like me.

But the word still tastes right on my tongue when I look at her.

She turns slowly, and that honey-gold gaze locks on me.

Up close, there is no buffer of a crowded room and public decorum to scrutinize us.

Here, there is only her face highlighted by moonlight, her eyes bright and her mouth curving upward with the kind of smile that should come with a warning label.

“Shouldn’t I be saying that to you?” she asks.

I exhale once through my nose, the sound almost a laugh and not nearly as amused as it sounds. “I was not the one who disappeared from her father’s side while he was making his rounds.”

“No. But you were the one staring at us like you wanted to set us on fire. Planning on taking us out once nobody was looking?” The bluntness of her tone lands like a match dropped into dry grass.

For a second, I just look at her.

Most women would not dare say something like that to me.

The smart ones would keep the accusation buried beneath flirtation.

The cautious ones would never acknowledge it at all. Isabella has never belonged to either category, unfortunately.

She says the dangerous thing simply because it is true and because she knows I can never decide whether I want to silence her for it like I do with anyone else or drag her closer until she says worse.

“Or maybe,” she says, tilting her head just slightly, her eyes narrowing, “you were staring our way for an entirely different reason…”

“Careful,” I murmur, taking another step forward. “You should know better than to romanticize me.”

A flicker of amusement touches her expression. “Would the observation be inaccurate?”

Christ.

I should leave.

That thought arrives clear and sensible and utterly useless the second it forms because my body has already chosen otherwise.

My eyes drag over her face down to the elegant line of her throat. It’s there that I see the faint fluttering of her pulse.

It’s too quick for someone pretending to be so calm.

So, she is affected.

The discovery gives me no peace at all, however, only adding another layer of temptation to drown beneath.

I wonder what else about her is betraying the poise she wears so beautifully.

Is her breathing this steady by force, or are her hands aching to touch something the way mine do?

Whether she has any idea how close I am to forgetting every rule that has kept this from becoming a catastrophe is rapidly becoming irrelevant.

“Did you come here to see if I would follow?” I ask, my voice barely above a murmur.

Her lashes lower just enough to suggest thought, though we both know she already has an answer being held back on the tip of her tongue. “Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

Her chin lifts. Defiant little thing. “Why?”

Heat flares low in my gut.

I close the distance between us in two strides instead of answering her question, my hand fitting around her throat to use to back her against the wall behind her next to the windows.

We’re close enough now that her perfume fills my lungs. It’s light and floral with an undercurrent of warmth like cloves.

My hand flexes, just once, as I fight the urge to lean down and tease her mouth with my teeth.

Lust is simple.

It is controllable, a bodily need that comes and goes like bad weather.

What I feel when I look at Isabella is something else entirely, something more corrosive.

It lingers, festers, makes me restless in my own skin no matter what I do to purge myself of it.

“Careful,” I murmur again. My hand rises from her throat to brush a stray lock of chestnut hair behind her ear. My fingers linger there, tracing the delicate shell of her ear. “A girl like you shouldn’t play with men like me.”

Her breath catches, but she doesn’t pull away. Instead, she leans into the touch. “And what kind of man are you tonight, Elio Conti?”

The kind who is about to break every rule drilled into him since he could hold a gun, I want to say.

Instead, I cup her face and tilt her head to the side.

My lips brush along the spot just below her ear, relishing in the shiver that rolls through her body from the contact. “The kind who’s going to fuck you until you forget why you ever thought this was a bad idea.”

She laughs softly.

Her hands come up to fist in my shirt, pulling me closer. “Then stop talking and do it.”

I can never deny her anything.

My mouth crashes down onto hers.

2

ELIO

Her lips are soft, yielding in a way that makes my blood roar.

She is soft in the way I knew she would be and still, somehow better than anything I imagined, giving in to me just enough to make the blood rushing through my ears suddenly surge straight down to my cock, coaxing something primitive inside me to lift its head and bare its teeth.

She tastes like the wine from dinner and something sweeter, something uniquely belonging to Isabella.

A taste I could spend a lifetime chasing and still never have enough of. The realization hits me so hard, it draws a low groan from deep in my chest, rough and involuntary.

I deepen the kiss before the thought can settle and caution can drag me backward and remind me what a terrible idea it is to give in like this.

My free hand slides to the small of her back. The other remains locked around her face.

My palm spreads over her spine and I pull her flush against me, my cock giving a hard jerk the moment her body fits against mine.

Christ.

The contact is brutal in its perfection.

Her slim curves mold against my broader frame, obliterating every ounce of self-control and reminding me of every sleepless night I’ve spent thinking about what it would feel like to have this exact collision.

She feels made for my hands, for my mouth.

The thought is possessive enough to shame me, but shame has no place left in me now. Not with her mouth opening under mine and my tongue curling against hers until she moans.

When we break apart, her cheeks are flushed, lips swollen from mine, and those amber-flecked eyes are dark with want.

“Come with me,” I tell her. The words are not a request.

She nods once, trusting in a way that should terrify me for her. It does in a way, but not enough to stop me from pulling her away from the wall and taking her hand in mine, lacing our fingers to prevent her from pulling away.

I lead her out of the small room and through a side exit of the venue, the cool night air of the city wrapping around us slowly.

My car waits in the back parking lot, it black armored exterior catching the faint moonlight overhead.

I open the door for her, watching as she slides in with that graceful ease she always carries, and then join her behind the wheel.

We drive in silence as the city lights streak past us in blurred ribbons of gold and white, the whole world outside the windshield dissolving into motion. The engine hums low in the background.

Neither of us speaks.

Everything that needed saying had already been done, so just by the single look she gave me inside that moonlit room and in the way she let me lead her out without protest and settled into the passenger seat beside me with that same maddening certainty.

My hand leaves the wheel long enough to move across the center console and find her thigh.

The moment my palm settles there, a dark satisfaction curls through me when she doesn’t push it away.

My fingers tighten once, squeezing just enough to feel the shape of her beneath them.

Her fingers wrap around mine.

There is nothing timid in the gesture as her thumb traces idle patterns over my knuckles, slow and absentminded on the surface, yet each light stroke sends another sharp current racing straight down to my cock until my grip on the wheel tightens hard enough to ache.

“Where are we going?” she finally asks.

“Somewhere no one will look for us,” I answer automatically.

Where we are going is my private apartment, a place no one knows about. I have never brought anyone there before—lover, ally, not even family.

It exists outside the usual map of my life, a place carved out in secret from the demands of the city and the endless reach of my name. It is not home, but it is the closest thing I allow myself to a reprieve.

The building itself is forgettable by design, tucked into a quiet residential pocket far from the neighborhoods my family owns.

We pull into the private garage beneath the building, my tires whispering over the well-maintained concrete before I guide the car into its designated space.

The second the engine cuts, the silence that follows is nearly deafening.

Only the faint ticking of the cooling engine and the sound of my own pulse beating too hard keep my ears from ringing.

When I look over at Isabella, she is watching me. That honey-gold gaze slides from eye to eye as she reads me.

Her lips part slightly, but whatever thought crosses her mind stays there.

I get out first and come around to open her door.

The garage light paints her in muted shadow, softening nothing about the effect she has on me.

She places her hand in mine as she steps out, and that simple trust nearly undoes me more than any flirtation could. I close my hand around her fingers and lead her toward the private elevator without a word.

The ride up is brief. The doors open directly into the apartment. Inside, it’s sparsely decorated.

Dim light spills across hardwood floors and the few pieces of furniture I’ve bothered to furnish the space with. She steps inside and turns slightly, taking it in.

For one absurd second, I wonder what she sees when she looks around.

Not just at the apartment, but at the part of me that this exposes.

As soon as the door closes behind us, whatever little restraint I had left snaps.

I move before thought can interfere, pulling her to me again and kissing her harder this time.

She meets me with equal fire, her hands shoving my jacket off my shoulders, fingers working at the buttons of my shirt.

I back her toward the bedroom, lifting her easily when we reach the threshold of it. Her legs wrap around my waist instinctively, and I groan at the searing heat of her core pressed right against the thick bulge straining in my pants.

We tumble onto the only piece of furniture in the room, a massive king-sized bed, in a tangle of limbs and desperate touches.

Her dress rides up around her hips, one delicate shoulder strap slipping down to reveal the soft swell of her breast and those faint freckles that dust her light olive skin.

They trail lower, disappearing beneath black lace, and I lose my mind at the sight of them.

I kiss every single one I can reach, slow, open-mouthed kisses that turn into bites and sucks, marking her as mine.

Mine.

After fucking weeks of stolen glances and subtle teasing that I had convinced myself I’d been reading into, she’s finally underneath me where she belongs.

“Elio…” She breathes out my name, her fingers threading through my hair, tugging just hard enough to make me hiss.

I strip her slowly despite the inferno raging in my veins. I want to savor this, memorize every inch I’ve been stupid enough to deny myself of touching and tasting.

Her dress pools on the floor when I finally strip her of it and her lace bra—fuck, the same black set that has haunted me since I caught a glimpse of it—comes into full view.

I peel it away reverently, groaning at the sight of her perfect breasts, nipples already tight and begging for my mouth on them.

“Do you have any idea,” I rasp, cupping one in my hand, squeezing with just enough pressure to make her back arch off the mattress, “what you do to me?”

She moans in response.

I lean down and suck her nipple into my mouth, flicking my tongue over the sensitive peak while my thumb teases the other.

Isabella moans again, the sound making my cock throb painfully. Her hands fist tighter in my hair, holding me to her as I devour her like a starving man.

I move lower, kissing down the delicate trail of freckles across her ribs and stomach until I reach the edge of her lace panties.

I hook my fingers in the waistband and drag them down her legs, leaving her completely bare beneath me.

For a moment I just stare, drinking her in. Her pussy is glistening, so fucking wet for me, it makes my mouth water.

“Such a pretty thing you are,” I murmur.

I spread her thighs wide and settle between them, dragging my tongue slowly up her slit. Isabella cries out, her hips jerking against my mouth to grind against it. I growl and pin her down with one forearm across her lower belly, then feast on her like she’s the last meal I’ll ever have.

Long, deep licks quickly move to swirling around her swollen clit. I take two fingers to circle them around her dripping hole before sliding them both inside her, curling them until her entire body jerks again.

I want to savor her.

I want to ruin her for anyone else.

I pump my fingers in a steady, punishing rhythm while my tongue works her clit without mercy.

Her walls flutter and clench around my fingers, getting wetter with every stroke. I add a third finger, stretching her wide, preparing her for my cock, and she shatters hard on my tongue with a sharp cry.

“Elio!” Her thighs tremble violently around my head.

But I don’t stop. I keep nursing her through it, drawing out every pulse and shudder until she’s gasping and whimpering.

I don’t give her time to recover.

I sit back on my heels, licking her taste from my lips.

My cock is aching, heavy and leaking as I shove my pants down just enough to free it. It jerks hard in my fist when I wrap my fingers around the thick length and line myself up at her entrance. In one brutal thrust, I bury myself completely inside her.

She lets out a loud cry.

“Fuck,” I groan. She’s so tight, so hot, so damn wet, clenching around me like she never wants to let go of me.

I start to move, keeping my strokes deep and devastating, rocking the entire bed with every thrust.

I claim her over and over, stretching her wide around my cock, filling her completely until there’s no room left for anything but me.

My hand grips her hip hard enough to leave marks I want her to feel for days after this is over.

The other is braced beside her head as I fuck her with every second of pent-up lust and raw obsession I’ve had for her since the first moment I laid eyes on her over a year ago.

Each time I slam into her, I grind my pelvis against her clit with every stroke.

Her hands move under my shirt and her nails rake down my back, her legs locking tightly around my waist as she meets me thrust for thrust, riding my cock like she owns it.

“This pussy was fucking made for me,” I growl. “Only me. No one else will ever have you like this. Say it.”

“Oh, fuck,” she gasps, her honey-gold eyes glassy with pleasure. “Only yours, Elio…”

I drive into her deeper, the wet sound of our bodies slapping together filling the room along with her broken moans.

When she comes again, her walls pulse and flutter around my cock like a vise.

I follow her over the edge with a savage groan and bury myself as deep as I can go and spill inside her, pulse after pulse, filling her with everything I have.

I roll before I collapse on top of her, sweat-slicked and breathing hard, and drag her close again.

For a few long moments, we lie there in the quiet. Beyond the windows, the city breathes in restless pulses. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wails and fades.

She is draped over me like she’s done this a thousand times.

The thought should unsettle me, should raise every instinct that has kept me hard and untouchable all these years. Instead, it sinks into me with a dangerous kind of ease.

One arm is curled loosely around her waist, my hand stroking down the length of her back in slow, possessive passes I do not even bother trying to disguise.

The gesture is mindless now, nearly instinctive.

As if some part of me has already decided she is mine to soothe, mine to keep close, mine to touch until the tension finally drains from her body.

Even now after I have had her, the possessiveness does not ease. If anything, it has simply deepened its claws in me. I should be sated by now, restored to whatever version of control I walked into that banquet hall wearing before she unmade it.

Instead, I feel stripped raw, every nerve inside me still lit up and humming.

Her fingers move across my chest with far more care than a man like me has any right to receive, tracing the scars littered across my skin—old ones first, a thick, pale line near my ribs from a knife slashed across me during a bar brawl when I was seventeen and stupid enough to think rage made me invincible.

The smaller notch below my collarbone is next, a stab wound that should have killed me if the man holding the blade had steadier hands.

Then the newer ones, the harsher, meaner marks left by bullets, are the ones her fingers pause over.

The marks are evidence that violence does not come from those proving themselves in alleyways after a night out drinking and a few impulsive exchanges, but from grown men waging war under family names with the desire for power grabs.

Her touch over them is feather-light, almost reverent. That softness does something unbearable to my heart.

I stare up into the dark at my ceiling, trying to understand how I have ended up here flat on my back in my private apartment with a woman curled up against me, letting her fingers drift across every piece of my brutal personal history that has been carved into my skin over and over as if she has all the time in the world to learn it.

What is it about Isabella that has always unraveled me so easily?

It has only been a year and a half since she came into my orbit. Eighteen months, to be exact.

A blink by the standards of men like me who measure life in wars, shifting alliances, and funerals.

And yet it feels longer than that by miles… as though she has been lodged beneath my skin for years, irritating and intoxicating in equal measure and impossible to remove.

I remember the exact second I saw her and she stopped being a background figure and became an actual fucking problem.

She had been standing near one of the back terraces at a dinner between our families, shrouded in shadow and listening to a conversation she was clearly not meant to be included in.

Most girls her age would have looked bored or intimidated by the things being discussed. Isabella, instead, looked thoughtful, picking apart every little detail.

Approaching her had been a mistake, but my curiosity had gotten the better of me. Amos Russo’s only daughter had only ever been another pretty girl draped in expensive fabric and jewels, trailing behind the powerful men in her family, in my mind.

I had absolutely no idea what I’d be getting myself into when she first turned those honey-gold eyes on me.

No woman should have that kind of power over me.

And yet… she does.

The irrationality of it makes me feel weak in ways bullets never could. I know how to handle threats and men who come at me with blades and bravado. I know how to solve problems in permanent, efficient ways.

But this? This gnawing pull toward a woman I should have kept far from myself the second I understood what she was becoming to me? There is no clear solution for it.

Distance has only made it worse. Restraint turned it obsessive.

Every attempt to starve myself has somehow only deepened the hunger.

I exhale slowly.

“You make me want things I shouldn’t,” I admit into the darkness, the words slipping out before I can cage them.

The second the words are out, I almost regret them. Not because they are untrue but because they are the most honest thing I have said in a very long time.

She lifts her head up to rest her chin on my chest, eyes searching mine. “Like what?”

My jaw tightens.

I am rapidly realizing this is not just sex.

Maybe it never was with her.

She makes me want what I was raised to believe would get me killed, a life outside of my family’s syndicate where mornings belong to no one but us.

Where locks on doors are not for strategy, but for privacy between us. She makes me want to keep her, protect her, to choose tenderness when violence has always come more naturally to me.

She makes me want… peace, and I do not know what to do with that.

“I don’t know,” is what I find myself saying.

Men like me only know how to hunger for power. For the cold satisfaction of watching rivals choke on their own arrogance. Those wants are simple, clean in their brutality. They fit the world I was born into.

Peace simply does not.

It is softer, stranger, even. It asks a man to imagine surviving without the armor that made him.

To picture a life built around waking up and not immediately reaching for the part of himself shaped to kill at a moment’s notice.

She watches me for a long while. Her fingers move up to my chest, her palm splaying over my heart.

The contact is warm, more intimate than anything else we have done tonight. “You do know, Elio.”

My jaw tightens again.

The simple certainty in her voice hits harder than if she had demanded an answer outright.

She is not guessing with this. She is telling me she knows the truth with the quiet confidence of someone who has already seen it written all over my face.

I should take it back, pretend I only meant the obvious hunger between us that is the physical want, the easier vice.

But I cannot seem to force the lie out.

Not with her hand still resting over my heart and her eyes silently daring me to confess what is already on the tip of my tongue.

I lift a hand, brushing my fingers along the side of her face.

My knuckles skim her cheek, my thumb drifting down to her lower lip, still swollen from my kisses, still carrying some visible evidence of my lack of restraint.

The sight of that mouth should drag me back toward hunger. Instead, it drags something deeper out of me.

“A future where I’m not just an underboss,” I say quietly, swallowing thickly. The words feel heavy the moment they leave me, each one a stone dropping into dark water, disappearing quickly beneath the rippling surface. “But… a husband. A father.”

The confession hangs between us for one terrifying moment.

No gun has ever made me feel this exposed before. This is the most honest I have ever been in my whole life.

Not just with her but with myself, too.

I have thought about pieces of it before this, passing fantasies I crushed under the heel of reason the second they appeared.

The image of a woman beside me at a table that belongs only to us and a child asleep in her arms, my name spoken not in fear but with love, have all been nothing more than impossible desires that I have always dismissed for what they were, weakness dressed up as longing.

Except hearing it out loud, stripped of all excuses, I realize it has never been that.

It has been grief in advance for a life I assumed I would never be allowed to have.

She smiles then, the expression so soft, it almost hurts to look at.

She rises from where she has been resting against me and leans over, her hair brushing over my chest, her mouth finding mine in a kiss that is nothing like the desperate hunger from earlier.

This one is slower and more tender. When she pulls back, her forehead lingers on mine.

Her voice is barely above a murmur when she says, “Then take it, Elio. We could build a future together without all of this. We don’t have to be stuck being tied to what our families want forever.”

I stare at her.

For a second, I do not speak because I… can’t.

Nothing has ever hit me the way these few simple words do. Not because they are naive.

Isabella is far from that.

She knows the cost of what she is asking for—our bloodlines, our syndicates, our fathers who have planned our futures well before either of us were ever born.

She knows what would happen if either of our families understood the depth of what has taken root between us tonight.

And still… she says it anyway.

For the first time in my life, I actually believe it may be possible.

Suddenly, I cannot remember why I ever thought the path before me was the only one that existed.

My older brother has always been my father’s heir, not me.

And now I can see with terrifying clarity that walking away from the syndicate and letting my father’s empire continue without me would only lead to a minor fallout.

I could see myself giving up everything for her and taking her somewhere the names Conti and Russo mean nothing except for what we choose to make of them.

I could do it if it meant keeping her in my arms like this.

That thought should fill me with shame and reflexive contempt that I have always reserved for men who lose empires over women.

Instead, it fills me with something quieter and far more dangerous.

Hope.

I look at her, really look at the steadiness in her eyes and the confident certainty she is offering me as what I can only perceive as a lifeline.

In this very moment, I would burn down every expectation placed on my shoulders if that was the price of keeping her.

“Walk away with me,” she whispers.

I have inherited expectations so heavy, they might as well have been shackles forged into my bones.

I have been told since boyhood what belongs to me, what I am owed, what I am meant to protect, expand, and eventually pass on.

None of it has ever touched me like this.

None of it has ever made me look at the woman in my bed and feel my entire body revolt at the idea of stepping away from her warmth.

Here, in the dark, she is only Isabella.

Not Amos Russo’s daughter, not a bargaining chip wrapped in cream silk and family expectations or the dangerous temptation I should have crushed the moment I understood what she could become to me.

Just Isabella.

Mine, some savage part of me whispers.

My hand slides to the back of her neck, holding her there gently. “Okay.”

For the first time, I can see an edge beyond the empire.

And on the other side of it, I see only her.

3

ELIO

The call comes at 3:17 a.m.

The muted vibration of my phone skittering somewhere across the hardwood floor is a persistent mechanical hum beneath the heavier quiet of the apartment.

The screen throws a dim, fractured glow up the side of the bed and across the ceiling, pale enough to look almost ghostly from where it lies half under the foot of the bed.

For a second, I do not move.

I lie there on my back with Isabella draped against me, the warmth of her body still sunk deep into mine after hours spent tangled together in the sheets.

Her leg is hooked lazily over mine.

One arm is curled across my ribs. Her hair is spread over my arm while her cheek rests against my chest, using it as a pillow.

The faint scent of her perfume carries beneath the musky remnants of sex.

The phone keeps vibrating, nearly making me sigh. Reality always knows when to intrude at the worst of times.

I close my eyes for half a second and exhale through my nose, already irritated by the simple fact of being needed.

There is always another demand, another problem requiring a firm hand and a cold mind.

Another late-night call most likely demanding blood be spilled or money collected. Maybe both.

Tonight, instead of purpose forcing me to rise from the warmth of my bed, resentment keeps me still.

For the first time in my life, I have something I do not want to part from.

When the vibrating stops, plunging the apartment into silence once again, I let my eyes slowly drift shut.

The absence of the sound feels like a small mercy I’m rarely ever granted. Whatever it is can wait until morning.

Sleep begins to creep back in at the edges of my thoughts.

The tension in my shoulders slowly starts to unwind once more, dragged down by the steady cadence of Isabella’s breathing and the residual ache of spent desire in my bones.

Then the phone starts vibrating again.

The sound rips through the room with the persistence of a barking dog, somehow louder this time.

The cold glow of the screen flares once more against the ceiling, flashing through my closed eyelids like a signal fire.

This time, I do sigh.

That is how it always works, though, isn’t it?

Every good thing in my life has always arrived with the shadow of consequence close behind it.

Peace never stays unpunished, desire never comes easily.

And love, if that is what this is shaping itself into, is probably the most dangerous indulgence of all to give in to.

For one wild second, I consider smashing the goddamn phone against the wall.

Watch the screen shatter and the call die unanswered on the other end before I drag Isabella closer against me and choose oblivion over obligation just this once.

The fantasy is brief and probably the clearest evidence yet that she is changing me in ways I do not entirely understand.

It is harder than it should be to disentangle myself, not because she’s particularly heavy, but because I simply don’t want to.

The sheets whisper around us as I shift and move with the slow, controlled precision I normally reserve for drawing a weapon in a crowded room.

The last thing I want to do is wake her.

She looks too peaceful like this, her face softened by sleep, her mouth parted slightly to breathe me in slowly.

The sight of her untouched by tension feels rare enough to guard.

There is no watchful edge to her like usual, no sharp, assessing eyes latching onto every detail in the room to dissect. It has all been put aside for a few stolen hours of rest, ones I know she desperately needs as much as I have.

She stirs for only a moment, shifting into the warmth I have left behind as if her body notices my absence before her mind ever could.

Even half asleep, she reaches for where I was only moments ago. When she settles again, she murmurs something soft in her sleep.

The sound is too faint to make out, little more than a breath shaped around a word, but it is intimate in the most brutal way, that small, unconscious sound.

More intimate than the gasps I dragged from her hours ago. More than the way she clung to me when pleasure stripped all the poise from her.

I cannot help myself as I lean over and press a kiss to her temple, my mouth lingering for a second longer than necessary.

Her skin is warm beneath my lips and she smells like sleep and sex and the faint trace of her perfume still clinging stubbornly to her hair.

For these few suspended seconds, I ignore the rest of the world entirely. When the vibration finally silences, the apartment falls still again.

Half of me is tempted to let the call go unanswered.

To slide back beneath the sheets and gather her into my arms again before the warmth fades from the place where I had been.

To pull her against my chest and bury my face in her hair and steal another hour, maybe two, before the life waiting outside these walls pulls me away from her again.

It is a seductive thought.

A stupid one.

It vanishes the moment the vibrating stirs the quiet once again.

Now it is no longer easy to dismiss as a drunken nuisance or some underling too incompetent to finish a job.

Whoever is trying to contact me, especially this late, must be important.

In my world, people do not keep calling at three in the morning unless something has already gone very, very wrong.

That is enough to force me to step away from the bed.

I bend and rifle through the discarded heap of my clothes scattered across the floor, my hand brushing past my shirt, my belt, the dark slacks I had peeled off in too much of a hurry earlier once we finally settled down for the evening.

Finally, my fingers close around it.

When I turn it over, the screen grows dark again in my hand.

For a second, I see nothing but my own reflection faintly ghosted across the black glass, bare-chested and disheveled in the dim light, looking less like the Conti underboss and more like a man caught between two worlds.

Then I tap my thumb against the screen, forcing it to wake once more.

My heart gives a slight, unwelcome stutter when my brother’s name appears on the notification bar, two missed calls next to his name.

The sight of it tightens something in me immediately.

Alessio contacting me after a banquet is not strange. If anything, it would be more unusual if he did not.

He is my brother, my father’s heir and other hand in all but title.

He is the only person in the family besides our father who has the standing to demand answers when I disappear from an event without word ahead of time.

After a banquet like tonight’s, there is always the expectation of a debrief. Who said what, which alliances seem strained, which politicians are leaning too hard in one direction, what opportunities surfaced beneath all the polished smiles and wine passed around in crystalline glasses.

Our father likes every detail gathered and laid at his feet before dawn, if possible.

A message from him after an event would hardly be cause for alarm. He would be curious to know where I vanished off to. Annoyed, probably, leaving him to deal with our father alone without some kind of buffer.

Suspicious enough to needle me about my absence in that nosy, older-brother way of his.

Especially because I had been expected to remain visible and circulate through guests to gather my usual share of leverage for the family machine.

But him calling this late? That is what feels wrong.

Texting is what he prefers. Alessio does not waste time engaging in long, drawn out conversations and rarely wastes urgency unless he has no choice.

If he is calling me instead of sending a clipped message about where I am, then whatever problem sits on the other end of that line is not something he trusts to text.

My thumb tightens around the phone.

When it lights up for a third time with his call, I do not hesitate to swipe my thumb across the screen to answer it and straighten to full height in one motion.

I cross the room quickly, the floor cool beneath my bare feet, and slip out into the hallway.

As I pull the bedroom door shut behind me, I take care not to let it latch too loudly.

The soft click of it closing sounds too final for my liking, almost like a line is being drawn between the warmth I have just left and whatever waits for me now.

The softness Isabella dragged out of me earlier retreats, folding itself away beneath older instincts.

The tenderness still on my mouth from kissing her forehead feels suddenly out of place on the same face that is undoubtedly about to hear bad news.

Whatever is going on is not something I want her overhearing.

I move through the apartment in silence, leaving the hallway and crossing into the living room where the floor-to-ceiling windows look out over the sleeping city.

The skyline glows in the dark like a field of banked embers, towers and street grids lit in gold and cold white, every window below holding strangers inside their own small worlds.

From up here, the city looks almost peaceful.

When I finally lift the phone to my ear, I ask, “What happened?”

Alessio’s tone is clipped, colder than usual. “Amos Russo was found dead an hour ago. Father wants you back here immediately.”

The floor drops out from under me. The sensation of falling is immediate and violent as it rips through me.

I lean forward to press a hand to the glass to steady myself. For one half-second, my mind goes completely blank.

Amos Russo.

Dead.

I just saw him tonight alive with his arm draped over his daughter’s shoulders, familiar calculation tugging at his smile like it always has.

He had been speaking to a few politicians when Isabella and I had snuck out, mostly likely trading pleasantries while silently creating plans like every other predator in that room.

And now he is dead?

I turn away from the windows without realizing it, my whole body suddenly too charged to stay still.

One hand drags back through my hair, pushing the thick waves away from my face as if the motion might somehow make any of this settle easier in my mind.

“What the hell happened?” I hiss.

There is the faint sound of movement on Alessio’s end, the sound of a door shutting.

When he speaks again, his voice is even flatter than before. “He was found dead outside his compound. Two shots in the back of the head. No one has answers right now.”

Two shots in the back of the head. An execution. Not the kind of death men like Amos meet by chance.

That is without a doubt a message, though to whom remains unclear. Whoever did it wanted certainty that the head of the Russo family would have no chance at survival.

Whatever disruption of the status quo they hoped for is exactly what they will be getting.

My brother’s tone alone is enough to tug uncomfortably at my gut. My brother is not a man to give in to dramatics. If anything, he’s spent half his life sounding bored by disaster.

So when his voice hardens on the next sentence, it surprises me.

“People are looking at his daughter being behind it.”

My heart gives a hard, brutal tug.

The reaction is so immediate, it feels like a fist closing around the actual organ beating inside my chest.

My head snaps toward the same hallway I’d just come from, so fast, the movement almost hurts.

The dark line of it stares back at me, the shut bedroom door at the end suddenly transforming into more than just the place where Isabella is sleeping blissfully unaware of what’s befallen her father.

Why in the world would Isabella be a suspect?

It makes no sense.

I stare out at the city again and see none of it.

My mind is already somewhere else entirely, circling the same ugly question and finding no answer that does not stink of opportunism.

Yes, powerful men’s daughters are easy targets for speculation, that much is obvious.

Girls like Isabella are born under expectations where they are watched, weighed, and discussed as though they are only assets and not people.

Every glance gets interpreted, every absence becomes suspicious and the target of gossip and speculation.

Every flash of temper or disobedience gets stored away for later use by people happy to weaponize it.

Family gossip latches onto women like her because it is easy. Daughters are expected to be beautiful, obedient, and useful, and the second they stop fitting neatly into any one of those categories is when the whispers start.

But murder?

Patricide?

To leap there this fast means someone is either desperate for an explanation because higher authorities are already breathing down their necks, demanding names before Amos’s blood is even dry on the pavement, or someone is far too eager to offer up a theory that serves them personally.

In my world, people do not rush toward the most dramatic conclusion unless that buys them something, be it protection, influence, or time.

Accusing a dead man’s daughter buys a great many people all three.

I force myself to breathe again. “Why is that the first conclusion?”

Alessio is quiet for a beat.

Long enough for me to picture him standing somewhere in our family home with tension unnaturally tightening his features.

The whole estate is probably awake by now and moving like an anthill suddenly exposed to a predator.

“It isn’t. But no one can find her currently. So, as you might suspect, emotions are running high.”

A habit, an old one. A sign of annoyance so controlled, most people never notice it when it happens. Right now, it is the only outward tell I allow myself as my thoughts harden.

I grunt softly into the receiver.

Of course they can’t find her. She is in an apartment no one on Earth knows about. In my bed, wrapped in my sheets with the marks of my mouth still on her skin and no idea her father is even dead while her name is already being dragged through the first circles of hell because she had the misfortune of vanishing from public view for a few hours.

Speculation has already done what speculation always does. It has taken an innocent absence and twisted it into a conspiracy. In our circles, missing is never innocent. Not when power is about to shift. Every gap in a timeline becomes a breeding ground for suspicion. If no one can account for Isabella’s whereabouts, then those around her will fill the silence with the version of events most useful to their appetites.

And right now, the most useful version is the ugliest, most damning one.

Though, if I am being honest… there is a silver lining, if I am willing to call it that. No one knows Isabella has been with me all night. At least not yet.

From what it sounds like, no witness has come forward saying they saw me follow her away from the banquet. There has been no link connecting my absence and hers together, which means what has happened between us will remain between only us.

That secrecy is the only reason I do not immediately feel the walls closing in around me at the moment. But that is a fragile comfort.

If her family were to find out I whisked her away tonight, all hell would break loose.

Not only because I touched her, but because I took something men like her father consider one of the only assets worth guarding in a daughter born into power, her body, her purity.

Her market value wrapped in obedience and all the suffocating Old-World rot our circles still dress up as tradition.

They would not see what happened between us as passion or the inevitable collision of two people who have been circling each other with too much hunger filling their veins.

They would see theft.

In a way, they would not be wrong. If they ever learned exactly what happened here and exactly how eagerly she came to me and the plans she proposed to me afterward, the fallout would be immediate and intense.

Men like Amos Russo do not believe in romance where their daughters are concerned.

They only believe in leverage and in the value of an untouched body and carefully managed appearances. They count worth in terms of contracts and alliances and bloodlines, never matters of the heart.

Ironically, in our circles, Isabella is far more valuable than I am. I am the underboss of the Conti family, a son raised for command and sent to end problems when diplomacy proves to be not enough.

My name carries weight, sure, fear and influence. But Isabella moves within another economy entirely.

She is beautiful, intelligent, well-bred, untouched enough to still be presented as a rare find.

A daughter of a powerful family with the pedigree to bind herself to another and create future deals and a bridge to whatever resources her family is after.

One day, they will use her to further some kind of gain for the Russo family.

Maybe territory, protection, access to the political circuit or ports or the supply lines of another syndicate that can offer better than we can.

Whatever form it takes, it will be dressed up as duty and prestige and what is best for the family, and she will have no choice but to comply.

Well, until now.

With Amos dead, everything is up in flames at this point.

Whatever feelings she has for her father, whatever frustrations or fears or quiet resentments that may exist beneath that encouraged her to propose running away with her to me, I do not believe it’s out of maliciousness or to cover up her own tracks.

This certainty I feel isn’t because I am developing feelings for her but because I know what it takes for someone to be capable of violence and that kind of execution.

I know how murder changes people no matter what form it comes in, whether that be from hands that get personally stained or through a proxy’s.

Tonight, when she was next to Amos, I saw many things reflected in those honey-gold eyes of hers. Weariness, calculation, restraint, but no intent to kill.

I wouldn’t have missed something like that.

“Elio.” My brother’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “Did you hear me? You need to come back home. Now. Father is already convening in the war room.”

I breathe out slowly, forcing my shoulders to relax. “I’ll be there in twenty.”

4

ELIO

I drive from my apartment to my family’s estate with the taste of Isabella still on my tongue and the echo of Alessio’s words ringing in my skull like a death knell.

The city is half-dead at this hour. Streetlights cast long, jaundiced streaks across the windshield as I cut through empty intersections and sleeping neighborhoods.

Usually I find comfort during the stretch of night when the city sleeps, but now it merely serves as a catalyst of what I know will be coming.

My hands tighten on the steering wheel until the leather creaks under my grip.

Thirty-three years of conditioning scream at me to compartmentalize, to lock the memory of her body beneath mine into a steel box and throw away the key because there are more important things to worry about right now.

Bury the distraction before it can be used against me.

This is the exact situation I was molded for. To manage the crisis and turn it into strategy, force the chaos into something more manageable to deal with.

I know how to be that man.

I have spent my whole life becoming him.

Yet every mile I put between Isabella and me feels like another fracture in the foundations I spent all these years building and reinforcing.

I hate that some part of me keeps tracking backward, imagining her waking to an empty bed, to my missing warmth and a silence she will not understand until she reaches for her phone and finds whatever hell will be waiting for her to answer on the other line.

I picture her face when she learns what happened with perfect clarity, disbelief at first, then the careful composure she wears like a second skin smoothing out her features.

And beneath that, the hurt she will hide because women like Isabella learned young that grief in our circles is safest when disguised as poise.

Hours ago, I had been ready to abandon all of this for her. I had looked straight at the life that had been built for me and seen, for the first time, an exit. I had imagined leaving, walking away from the syndicate, my father’s plans, the title that has sat on my shoulders since the day I turned twenty-one.

Yet the second my brother’s call summoned me back home, I’m hesitating. The fact that I am going back at all, leaving Isabella alone back at my apartment while the machine that built me starts turning once more, feels wrong.

I can already feel the gravity of her trying to pull me backward. All the weak points she exposed in me tonight are now bleeding and festering.

Underbosses are not supposed to hesitate like this.

They are not supposed to ache for a woman accused of murder, no matter how ridiculous the theory may be or how transparently convenient the accusation already sounds even to an outsider.

My laugh, when it comes, is short and humorless.

This is what weakness feels like, then.

How horrific.

The Conti family estate looms ahead as soon as my car cuts down the long, private road.

Its floodlights carve crisp white beams through the pre-dawn dark, bleaching the drive and the high iron gates in a cold, surgical glow.

The whole property looks less like a home and more like a fortress built expecting enemies to siege the front steps at every hour.

I have seen this place in every season, in every mood, under summer heats and winter frosts, yet tonight, it looks more somber than it ever has.

The guards at the gate nod once as I pass through, armed silhouettes standing rigid beneath the lights.

Their faces give away nothing.

Their eyes avert almost immediately as my car pulls through. They know better than to question the underboss returning before dawn from somewhere unknown.

In this house, curiosity is a vice people lose fingers for if indulged too openly.

Men who work for my family have all learned quickly that silence is often more valuable than openly unchecked curiosity.

Still, I feel their awareness on the car as I drive by.

The long drive curves toward the main house. The estate rises in front of me, every window lit from within.

The structure of this place has always been meant to impress and intimidate in equal measure.

My grandfather designed it that way, or so I was told.

Every security camera tucked into shadowed corners, every reinforced entry point hidden beneath Old-World looking luxury, is meant to remind guests that while they may be welcomed in, they will never truly be safe here.

I kill the engine as soon as I reach the front car park, my body sagging back into the seat for a few seconds as silence falls over me.

Allowing myself a few moments of reprieve before stepping into the chaos I know is waiting for me inside those doors is staving off the inevitable.

However long I sit here and dwell will not save me from having to soon deal with both my father and brother’s questions.

I let out a slow exhale through my nose before popping the driver’s side door open.

Before I can even step fully out of the car, two of my family’s attendants emerge from the side entrance with polished efficiency.

Their hands are already reaching for the car keys by the time I finally shut the door behind me, a silent understanding passing between us that they will pull the vehicle around to the secured garage and make sure it is ready again the moment I need it.

I pass by them with little acknowledgment other than to hand my keys over.

The main doors are open when I reach them and step through them. The shift in atmosphere hits me instantly the second I cross the threshold.

Inside, the estate is buzzing with tension.

The marble foyer gleams beneath the chandeliers, polished and immaculate as always, but the quiet luxury that is usually draped over this place has been ripped away and replaced with stress that feels suffocating.

Staff move briskly through the corridors with trays of coffee, fresh glasses, food, and whatever else has been requested from those above them.

Lita, one of my favorite housekeepers, passes by me without acknowledgement.

Her hair is half pinned up in a messy style, pieces of it falling around her face as though she had barely any time to make herself look presentable before someone barked for her downstairs.

Junior housekeepers follow after her in a tight cluster, all of their eyes pinned to the floor until reaching me.

Their heads turn subtly in my direction for a few seconds, a few eyes widening in my direction.

This house runs on control, on ritual, on the illusion that every piece of it moves according to design without flaw—outside or otherwise.

The underboss returning at this hour means whatever rumor had been spread to drag everyone out of bed has now been made real. It means the problem is no longer contained within the sealed walls of our war room.

Now that the heads of the family are involved this outrightly, the danger for our futures can no longer be denied.

I shrug off my coat as I walk and hand it to the first attendant quick enough to materialize at my side.

“Where is he?” I ask.

I do not need to specify exactly whom I’m referring to. In this house, when the situation is this ugly, there is only ever one man everyone turns to for direction.

“My lord is in the west study, sir,” the attendant says immediately. “With your brother.”

Not the war room, then.

That’s unusual.

The west study is where my father conducts the business he does not want overheard in the formal room downstairs.

It is a place designed for pressure rather than strategic moving, for men to walk in believing they have options and soon find themselves quickly in over their heads.

Hearing that Alessio is already with him sends a fresh pulse of tension running through me.

While I doubt my brother has any idea where I’ve been since the banquet, it also doesn't escape me that there is a very real possibility that his speculations surrounding my absence have already been brought to my father’s attention.

Or discussed in length.

I give one short nod and keep moving.

The corridor toward the west wing seems endless tonight. The portraits lining the walls of stern dead men in gilt frames watch with their usual painted severity as I pass.

Generations of Contis, all men who bled and schemed and murdered their way into permanence on our family tree.

The version of me this house expects, the one perfectly in line with the men whose portraits I now pass, has already begun settling over my skin again without thought.

It is easy to push away the memory of Isabella asleep in my bed now that this house is in full crisis mode.

As I near the west study, two armed guards stand outside the door. They aren’t the younger ones pulled hastily from rotations and scattered throughout the property but older men, trusted.

Ones my father has always placed at the threshold of his door whenever whatever is being discussed on the other side has the power to change the entire landscape of the city.

They step aside the second they see me, one of them opening the door without a word.

The light from inside spills across the hall, bleeding over my shoes in a long amber strip.

I pause only for the span of a single breath before stepping through it.

The west study always feels smaller when there is blood in the air. Not physically.

The room itself is vast by any reasonable standard with its coffered ceilings, dark walnut paneling, shelves lined in old tomes far exceeding my lifespan with even older secrets.

However, tonight, the space feels compressed by grief forced into motion as one singular death has changed the course of many things.

Maps are spread across the long mahogany table in the center of the room. Detailed territory layouts are marked with shipping routes, warehouses, safehouses, political districts, and known syndicates not allied with our own.

Red pins mark Russo territory, black pins mark ours. The colors look contradictory scattered across neighborhoods and docks, none of them intersecting.

I do not miss the fresh spaces already marked among the red. Nor the fact that more pins than usual have already been shifted on our side.

Things are moving fast, as they always do after a patriarch drops.

My father, Vittorio, stands at the head of the table. Sixty-two years old and still built like the fighter he once was, age has not softened him in the slightest.

The raw and reckless violence of his youth has long since been traded for a colder kind of discipline.

Even standing here now in the center of the room, he has always had the look of a man who expects every situation to turn into a brawl.

Tonight, though, his shoulders carry a new weight.

It is not obvious, though nothing about my father ever is.

To anyone else, he might simply look more focused than usual.

His graying hair has been combed back with the same neatness as always, his expression pulled into those familiar hard lines, but I know him too well to mistake it for anything else.

I know what fatigue looks like on him, what fury does to his expression, how grief weighs on him regardless of his ever acknowledging it in the first place.

It doesn’t surprise me even if it feels out of place for a man like my father.

He and Amos have been friends for a long time, a story told so often, it has slowly turned into legend among our syndicates.

Once, when they were young, Vittorio Conti and Amos Russo belonged to rival families clawing for the same pieces of this city.

Their fathers hated each other, and shared streets soon turned bloody despite neither side even remembering what parts they wanted to hoard to begin with.

By all logic, the sons should have inherited that same hatred and continued it.

Maybe it was pragmatism or shared fatigue, perhaps even the simple recognition that they were more alike than either of their fathers ever cared to admit.

Whatever the reason was that convinced both newly fledged men to lower their guns once the reins of their empires were passed down, Vittorio and Amos built something different out of the rubble that was given to them.

I used to think their alliance was invincible simply because I could not imagine either of them allowing the other to be taken off the board.

Now it’s become clear how foolish that belief truly had been.

My gaze flicks briefly to Alessio.

He leans against the wall farthest from the table. His arms are crossed tightly over his chest, his attention fixed on the men moving around the study, turning one corner of the space into a makeshift security hub.

A few of the men glance toward him before speaking, unconsciously checking his reaction before deciding how urgent an answer to their questions are.

At thirty-six, my older brother has never needed to be the loudest man in a room to control its rhythm.

Where I was built to end problems once they become one, Alessio has always been better at seeing them before they fully form.

He is the strategic mind where I am the unbreakable blade.

The architect to my executioner.

The one who can look at a mess of competing interests, wounded egos, and shifting loyalties and somehow see the clearest route through it.

Our father has relied on that balance between us for years.

It has always worked because we understand our roles without question.

Between the two of us, there are very few problems this family cannot absorb or bury. But tonight, looking at him now, I can tell even he feels the strain in the air.

“Elio,” my father greets as soon as the door is shut behind me.

My brother’s eyes lift then and meet mine across the room.

There is no brotherly softness in them, no trace of the man who once bloodied a boy twice his size for breaking my nose when we were children. What looks back at me now is a strategist wanting answers.

Where were you? Is what his eyes ask me.

I give him nothing.

Or try to, anyway.

Unfortunately, Alessio has never needed words from me to know when something is off. He reads what I do not say with infuriating ease.

I see it now in the way his shoulders roll back to press more firmly into the wall behind him, subtle enough that no one else in the room would take it as anything other than getting comfortable for a long day ahead.

I know he has seen enough in my eyes to understand that whatever pulled me away from the banquet and left me unaccounted for hours is not a detail to ignore.

It is a thread he will undoubtedly return to later to unravel when the audience around us is gone.

I move closer to the table before he can hold my gaze any longer.

The reports spread beside the map catch my attention immediately. Amos Russo’s entire life is spread out in excruciating detail—the things he owned, the things he controlled, the pieces of his empire men would kill to take now that he is gone.

All of it has been rendered down to simple lines on pieces of paper.

He had always been known for his quiet ruthlessness for as long as I can remember, patient in a way that made weaker men overplay their hands against him constantly.

He did not posture the way some Dons do.

He was always subtler than that, deadlier in his own way.

To find that a man like that was taken out with two clean shots to the back of the head so soon after appearing at a public event makes this all the more disturbing.

And perhaps what is worse beyond that is whoever pulled the trigger must have known Amos well enough to get that close.

Not to mention the fact that there has been no immediate claim of responsibility from any of our enemies.

That bothers me more than the manner of death.

A killing like this should already have ambitious rivals claiming responsibility as a means to sow fear into all of us, yet none have come forward.

A hit like this either screams of an inside job or a rival with deep pockets that none of us have been aware of up until now.

When I finally lift my eyes from the papers on the table, it’s to look across it. “Are you thinking this is internal or external?”

My father rubs a hand over his face. It is a rare gesture from him. “I’m not sure as of right now.”

While the answer is honest, it still unsettles me. Vittorio Conti does not voluntarily admit to feeling uncertainty unless he can no longer pretend to not feel cornered by it.

This city obeys his rule not because they believe he is invincible, but because he has spent decades making doubt look like something that happens to lesser men.

To hear even a trace of it now, however buried beneath that iron calm it remains, sends a shot of ice racing through my veins.

He continues, lowering his hand, his expression already settling back into stone. “Though, I would wager that whoever is responsible will wait to see what our next move is before striking again.”

My brow lifts. “You think it’s another syndicate?”

“I doubt his own would be stupid enough to do something like this,” he answers.

I let the words settle over me.

Someone outside our network would gain a great deal from taking out a prominent figure like the head of the Russo family.

The temporary chaos alone would be worth fortunes to the right people.

Sometimes, all a rival needs is to create disorder and stir up the very real fear that if one Don can be taken out and left outside his own compound without any witnesses, then no patriarch is untouchable.

I nod to the table, my eyes focusing on the north end of the map. “The Bianchi family has been sniffing around the Russo routes for months. They’ve been loyal to the Russos for some time now, but that loyalty dies once the man who commands it does.”

“Perhaps,” my father says, his eyes narrowing on the map too. “However, the Bianchi family are also not known to be opportunists.”

A fair point.

They are an ambitious family, yes, but I’ve never considered them sloppy. Not usually, at least. They prefer leverage that can be disguised as a mutual partnership, unlike many other syndicates.

Killing Amos in this manner would be a sharp deviation from their usual character unless someone else inside the family has started steering the wheel.

Unfortunately, internal betrayal always remains on the table no matter how loyal a house claims to be.

Men kill for power, insult, fear, and imagined futures just as often as they kill for orders.

But my father is right about one thing.

To take Amos out like this from within would require either breathtaking arrogance or desperation so severe, it borders on madness.

Alessio pushes off the wall then. “Isabella…”

The muscles in my back tighten automatically.

“She was at the dinner tonight, wasn’t she?” he asks, voice still maddeningly calm. “Last seen slipping away with…”

His eyes glance in my direction, quick enough that most of the room would miss it, but I catch it. It is a hook baited with a subtle accusation, and it is meant for me alone. Heat surges through my veins, anger that is nearly violent.

Touch her and I will end you, brother or not.

The thought is instant, primal in a way. I’ve never felt the need to put my brother in his place before, least of all over a woman. We are not like that and never have been.

As the only two sons from our father’s line, Alessio and I have always been unusual in one respect—neither of us has ever been interested in turning succession into sport.

The future of the syndicate has always sat between us like a practical problem waiting for the right time to be solved, not a crown to be torn from the other’s head.

Eventually, once our father passes, we will sit down and discuss the details, I have no doubt of that. But even then, I have never believed any real rivalry would occur between us. We were not raised to fracture like lesser bloodlines fighting over smaller scraps. We were raised to function like a well-oiled machine. Alessio thinks, I strike. Simple.

Feeling any kind of anger toward him is unheard of. Even now, it feels unnatural despite the emotion raging through me.

I do not know what unsettles me more, that he is implying Isabella is behind any of this or that I am one breath away from stepping around this table and reminding my brother, quite physically, that there are boundaries even he does not get to test.

I school my face into an indifferent mask before I can betray anything.

“There’s no reason she would be involved in this. It isn’t like she’d gain anything. She’s a woman,” I say flatly.

The words taste like ash in my mouth. I hate saying them. I hate even more hiding behind the same patriarchal logic that has caged Isabella her whole life. But in this room, at this moment, it is useful. Men like my father and brother do not see women as capable unless they are forced to.

If I can shove Isabella back beneath the category of ornamental irrelevance in their minds to turn their scrutiny elsewhere, I will do it.

Alessio’s smile is thin. He knows exactly what I am doing. “Displeased daughters become weapons all the time, Brother. Especially when there are promises made from a third party.”

My eyebrow ticks. He is pushing my buttons now. “Promises such as…?”

He lifts one shoulder in an almost lazy shrug. “Freedom, perhaps? Something else equally desirable? Whatever could be promised to convince a daughter to plot against her own father wouldn’t be something simple.”

My hands flex at my sides.

Freedom hits too close to the conversations Isabella and I had mere hours ago back at my apartment, to the future she told me we could build if we walked away from all of this and never looked back.

Standing here in my father’s office, that offer follows me like a ghost.

For the first time in my life, the path laid out for me since birth feels less like destiny and more like a cage. In her arms I saw a different life, one without war rooms and replaced by quiet mornings spent learning how to take care of something fragile instead of breaking it.

In that moment, lying there with her tucked against my side, I truly believed I would give all of this up.

The syndicate.

The power.

The name.

I believed it with a clarity that still frightens me now.

If I had never known Isabella, I could have gone on as I always have. I know the terrain of my family’s business better than I know my own reflection. It is ugly, but it is fluent to me.

I know how to become the version of myself this world demands from me without hesitation, and it reminds me how easy it would be to stay.

I can protect Isabella better from inside the machine than by abandoning it. But is that enough to justify the cage trapping me by calling it necessary?

It is easy to convince myself that walking away can wait until this crisis passes, until the next threat is buried, until the next war cools, until the next excuse arrives dressed up as responsibility I can’t afford to refuse.

Until later becomes a whole life spent serving something that never intended to let me go in the first place.

So what is the alternative now that I have had a taste of what I never knew I wanted?

Because tasting it has changed everything.

Now I know what peace felt like for a few stolen hours and to want not just a woman’s body, but her mornings, her trust, her future, her hand over my heart while I confessed the most dangerously vulnerable things to her I have ever said out loud.

Can I go back to living my life as Elio, the Conti family’s underboss now that I know there is another life somewhere beyond the walls of this one?

I do not know.

Maybe I have been tainted by something far more dangerous than weakness…

Maybe it is by the slow, unbearable awareness that life might have held more for me than blood and blind obedience if I had only been born elsewhere to softer people under a kinder name.

My father’s voice breaks through my thoughts. “We will need to locate Isabella as soon as possible.

She needs to be questioned before any more of this gets out to the other syndicates.”

I pull in a slow breath. “I’ll look for her.”

I don’t miss the look my brother eyes me with.

Making me hesitate where once I would have acted without blinking. If that is what Isabella Russo has done to me, then it is the most exquisite ruin I have ever known.

And maybe the real truth is that I’m not sure I want to be cured of it.

5

ELIO

The meeting drags on for hours.

Through it all, I feel a fracture widening inside me.

Every time someone mentions the Russo name, my mind flashes to chestnut hair spilled across white sheets, to freckles dusting over olive skin, to the way Isabella challenged me with that brilliant, fearless mind even while I was buried deep inside her.

My father remains at the head of the table saying little and missing nothing. Beside him, the rest of our administration posture and circle and scheme, each man continuing to calculate what Amos Russo’s death means for our family’s power.

The enemy, whoever they are, has done this to promote chaos, and right now, that is exactly what they are getting.

Isabella’s name keeps surfacing within the current, dragged back up no matter how many times the conversation moves on from it.

Her absence, her possible knowledge, even her family’s bloodline comes into question time and time again.

The stability our syndicates once had collectively dissolves as suspicion and her potential involvement continue to fuel the conspiracies.

I nearly put a bullet through every man’s skull inside this room.

The urge for it comes fast and vicious, making my pulse pound behind my eyes.

It takes every ounce of control I possess to remain seated and continue to keep my expression under control while rage prowls through my bloodstream like a starving animal.

By the time the evening claws its way over the skyline, the city beyond the windows is washed in a bruised red-gold.

I slip away the first chance I get to drive back to my apartment. Because while they debate her as a threat, all I can think is that she woke up alone.

I tell myself I had no choice, that when the call came, I had to go.

That a dead Don and a room full of wolves do not allow for explanations or lingering in bed with the daughter of an ally whose death may already be the spark that sets the city ablaze.

But still, that does little to ease the guilt that still claws at my insides.

No one stops me when I leave without a word. Maybe they believe I am hunting leads like I implied I would.

No one would suspect, perhaps other than my brother, that I already know where Isabella has been.

I drive too fast through the streets to get back to my apartment.

There is little doubt in my mind that she is already gone. Why the hell wouldn’t she be?

She is too smart to stay in the apartment of a man who vanished before dawn and belongs to a family now circling her own like vultures.

If she has heard about her father, and of course she has, then she has every reason to run from me the moment she had the chance to.

Still, I drive there anyway because there is punishment in certainty, and apparently, I have decided I deserve it.

When I pull into the underground garage beneath my building, the silence that greets me is nearly deafening. I kill the engine and sit there for a moment, staring through the windshield with my heartbeat pounding in my ears like a countdown.

I already know what waits upstairs, an empty apartment with sheets that have long gone cold and her scent fading from the air.

Why am I doing this?

Sighing, I get out anyway, shutting the car door harder than necessary and head for the elevator. I lean back against the cold steel wall and close my eyes for a brief second, but it does nothing.

All it does is heighten everything I am trying not to feel—the dull ache behind my eyes, the grit of exhaustion clawing at me from the inside out, the sour twist in my gut that has been there since the moment I left and went running back to the blood-soaked machinery of my world.

The doors part with a lazy, mechanical slowness that grates on my nerves, and I step out already braced for proof that I have ruined the only thing in my life that has ever felt good.

My apartment looks the same from when I left it almost nineteen hours ago. I stand there for a moment without moving, every muscle in my body locking tight.

The entryway lamp casts a muted amber glow across the hardwood floors. My jacket is still on the floor next to the door from where Isabella had stripped me of it yesterday. The curtains are still pulled back from the windows, allowing the city to glow through the floor-to-ceiling windows in a wash of gold and black, painting the room in shadows.

Beneath the familiar traces of my cologne still lingering in the air, so faint I almost think I imagine it, is her.

I step farther inside, letting the elevator door shut behind me with a soft click that sounds far too loud in the silence.

“Isabella?”

The knot in my stomach twists harder when there is no answer.

I rake a hand over my face, exhaustion making everything feel too amplified. This entire day has been one long exercise in restraint, and now that I am here in the quiet wreckage of what I chose, I can feel all of it starting to crack.

My gaze catches on the hallway leading down to the bedroom and I stop. From where I stand, I can see only the edge of the doorway and the faint light coming in from the window. I move toward it slowly, almost against my own will, every step heavy with dread and something far more dangerous than that.

I stop in the doorway.

For one suspended heartbeat, I forget how to breathe.

The sight of it empty nearly puts me on my knees.

She’s gone.

6

ELIO

For three days, I do not hear from her.

Not a call.

Not a text.

No whisper through a mutual contact or sighting passed along by one of the men I trust. Not even through an indirect message people in our world know how to send when they do not want a paper trail leading back to them.

She disappears so completely, it feels intentional.

Maybe that is the point.

The silence settles into my bones by the end of the first day as a slow poison I cannot spit back out.

At first I tell myself she needs space. That grief has its own gravitational pull no one can escape from and no sane woman would want the man who allowed her to wake up alone and uninformed anywhere near her after a blow like that.

I tell myself she is with family or hidden away, guarded and somewhere safe enough to collapse without having to worry who might see her do it.

I am not sleeping much to begin with, but whatever scraps of rest I used to get vanish entirely after that.

Night becomes a series of pacing loops through my apartment, the whiskey bottle I’ve never touched slowly growing emptier and emptier while the city glows beyond the windows to a kingdom I have no hand in owning.

I find myself staring at my phone for stretches of time that make me feel insane, waiting for it to light up with her name.

But it never does.

I have never begged for anything in my life. Not for loyalty, mercy, for honor, and especially not for love.

But with every passing hour of her silence, I get closer to understanding what kind of man would drop to his knees for a single word from the right woman.

And the worst part is that I deserve it.

I deserve every second of not knowing where she is, how she is, whether she is sleeping or eating or drowning under the weight of her grief. I deserve to stare at a blank screen until my eyes burn.

I deserve the tightening in my lungs every time my phone buzzes with someone else’s name.

I answer when I have to. I give orders, sit in meetings, put on my suit and my face and my voice, and to everyone around me, I am exactly what I have always been, a man built by discipline and forged through violence.

A man who does not bleed in public no matter how deep the knife goes.

But inside, I am unraveling stitch by stitch.

I have wanted women before. Wanted bodies, mouths, a few hours of relief from the constant pressure of the life I was born into because desire is simple. Desire is cheap. It burns hot, then dies quickly.

This is not that.

This is waking up with rage tightening its grip around my heart with each beat, suffocating me slowly because the side of the bed where she slept one night is cold now and has been for days.

On the third night, I break.

I leave another meeting before it is properly over, ignoring the look Alessio sends me from the far end of the table when I rise and turn for the door. He says my name once, the tone a warning edged with concern, but I keep walking. I drive through the city with no destination at first, just the sick pulse of need driving me harder on every block.

Rain has started falling, glossing the streets until every light in the city looks smeared with fractured lighting.

My tires hiss over the pavement as music from the radio murmurs low through the speakers, some old blues track soaked in regret that I shut off because I cannot stand one more voice in the car with me.

I end up outside of one of the many penthouses the Russo family owns, only realizing it when I recognize the building number on the side of the brick exterior.

I sit across the street with the engine still idling, one hand wrapped tight around the steering wheel, and watch the lobby doors like a man waiting for absolution to come walking out under the fluorescent street lighting.

After two hours, I finally drive away.

I tell myself to leave it there. That if she wanted me to know where she is, she would have found a way to tell me.

Yet despite the logic of those thoughts rattling inside my head, the other ones—louder and far more desirable to listen to—urge me to keep moving.

So instead, I drive through the city until my gas gauge dings, slowly hunted by its own thoughts.

By midnight, I am back at my apartment.

I remember almost nothing of the drive there.

At some point, I park. At some point, I kill the engine and I get out and drag myself over to the elevator. But the details do not matter.

By now, my body has gone completely cold. I move through the garage on instinct alone, every motion stripped down to habit.

The mirrored walls of the elevator throw my reflection back at me and for a second, I barely recognize the man staring out of them.

Dark stubble shadows my jaw.

Exhaustion has carved hard lines into my face, sharpening me into something harsher… meaner. My eyes look empty.

I drag a hand over my mouth and close my eyes for half a second, just enough to let the steel box carry me upward while the city drops away beneath my feet.

I should be thinking about tomorrow and the men who will be waiting for orders, and the fracture spreading through both our families like rot beneath the foundation of old floorboards.

Instead, all I can think about is her.

When the elevator slows at my floor and the old familiar mechanical groan settles into place, I feel it before I understand it, my body already knowing before my mind can catch up.

Every instinct I possess hardens at once, exhaustion burning off in one hot, violent sweep.

The doors open with infuriating slowness, revealing the dimly lit entryway beyond.

I step out of the elevator, my eyes lifting automatically toward the windows facing the city.

And then I freeze at a figure standing in front of them.

For one second, my mind refuses to make sense of what I am seeing. The room is lit only by the scattered glow of the city lights beyond the glass, leaving her mostly in shadow.

She stands motionless, framed against the skyline like some ghost haunting me.

Her face is turned away, angled slightly toward the traffic below, but I can still make out the soft line of her cheek and the delicate slope of her shoulder, the impossible familiarity of the way she holds herself, confident even in an unfamiliar place like this one.

Relief hits first so suddenly, it nearly buckles my knees.

My lungs unlock in one ragged pull of air, my vision blurring for a heartbeat.

I actually sway where I stand and catch myself with one hand brushing the wall beside the entryway to keep myself upright. She is here.

She’s alive.

Real and breathing and close enough to touch.

Why is she here?

She should have known better than to come back to me.

I know what I am. Men like me do not get softness without punishment.

We do not get to lose ourselves in bright, fearless girls with clever mouths and believe for even one second that the darkness trailing behind us will stop at the bedroom door.

Yet here she is, back inside the lion’s den.

I take a step forward anyway, careful, as though one wrong movement might shatter the fragile reality of her standing in my home.

My shoes make almost no sound on the hardwood, but she stiffens all the same. It is small, the tightening through her shoulders barely there, but I catch it all the same as if she had flinched.

Every part of me is suddenly too aware of the exhaustion dragging at my limbs and the cold dampness still clinging to my coat from the rain outside.

My eyes adjust the closer I get to her, filling in what shadows had first concealed.

She is wearing all black—a simple dark blouse and fitted slacks, elegant in that effortless way that always makes her look impeccable. Her hair falls down her back in loose chestnut waves, half obscuring the line of her neck.

Both arms are wrapped around her midsection, tugging tighter around her frame when I finally stop behind her.

My chest tightens until it hurts. The instinct to go to her is primitive in how hard it tugs at me to close the distance between us and pull her away from the glass and into me.

To feel the proof of her beneath my hands and press my mouth to her temple, neck, anywhere I can reach, and tell her the one truth that actually matters—that for some impossible reason, the world has handed me something I do not deserve and would kill to keep.

“Isabella,” I murmur.

She closes her eyes. I know she does even before she turns because I see the slight dip of her lashes against her cheek in her profile and the way her mouth tightens right after. Slowly, she turns to face me.

She is beautiful still, that much is inevitable. Grief cannot rob her of that. But there is something altered in her now, an invisible thread pulled too tight.

Her face is pale beneath the city glow, her eyes shadowed, the skin beneath them faintly dark as if sleep has become a stranger just like it has for me.

Her mouth, that clever mouth I know too well, is set in a line that looks composed until I notice the strain of it around the edges of her lips.

For a long moment, neither of us speaks.

My voice feels strained when I finally manage, “You shouldn’t be here.”

The words come out harsher than I intend for them to. In all honesty, I don’t even know why I say them. While true, they are the furthest thing from what I want.

Her expression flickers, not quite from pain, but something close to it.

“No,” she says softly. “I probably shouldn’t be.”

Her gaze holds mine. In that moment, I can see what the last three days have done to her too.

Whatever this is, whatever pulled her back to my apartment despite all common sense to stay away, has gone beyond just a single night shared together.

This is no longer something either of us can dismiss as a mistake made in a moment of weakness.

She takes in a breath like it hurts. “I wanted to tell you myself that I’m leaving the city.”

I go perfectly still. “What?”

For a second, I am not even sure I heard her correctly. The words seem to hang in the air, suspended and too unreal to be true. That is the last thing I ever thought I’d hear. Not why did you leave? Or why weren’t you here to tell me? Those questions would almost be easier to handle. Not this.

I was ready for her anger, for her to blame and lash out at me because of her grief.

Nothing prepared me for this. I stare at her while trying to find the crack in her expression that says she does not mean it. That this is grief speaking for her and this temporary feeling is simply an impulse to run from reality. Anything but real.

She looks tired but there is resolve threaded through her posture. It sits in the lift of her chin and the way she holds my gaze without flinching.

Careful control wraps around every breath she takes, settling her shoulders back.

“Leaving for where?” I ask, though I already know that isn’t really the question I want to ask. I ask it anyway because the alternative is asking for how long, and I am not ready for that answer. Or worse, for her refusal to give it to me.

Her eyes flicker. “I don’t know.”

My mouth opens, then closes again.

She folds her arms tighter around herself. “My father is dead, Elio.”

I say nothing.

What is there to say to argue?

Her laugh is soft and joyless. “We haven’t even put him in the ground yet and people are already whispering about what comes next and who can be trusted.” She swallows. “I can feel it when people look at me. They think I know something.”

The shame that hits me then is hot enough to feel like a fever. I sat there during those meetings with my face carved out of stone and said nothing because to defend her too fiercely would have exposed us both. Now she stands in front of me carrying the damage of that silence.

My jaw clenches until it aches. “You think leaving will make you safer?”

The correction is immediate. “It will make me less visible to people who think I have something to do with my father’s death.”

My lips thin.

She is too smart to pretend true safety exists for people like us, but invisibility, distance, obscurity from the world we both grew up in… these are things that will make her harder to hunt if she can successfully disappear without anyone outside of her family’s administration knowing.

I take another step toward her before I can stop myself. “Tell me where you’re going.”

Those honey-gold eyes lift to finally look at me. “I will if you agree to come with me.”

Something violent flashes through me so fast, it leaves my hands curling at my sides.

Not at her, never at her. I would sooner cut off my own arm than turn that kind of violence on her.

No, what surges through me is aimed at the request itself and at the brutal, breathtaking recklessness of her standing in my apartment and offering me the one thing I have wanted from the moment she first looked at me

Come with me. As if it could be that simple.

Beneath the instinct to reject what she is asking, something uglier tears awake inside me. Want. So strong, it makes my chest feel split straight down the center.

For one ugly, traitorous beat, I see myself bridging the distance between us, grabbing her hand, and walking back to the elevator without another word.

I see highways swallowing the city behind us as we drive, and motels booked under false names while we strip ourselves of our past identities.

Sunrises spent in places where no one knows my face and no one says my last name with fear or loyalty or expectation.

I see her beside me through it all, alive and furious and so fucking beautiful, and for one moment, the fantasy is so vivid, it nearly passes for a memory.

Then reality rips through it like barbed wire catching on skin. My jaw locks so hard, pain blooms up the side of my face.

“How can you possibly ask that of me?” I say, the words bitten out between my clenched teeth.

She does not flinch, but of course she doesn’t. Isabella has never once been frightened off by the parts of me that scare everyone else. “You told me you would.”

The simple honesty of that statement almost makes me laugh. Instead, all I can do is stare at her because she is right. At the time, it had felt impossible enough to actually become true. She’d brought out a reckless side of me I never knew was there to begin with.

“You were supposed to mean it,” she says softly, and that softness cuts deeper than fury ever could. “Or at least I thought you did.”

If she had screamed at me, I could have met her there. If she had cursed at me, struck at me with the full weight of her grief, I would have known how to handle it.

Men like me are built for violence and trained to endure and return it in equal measure.

But this quiet hurt… there is no armor against it. Nothing to save me from the deep pain that pools in my gut.

“I did mean it.” I hear how raw I sound the second the words leave me.

For the first time since seeing her after stepping out of the elevator, something truly fragile crosses her face.

She looks away from me then, turning slightly back toward the window and the city below.

The skyline glitters against her reflection, pale in the glass and ghosting over the lights beyond.

“Then come with me.”

Christ, I want to.

“I can’t, Isabella.”

She turns to face me fully then. Her eyes shimmer with unshed tears she refuses to let fall. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter. “Was any of what you said real, or was I just a convenient distraction?”

For one suspended second, the room goes soundless around me. I drag in a breath that does nothing to loosen the pressure in my chest.

If she had only been a distraction, this would be easy. I could let her go and cut ties without ever feeling guilty over it. Telling her this was all a mistake, or a fleeting hunger finally satiated, would keep this simple where it was supposed to remain.

But the truth of the matter is that Isabella has never been a fleeting moment for me.

She was the first woman who made me think about leaving before I even realized I was trapped.

Every moment I let myself imagine a life outside my family and the responsibilities it carries had been a fantasy turned anchor that I held onto like a lifeline.

Maybe in another life, this could be real.

Maybe in another life, I would have been born a mechanic or a ranch hand or a man who fixes roofs and comes home with sawdust on his boots instead of blood under his nails.

Maybe in another life, I would have met her in a city that did not require bodyguards and coded language and men willing to kill for a surname.

Maybe in another life, I would have loved her in the daylight and asked her to stay in ways that did not sound like a threat to both our futures.

In another life, I would have burned the syndicate to the ground for her.

But this is not that life.

This is the one where my family’s name is a noose slowly tightening around my neck.

One where choosing her openly would not just damn me but paint a target on her so bright, the whole underworld would take aim and fire.

In this world, women have always bled for crimes they never committed except being loved by the wrong man.

And that is simply a life I can not damn her to.

“No,” I whisper.

She dashes them away angrily, furious at herself for letting them fall and even more so at me for being the reason behind it.

The sight of her crying does something catastrophic to my heart. The tightening around it turns vise-like, stealing the breath from my lungs where the pain becomes unbearable.

“Fine.” She steps back.

“Isabella,” I say immediately, moving toward her.

“Don’t,” she whispers.

My hands flex uselessly at my sides, every instinct in me screaming to close the distance and catch her face, to force her to look at me until she understands exactly why I’m doing this.

All I can actually do is stay rooted to my spot as she steps around me and heads for the elevator.

“Goodbye, Elio,” she says.

I don’t turn back around to watch her slip between the elevator doors when they open. Nor do I watch as the numbers tick down to the ground level.

I simply stare out at the city skyline and feel my heart shattering in two.

7

ISABELLA

Eight years later…

I stand at the kitchen counter of our small rental house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in this sleepy coastal town where violence feels like something that happens only on television.

This house is modest, though not in a bad way. White siding compliments the faded blue shutters and narrow porch outside with two flower pots I forget to water half the time until Matteo reminds me with dramatic offense.

Inside, everything smells faintly of lemon cleaner, coffee grounds, and the breeze that drifts in if the windows stay open long enough. The floors creak in places I know by heart. The cabinet beneath the sink sticks when the weather turns humid.

I used to think ordinary meant lesser. Now I know better.

Sunlight filters in through the white curtains I pulled back from the kitchen window earlier, the fabric stirring every now and then in the breeze coming through the cracked pane above the sink.

It paints the room in soft yellow, catching on the ceramic bowl of peaches on the table and the school forms I still need to sign before Matteo leaves.

Outside, the air carries the faint scent of fresh-cut grass as a lawn sprinkler ticks in slow, lazy arcs across the neighbor’s lawn.

Matteo’s laughter echoes from outside, bright and unguarded.

That sound is my favorite thing in the world.

I live for the sleepy version of it when he stumbles into my room in dinosaur pajamas and climbs into my bed before sunrise, for the wild version of it when he runs ahead of me and forgets there is such a thing as danger.

I live for the soft version at night when his voice goes syrupy with exhaustion and he asks for one more story even while his eyes are already falling shut.

Every day, I wake up and thank God he still laughs like that.

I look up from the lunchbox open on the counter and watch him through the window, my heart doing the same stupid, tender thing it always does.

He is in the backyard with a soccer ball at his feet, darting past one of the neighborhood boys with reckless confidence.

His shoelaces are tied unevenly because he still ties them too fast when he is excited.

He runs with his head slightly forward and his body thrown forward into motion without care.

Matteo is seven now.

There are mornings that still knock me off balance with the sheer fact of it. Seven years since I first held him against my chest in a dim hospital room under a false name.

His dark hair falls into his eyes as he runs, too long again because I keep forgetting to book his haircut and because part of me loves the softness of it curling over his forehead.

His skin bronzes easily in the sun, warmer in tone than mine, and his limbs are always scuffed from climbing something he should not or launching himself across the yard.

His eyes are honey-gold. Mine, undeniably.

When he was born, I had searched his face with the desperate hunger of a woman bracing for both a miracle and punishment.

I was terrified of what I would see, worried he would come out bearing too much resemblance to the man I had loved and lost.

Scared most of all that one day, I would look at my son and see history waiting to repeat itself in his bones.

Instead, Matteo arrived with a furious cry, a stubborn tilt to his chin, and my eyes.

It felt like a small mercy for everything else that had happened beforehand.

He scores a goal then and throws both arms into the air, cheering loud enough that I hear it even through the glass. The other boy groans dramatically, and Matteo laughs again, spinning around on the grass like victory has made him weightless.

A smile pulls at my mouth before I can stop it.

I finish tucking apple slices into the little compartment beside his sandwich inside his lunch box and screw the lid onto his water bottle tight.

Peanut butter, apple, crackers, the granola bar he likes with the chocolate drizzle, one folded note with a doodled heart and a joke corny enough to make him roll his eyes when he reads it at lunch. I tuck that in last.

He knows nothing of the wars that once swallowed my family whole. Nothing of the bloodlines that course through his veins. Nothing of the grandfather he will never meet, a man brilliant enough to command rooms full of dangerous men with a single look and brutal enough to survive in their midst for decades.

My father had taught me early in life how to read a chessboard before the pieces started moving.

How to smile through negotiations and see the fracture line in every alliance and know precisely where pressure would make it split. He taught me to survive a world that devoured softness, then that same world devoured him.

Matteo knows nothing of the man who walked away before our son ever took his first breath. Some days, that truth is only a dull ache. Some days, it flares bright and poisonous, usually when my son laughs with his whole body or tilts his head in a way that reminds me too much of the man I have spent the last eight years burying in my head with rage.

To Matteo, life is simple, only consisting of school projects, bedtime stories, pancakes on Sundays, a mother who tucks him in each night and tells him how the world is gentle. I have spent every day since he was born making sure it stays that way.

I know all too well what lives beneath the polished surfaces of the underground society and what men are capable of when power and fear begin to feed on each other.

I know how quickly a home can become a battleground, how swiftly love can be weaponized, and one bad decision, one wrong person trusted, can turn a life into nothing but ash.

So I built walls to keep us both safe.

A new name, new paperwork, in a town small enough to feel forgettable and far enough from every major city connected to my family that it makes digging for us completely insurmountable.

I learned how to make myself smaller and erase every visible trace of the woman I used to be. How to smile and dress like a person the eye passes over easily.

I go by Marina Hayes now.

Marina with her soft cardigans and practical flats. Marina who works as a receptionist at the community clinic three streets over where she schedules follow-ups for blood pressure checks and knows which patients need the quieter rooms because the fluorescent lights make their migraines worse.

The young single mother who keeps mostly to herself but always waves to the neighbors and brings store-bought cookies to school bake sales and apologizes too much when she is late and pretends she has never held eye contact across a dinner table with men who discuss murder in coded languages.

No one here knows the name Isabella Russo or that I am—was—the daughter of a strategist who used to say that sentiment gets people killed faster than greed.

No one knows I once loved a dangerous man and paid for it with abandonment that nearly broke me.

I built this life from the ashes of that betrayal so my son could grow up believing strength does not have to come wrapped in cruelty and that love does not have to mean weakness.

When the coffee maker gurgles its final drip, I pour a cup and lean against the counter, letting the warmth seep into my hands.

It is not a perfect life.

There are bills that make me wince and nights when Matteo gets sick and I have no one to hand him to while I scrub vomit from sheets at two in the morning.

There are days at the clinic when the fluorescent lights make my own head ache and elderly patients who tell me their whole life story while the phone rings off the hook.

There are moments, usually around midnight, when loneliness slips in through the cracks of my resolve and sits with me at the kitchen table while I stare out the window at the stars and wonder if that same man I used to know is looking at them too.

But this life is ours.

Outside, Matteo is calling for a rematch, his face already flushed from running.

I take a sip from my mug and let my gaze rest on him.

For one fragile moment, standing there with a warm coffee between my palms and sunlight pooling across the floorboards behind me, I let myself believe that the past is finally what I have insisted it is for these long years—gone and buried, unable to find us here after all these years.

Until the knock comes.

It startles me out of my thoughts so sharply that a little coffee sloshes over the rim of my mug and splashes hot against my knuckles.

The sound echoes through the quiet house, too loud against the hush of the kitchen and the distant laughter outside. My heart gives one hard, ugly thud against my ribs.

I glance automatically toward the hallway leading to the front door, more irritated than alarmed at first.

For one absurd second, I honestly think it is a delivery driver trying to drop off a package too early.

Maybe the vitamins I ordered last week or the school shoes Matteo needs because he managed to outgrow the current pair in what felt like a single night.

Something normal and dull, belonging to the life I built with no help from anyone else.

Then another set of knocks comes right after.

This one different and far more authoritative than the first set.

My body reacts before my mind catches up.

It is not a conscious decision, more like a switch flipping somewhere deep in my bones from old instincts I spent years forcing to sleep now jerking violently awake.

The soft domestic haze of the kitchen evaporates in an instant, replaced by something infinitely more familiar.

I set the mug down without a sound.

Outside the window, Matteo and the other boys are already starting up another round in the yard.

My son is laughing again, jogging backward with the soccer ball tucked under one arm while one of the other kids complains about the last goal. The sight of him so careless and bright under the morning sun sends a surge of adrenaline laced with ice through my bloodstream.

I wipe my damp hand on the side of my pants and move down the hallway.

The floorboard near the entryway creaks under my weight, and I hate myself a little for forgetting about the sound at all.

As I approach the door, my mind is already cataloging options with an old, mechanical efficiency I have not had to use in years.

There is no weapon in the house, not anymore, unless one counts the chef’s knife block still in the kitchen.

The nearest neighbor is two houses down and this town’s response time is quick for domestic emergencies and laughable for something like this.

I stop just short of the door and look through the peephole.

What I see surprises me but also does not.

There are four men in black standing on my porch.

Their posture is too rigid, their eyes too alert in that unmistakable way that tells me every one of them knows exactly how fast they can draw a weapon and how quickly it will take someone to call about the sound of gunshots.

Their hands rest near concealed weapons at their hips while their eyes scan the cul-de-sac like wolves who have finally picked up a long-cold scent and do not intend to lose it again.

At the front of them stands a man I never thought I would see again.

Davide Bianchi.

My stomach tightens, confusion rattling around inside my head.

For a moment, all I can do is stare through the fisheye distortion of the peephole, my mind refusing to align memory with what is standing on my porch.

Davide Bianchi, boss of the Bianchi syndicate and once one of my father’s most trusted allies, has no business being here standing in front of my house while my son plays soccer ten feet away in the back yard.

Yet… he is.

He’s older now, of course. Time has marked him in the ways it marks powerful men who survive long enough to be feared by a second generation.

Silver threads through darker strands at his temples. There are deeper lines bracketing his mouth and fanning from the corners of his eyes, etched there by years of command.

He still wears power with that effortlessly dangerous neatness men like him are born with. His dark coat is immaculately pressed at the collar. His polished shoes have no place on a quiet suburban porch like mine.

Confusion rattles hard inside my skull.

Why is he here? Why now?

I changed names. I became a woman no one would bother remembering or looking for. I lived small on purpose and told myself that enough years and distance would turn me into a dead branch on the family tree, at most. Something too inconvenient to dig up unless absolutely necessary.

He lifts his head then as if he can feel me watching him on the other side of the door.

Davide had always been loyal to my father with the kind of Old-World devotion that had become rare even then. He and my father understood each other in ways not even Vittorio Conti could.

They both believed in order and legacy, and in the careful architecture of power that could crumble in a single moment.

He had always spoken to me with a certain reserve that bordered on respectful. Seeing him at my door is easier to swallow than someone from another syndicate.

Whatever this is, I cannot let it unfold on the porch with Matteo outside or neighbors drifting out with coffee mugs and turning their curious eyes toward my house.

The absolute last thing I need is for these men to stay visible any longer than absolutely necessary.

In towns like this, people notice and gossip. Once someone starts asking the wrong questions, suddenly, this soft little life I’ve made will no longer be anonymous.

I pull in a breath and slowly ease the door open, only a crack at first and with the chain still hooked to the inside of the door. Davide’s gaze lands on me immediately.

For one horrifying instant, I am twenty again, back in the world of ornate ballrooms and bloodstained loyalties, standing in a floor-length silk dress surrounded by men deciding my future without asking me whether I wanted them to or not.

“Ms. Hayes,” Davide says, inclining his head toward me.

The use of my alias is not a courtesy as someone else in my position would be led to believe.

It is proof he knows both who I pretend to be and who I really am. Someone like Davide would not come knocking on the door of a single mother with no connection to his world. He wouldn’t waste his time if he weren’t sure of my real identity.

Even though I’ve been out of the crime world for close to a decade, I still know how it operates.

My fingers tighten around the edge of the door. “Sorry, do we know each other?”

His eyes crinkle at the corners just enough for me to notice. His gaze sweeps over me in one unhurried pass, taking in everything from the simple cream blouse and neutral slacks to my hair pulled back loosely at my nape, all of it so far from the woman I used to be.

He is assessing me in a way I am no longer accustomed to being looked at.

Around here, people see a tired single mother with good manners and a tendency to arrive five minutes early for school pickup. Davide sees none of that. Or, really, he sees through it all at once.

There is a faint, respectful tilt to his chin before he says, “May we come in?”

The politeness of it almost insults me. No one from that world has ever treated me as anything other than an ornament.

Well, except for…

Pushing the thought from my mind, I glance back at the armed men behind him, then back at his face. My pulse stays maddeningly steady despite the tension trying to straighten my frame.

“Whatever you want, the answer is no,” I say evenly.

For the first time, something in Davide’s expression shifts. Not in offense like I’m expecting, but closer to a kind of weary understanding, as if this is exactly what he expected from me and perhaps even exactly what he would have done in my place.

“Isabella, please. It is important.”

A frown tugs at my lips before I can stop it.

So.

We are done playing games, then.

No more Ms. Hayes or pretending he might be at the wrong house or I might still have some flimsy civilian deniability to hide behind. I’m no longer the woman who schedules dental cleanings and reminds Matteo to return his library books.

I’m back to being the daughter of Amos Russo and a ghost come back from the dead with too much to lose now.

I pull in a slow breath and shut the door.

For a second, I just stand there with my hand flat against the wood, my eyes closing briefly as I try to think around the surge of fear slowly coursing through my veins.

When I open them again, I spot the chain as it glints in the morning light. One small strip of metal between me and the men who dragged my past to my doorstep.

If I shut him out now, what are the chances he will actually leave me alone?

Slim to none, most likely.

Men like Davide do not track a woman down after eight years and however many dead ends it took to find my trail just to accept a no from behind a locked door.

If anything, refusal would only confirm that whatever brought him here matters enough to warrant persistence.

Every minute he remains on my porch is another one some neighbor might peek out through their blinds and see black-clad men standing at Marina Hayes’s door like the opening scene of a disaster movie no one in this town is equipped to understand.

Whatever he has come here for, it cannot be good. If this conversation is happening, it will happen where I can control it.

After another long moment, I find my hand moving almost against my will, sliding the latch away from the door with a soft metallic scrape that sounds far too much like surrender.

When I pull it open again, Davide is standing there patiently.

He has not shifted his posture or shown one ounce of irritation. He simply waits, composed and grave, as though he already knew exactly how this would go.

Perhaps he already understood that the woman on the other side of the door would never choose impulse where her child was concerned but would eventually know when to give in.

There is something unsettling in that scrutiny, in being seen so clearly by someone who belongs to the world I worked so hard to escape.

It makes me feel exposed in ways my plain clothes and false name never prepared me for, stripped of camouflage and returned, however briefly, to the version of myself who knew exactly what men like him looked for and exactly how to hide from it.

Only now, I no longer have the luxury of thinking only of myself.

I step aside at last, inviting them all in without another word. Davide moves only then, crossing the threshold with the quiet confidence of a man long accustomed to entering places where he knows he is not entirely welcome.

He stands just inside the entryway, taking in the room with one measured glance.

The family photos on the side table and Matteo’s shoes kicked crookedly against the baseboard are what his eyes linger on first.

He moves deeper into my home, past the drawings framed on the wall leading into the living room, all bright crayon stick figures and trees. Every detail of the life I built is now being seen through someone else’s eyes.

I hate how I can’t tell what he makes of it.

I fold my arms across my chest and lead him into the living room. We both settle on the couches facing opposite each other. His men crowd just inside the archway, keeping a bit of distance from us to give us space.

When Davide looks at me again, it’s the first time since I opened the door that he looks less like a syndicate boss. Sitting here in my living room, he looks more like a man carrying a heavy weight that he can no longer bear on his own, bowing under it visibly.

“Another family is moving in on my territory,” he begins, lacing his fingers together over his knee. “They have begun seizing assets piece by piece. Quietly at first, with disrupting warehouse supply chains and shipping routes. Recently, they’ve moved to the financial fronts and have gotten a few of my accounts frozen. Entire operations I've had for decades are beginning to collapse overnight. They are ruthless and have no clear plans of stopping anytime soon.”

His voice remains even, but I can hear the strain under it.

“I need a brilliant strategist like your father was to help me make moves against them. I know he taught you well, Isabella.”

I feel the pull of it instantly, that old instinct stirring within me as my Russo blood hums in my veins.

It is stitched into me more deeply than the false name on my paperwork and the person I’ve been pretending to be for almost a decade.

Pattern analysis.

Weak points.

Pressure lines inside enemy lines.

That delicious, dangerous satisfaction of seeing three moves ahead while the other side still thinks they are safe on the first.

My father trained me in that language before I was old enough to understand how many daughters were never taught it. He would sit me beside him after meetings and ask what I saw.

Which one lied with his body instead of his mouth, what alliances were fracturing under the strain of politics and which insults had been filed away for future bloodshed.

He taught me to see the game beneath the board, to hear what men meant when they thought they were clever or too afraid to say something outright.

For one dangerous second, I imagine stepping back into that role. I imagine the hum of my mind when it locks into that kind of work, the thrill of making invisible pieces align, the private rush of setting a trap so elegant, the enemy thinks it is his own idea right until the floor drops out beneath him.

It would be easy, I realize with a coldness that unsettles me. Too easy. Eight years away and that part of me is still there, still breathing just below the surface, patient as a predator in deep water. It does not feel dead. It feels hungry.

Then I picture Matteo’s face. I see him exactly as he was five minutes ago with grass-stained knees, hair in his eyes, mouth open in laughter because a little boy from two houses down missed an easy goal and collapsed into theatrical despair.

I see the gap where one of his baby teeth finally came loose last week, the roundness still lingering in his cheeks from when he was a toddler, the way he tucks his stuffed shark under one arm every single night and pretends he has outgrown it if anyone asks.

The entire fantasy of my life as a Russo dies instantly.

My answer comes immediately, unwavering. “I will not let that world touch my child. Not now, not ever. Find another way, Davide. I can’t.”

Disappointment flickers behind his eyes. “Is there anything I can offer you that will convince you to reconsider?”

My hands tighten in my lap so hard, my nails bite into my palms.

There it is, the bargain I knew had to be waiting beneath all that courtesy. It isn’t a threat, not yet, but an open invitation for a further negotiation. A door cracked just wide enough to see whether I will step through it willingly or be forced to be dragged through.

Even if I wanted to, even if I allowed that buried reckless part of me to rise up and uncurl after years of being in the dark, Matteo’s safety instantly drags me back down to reality with brutal force.

There is no version of this where I step back into a world I once inhabited and somehow keep my son untouched by it.

The underworld does not tolerate innocence for long. It notices softness the way sharks notice blood in the water.

It identifies vulnerabilities, catalogues them, then decides whether to exploit them now or save them for leverage later.

Children are never just children there. They are heirs, pressure points, future pawns and insurance policies. That is always how the machine works.

It grinds and consumes all who come before it. Even if I tried to keep Matteo hidden, it would not matter for long. Sooner or later, someone would look too closely, some enemy would ask the right questions, and my son would stop being the sweet seven-year-old who still believes in magic tricks and Santa Claus and become what that world would make of him.

Useful.

I would sooner die than let that happen.

“I’m sorry,” I say. My voice sounds distant even to me, as though the answer comes from some colder, steadier version of myself. “But no.”

Davide nods slowly. And then he does something I do not expect—he accepts it.

At least on the surface.

He does not lean forward and remind me what men in his position are capable of when denied. Nor do his eyes drift meaningfully toward the window where Matteo is still outside playing. He simply sits with the refusal and absorbs it.

For a moment, I am almost surprised he is not threatening me.

Most Dons in his position would. Cornered badly enough to seek outside help, someone like him would not walk into a room like this without at least one knife hidden behind their back.

If he truly is desperate enough to come here, to track me down after eight years and ask for the one thing I swore I would never give anyone again, then it must be bad.

Bad enough to override pride and risk spooking me.

That thought settles uncomfortably in my chest.

Davide’s gaze lowers briefly to his clasped hands before lifting back to mine. “I will be in town for a few more days. Please think things over until then. I will leave my contact information for you. If I don’t hear from you within a few days, I will take your no as your final answer.”

All I can do is nod before standing.

He doesn’t stay any longer after that. He and his men file out of my house without a fight, leaving just as quietly as they’d come. I watch them climb into their cars from my front porch, my arms wrapped around my body tightly in a self-soothing motion.

The black SUVs glide away down the cul-de-sac like an omen. The street returns to their peaceful rhythm once they disappear around the corner. I step back inside after watching the road for another few minutes, making sure they don’t circle back around again.

As soon as I lock the door, I lean against it. To my surprise, guilt seeps into the cracks of my resolve like saltwater into an open wound.

What would my father have wanted?

Would Amos Russo call me a coward for turning my back on an old friend like Davide? Or would he demand I run faster, burn every bridge that could lead violence back to my son?

My mind becomes a battlefield of contradictions. Loyalty versus survival, duty versus motherhood.

Beneath it all lies a single, aching truth. I wish my father were still alive. He would see the angles I cannot yet see. He would know the path forward buried beneath my fear.

But he is gone, shot down eight years ago in a betrayal that shattered everything and that I still have no answers for.

Matteo’s voice floats from down the hallway, innocent and bright. “Mom? Is it time for school yet?”

I push off the door and turn toward the sound of his voice. Pull it together. “Yes, baby. Grab your backpack and get your shoes on.”

He bounds down the hallway with his cleats in hand, his honey-gold eyes sparkling with excitement as he sprints for the door to grab his backpack. I ruffle his dark hair and pull him into a hug that lasts a second too long.

He blinks up at me when I finally let go. “You okay, Mom?”

“Absolutely,” I lie, pressing a kiss to the top of his head.

We step outside into the warm morning air, hand in hand. The peaceful town stretches around us, the illusion of safety I have fought years to maintain. But the shadows of my past have never truly disappeared.

They only wait for the right moment to strike.

And today, they have found me once again.

8

ISABELLA

I cup my hand over my eyes as I watch Matteo dart across the field with a ball in front of him, his dark hair bouncing with each step and his honey-gold eyes narrowed in fierce concentration as he lines up his shot.

For one suspended second, everything slows.

There is only my son in motion, all wiry limbs and stubborn determination, the mid-morning sun catching across the crown of his head as he drives forward with that same relentless focus he brings to everything now, whether it is soccer or math homework or insisting he can absolutely bring all the groceries from the car without dropping them the second his feet cross into the entryway.

He leans into the kick at the last possible second, then his foot connects. The ball sails straight ahead, swooping hard past the goalie and catches into the back of the net.

A cheer erupts around the field.

Matteo throws both arms into the air in triumph, his face splitting into a grin with pure, incandescent joy just before three of his teammates barrel into him at once and tackle him to the grass in a laughing, chaotic pile of limbs.

The other boys swarm after them while the referee blows his whistle to get them all back onto the field to play another round.

A few of the parents next to me clap from the sidelines and nod in my direction with easy, warm approval.

“Great shot,” one of the fathers says.

“He’s getting so good,” another mother adds with a smile that reaches her eyes.

I smile back without using my teeth because that is what Marina Hayes does. I stand among them in my simple navy sweater and jeans, my hair pulled back in its usual low knot, and clap with the rest while my stomach twists into knots that have nothing to do with the game.

This should be an ordinary Sunday like any other—a chilly morning turning warm by noon.

Folding chairs dug into the damp grass a few feet from the sidelines, parents sipping their lukewarm coffees and shouting words of encouragement, little kids dressed in oversized jerseys charging up and down the field as if a neighborhood rec league somehow carries the same importance of a world cup.

This is the kind of day I used to ache for without even understanding exactly what I was looking for. From the outside, that is exactly what this looks like.

No one knows that I’ve scanned the perimeter of this field three separate times before kickoff and memorized every parked car near the entrance.

They do not know that I chose this spot on the sidelines because it gives me a clear view of the lot, the path to the bathrooms, and the road beyond the concessions stand because my pulse has been running too fast since the start of this week.

Davide’s visit has settled under my skin like poison, slowly spreading like a cancer I am beginning to no longer be able to ignore. It has changed everything around me without altering a single visible thing.

I clap again as Matteo untangles himself from the heap of laughing boys and gets back to his feet, grinning so hard, the gap in his front teeth show where it is still growing.

He glances toward the sideline immediately, searching for me.

I lift my hand and wave when his eyes latch onto me. His face brightens impossibly further before he runs off toward the opposite end of the field to join the other boys.

He has no idea that while he sleeps at night, I lie awake and replay every word Davide had said until dawn starts peeking through my windows. Or how guilty I feel to turn down one of my father’s closest allies. I still have not found a version of this that ends without something dragging us back into a world I thought I left behind years ago.

Matteo bounces on the balls of his feet while waiting for the game to resume. There is dirt smeared over one knee and one of his socks has already disappeared inside his cleat. One shoelace is threatening to come undone, but he doesn’t pay it any attention before he surges forward toward the ball as soon as the referee’s whistle blows.

His father would have loved watching him like this.

The thought arrives uninvited, and for a moment I hate myself for even thinking it. I hate him for still existing anywhere inside me after all these years.

For surfacing to my memory in fragments when Matteo runs a certain way or tilts his chin in a flash of defiance or grins after winning as if victory is his birthright.

It is not fair, the resemblance they share.

I cup my hands around my mouth and call his name with the same easy warmth as always. “Go, Teo!”

All the while, my eyes stay trained on the parking lot, following a black SUV with dark tinted windows pulling in from the street.

I wonder if this is how it begins, this new version of survival. Not with running immediately from gunfire or screams after an explosion, but with the quiet corrosion of everything slowly beginning to feel unsettled.

Is this how I will feel now?

Living with the inability to watch a soccer game without mapping an exit strategy or chatting with another mother without wondering how quickly I could get Matteo to the car if I had to? Will I no longer be able to hear my son laugh without feeling terror twine through the love that continues to make my heart beat?

I hate most of all that fear is trying to taint even something as small as that.

When the game finally ends, I bend to pick up my lawn chair and shake the damp grass from its metal feet before folding it back into its slip.

Around me, the field dissolves into the familiar post-game chaos with coaches calling out reminders for next Saturday’s start time.

Children race in circles, somehow finding a second wind the moment the final whistle blows. Parents gather discarded sweatshirts and cleats and half-empty water bottles, calling names into the warm afternoon air.

I hear Matteo running toward me before I see him. His footsteps are quick and uneven over the grass, his voice reaching me while he is still halfway across the field, already tumbling through words too fast for his breathing to keep up.

“See that, Mom? Two goals on my own! And Luca said the second one was way better because I kicked it from farther out and Coach even said if I keep practicing my left foot, I’m gonna be impossible to block and Tyler only got one and…” His arms wrap around my waist in the next second, his whole body colliding with mine hard enough to nearly knock me off balance.

A startled laugh leaves me before I can stop it. I plant my foot more firmly into the grass and catch him against me, dropping the folded chair to my side so I can hug him properly.

He is warm and sweaty and breathing hard, his jersey damp at the back, his skin smelling like grass and dirt.

I hold him tighter than I mean to, too tight, maybe. But he only squeezes me harder in return, still buzzing with an uncomplicated joy most adults spend their whole lives trying to find.

When I pull back enough to look at him, I brush his damp hair away from his forehead. It springs right back down, as always.

“I saw. You’re unstoppable, baby,” I tell him, smiling despite the ache in my chest.

He beams up at me.

For a second, it is all open delight, his whole face lit from within, bright and warm and innocent as the morning sun.

Then something changes. It is subtle, so subtle, most people would miss it. But Matteo is not most people. He has my eyes and far too much of my mind behind them.

That unnervingly perceptive stare of his flickers to my smile. His eyes narrow slightly, taking me in with a focus too hardened for a seven-year-old and somehow entirely natural for him.

He has always noticed what I wish he would not.

Unfortunately, my son did not only inherit his father’s face and stubbornness. He inherited me too.

“You okay, Mom?” The question is soft, almost casual, but I hear the real thing underneath it. He knows something is off.

I force my smile to widen, careful not to overdo it. “Of course I am.”

The lie comes easily and I hate that it does. I shouldn’t have to put on a front when it comes to my son. Especially when I feel the walls slowly closing in around us with no way out.

Before he can study me any longer, I tilt my head and add, “How about we make sundaes when we get home?”

Just as quickly as it appeared, Matteo’s scrutiny vanishes beneath pure delight. His eyes brighten, all suspicion washed away by the promise of sugar and celebration. He gasps dramatically. “Really?”

I laugh, more honestly this time. “Yup.”

He throws his arms up over his head with a loud whoop!

Before he can get carried away, I point a finger at him. “After you shower, though.”

The groan I get in response is immediate and theatrical enough to draw a smile from one of the other mothers passing by with a cooler dragging behind her.

“But Moooom,” he drags out, his head tipping back and his body swaying in an effort to fight the urge to collapse onto the grass from sheer dramatics. “I’m not even that dirty!”

I raise a brow and glance down at the streak of grass and dirt running down his shins and the damp collar of his jersey.

He follows my gaze, looks back at me, and sighs. “Okay, fine… but can I have marshmallow sauce and chocolate syrup?”

“We’ll discuss it in negotiations.”

He squints up at me. “That sounds like a yes.”

“That sounds like you’re getting ahead of yourself.”

He grins, already certain he has won.

I sling the folded chair over one shoulder once again, pick up his water bottle and extra pair of cleats with my free hand, and he slips his hand into mine.

His fingers are still slightly sticky, his palm warm as it squeezes mine. We start the walk home hand in hand.

Matteo chatters the entire way, his words bouncing off the sidewalk ahead of us like stones skipping across water.

He tells me exactly how the first goal happened even though I watched it myself. He reenacts the second with exaggerated arm motions that nearly make him trip over the curb and informs me with complete certainty that he is definitely making the school team once tryouts start in a few weeks because Coach said his field awareness is getting “super advanced”.

He talks about which of his teammates he thinks might get moved up too, which kid he secretly thinks is terrible at defense, and why goalie is “important but kind of boring to play”.

I half-listen, not because I do not care. I care so much it physically pains me. Every wonderfully ordinary thing he says hits a spot that is tender inside me. Each sentence is another reminder of what I am trying to preserve and what is at stake, what I may have to uproot before he even understands why if worse comes to worse.

The street heading back to our cul-de-sac looks exactly as it did this morning. Kids on bikes ride along the side of the road in loose, looping circles, their laughter lifting on the breeze.

Distant lawnmowers rumble somewhere behind the houses in that lazy, suburban rhythm that once felt almost comically absurd to me when I first settled here.

A woman farther down waters her front flowerbeds in rubber sandals and a sun hat and waves when we pass. Wind chimes clink softly from one of the porches.

The whole neighborhood glows with the easy, sun-washed safety I chose it for.

And yet, I cannot stop seeing the danger hiding in the shadows.

When we turn onto our street, the little blue house comes into view at the end of the cul-de-sac, looking exactly as it always does.

The flowers in the pot on the porch are drooping because I forgot to water them yesterday. Matteo’s scooter lies tipped on its side near the front steps.

The door to our mailbox is slightly ajar from the postman stopping by earlier.

It is home.

That word should soothe me. Normally, one look at our little blue house at the end of the cul-de-sac is enough to ease something deep in my chest. Home means Matteo’s sneakers kicked crookedly by the door and grocery lists stuck to the fridge with school magnets.

It means the couch with one sagging cushion and the cabinet that sticks in humid weather and the faint smell of vanilla from the candle I light at night after he falls asleep. It’s the smallest, softest version of happiness I ever trusted myself to want.

Until I see the black SUV parked two doors down.

Everything inside me goes cold. My feet stop without warning.

It is pulled up in front of the Thomasons’ driveway, but not quite angled toward their house.

Something about the placement is wrong. The windows are tinted dark enough to swallow any hint of movement inside, and even from here I can tell the plates are out-of-state.

My pulse spikes the instant I register it, every nerve in my body suddenly alive in the worst way.

The shift is so abrupt, Matteo takes half a step ahead before our joined hands pull taut between us. He turns slightly from the force of it, but I barely notice.

My eyes are too fixed on the SUV, scanning the outside of its frame with frantic precision for anything that looks familiar. Any insignia or subtle customization that might place it with Davide’s convoy from a few days ago.

But I see nothing.

Somehow, that is worse. Because if it matched, at least I would know what I am dealing with.

Matteo’s hand tugs on mine. “Mom?”

His voice is small with confusion, and that sound slices straight through the static roaring in my ears just enough for me to look down at him. His big honey-gold eyes are turned up at me, open and questioning, his earlier excitement about sundaes already slipping into concern. He senses the change as he always does. One glance at my face and I know he can feel something has gone wrong even if he has no words for it yet.

I open my mouth to answer him but nothing comes out. My heart is pounding so hard in my chest, it is making it difficult to hear over the sound of it. Each beat lands like a fist against my sternum, drowning out the ordinary suburban soundtrack that should still be here.

It could be nothing. Plenty of people drive large blacked-out SUVs in this city. Plenty of people come up from out of town for weekends in our little town a few miles from the coast.

Maybe the Thomasons have family visiting, their nephew from Boston they always liked to brag about or that friend from Connecticut who does roof contracting.

Maybe the out-of-state plates mean vacation, not surveillance. Tinted windows could mean nothing more than expensive taste and too much disposable income.

None of those explanations settle me. I know too damn well what men in cars like that look are doing when they are waiting for their target to walk by unaware.

My eyes dart to the house beside us, two doors down from ours, that belongs to an elderly couple who rarely come up from the city in spring.

Their front porch is bare, no car in the driveway. No lights on that I can see from here, even through the afternoon glare.

My mind latches onto the layout instantly, tracing the route the way I would have once done with escape routes in banquet halls and side entrances from safe houses—through their side yard, around the back, past the covered pool, cut across the back to our property’s fence line, climb it into our own.

If there is someone sitting in that SUV watching the front of my house, they would not notice us slipping in through the back. There is no visibility of it from the street.

I look down at him once more and force my features into something softer that could pass for being distracted rather than terrified. “Let’s go on a little adventure.”

He blinks up at me, dark brows pulling together. “An adventure?”

The suspicion on his face is almost painful.

He is too smart and observant for a seven-year-old.

Before he can ask anything else, I tug him gently with me and steer us off the sidewalk. We cross the elderly couple’s lawn slowly as if there is nothing strange at all about cutting across a neighbor’s yard in a neighborhood like this one.

The grass is brittle and yellow in patches where the spring rain has not yet fully repaired winter’s damage, and it crunches beneath our feet in dry little snaps that sound far too loud to me.

Matteo is quiet as we make our way around the back of the house, and that silence frightens me almost as much as his chatter would have.

It means he knows enough to feel that something is wrong even if he does not understand why. His hand squeezes mine tighter than before, and I squeeze his right back.

We pass through the back yard, keeping clear of the fenced-in pool. Its dark cover is stretched tight across the water, leaves scattered over it like rust-colored paper.

The whole yard smells faintly of damp wood and the rot of old spring mulch. Wind stirs the branches of the trees overhead. Somewhere nearby, a screen door slams. Every ordinary sound makes my nerves jump.

“Mom, what are we doing?” Matteo finally asks. His voice is low now, no longer airy with that post-game excitement. He keeps close to my side as we move, his steps shorter than mine, his gaze flicking between my face and the direction we are headed.

“We’re playing a game, silly,” I answer, trying to keep my tone light and easy with the kind of teasing warmth he expects from me.

I hate lying to him.

I hate even more that I am getting good at it.

We reach the far side of the yard and come up to the next corner. I pull both of us gently against the side of the house, flattening our bodies against the brick exterior. Matteo gives a tiny startled huff but lets me guide him where I want him. I can feel the roughness of the brick through my sweater sleeve as I lean just enough to peek back toward the street.

The SUV is still there and has not moved an inch. From here I still cannot tell if anyone is behind the wheel.

The windshield catches too much light and the tinted windows are too dark to penetrate this far away. There is no obvious motion coming from inside, no cigarette ember lighting while waiting, no silhouette shifting in the driver’s seat.

It feels ridiculous to be this paranoid.

This town is full of families and weekend visitors and cars that do not belong to my neighbors.

A blacked-out SUV is not proof of anything. If someone from school saw me now, half-hidden behind a neighbor’s house with my son pressed to my side, they would think I had lost my damn mind.

But Davide’s visit has kept every nerve in me humming with old danger ever since.

When I duck back behind the house, I turn toward Matteo and finally let go of his hand so I can grip both his shoulders instead. “Ready for our game?”

He eyes me suspiciously. “I guess...”

I plaster on a bright smile that feels almost cartoonish. “Okay. First one to the back door wins an extra scoop of ice cream.”

His eyes narrow further. He peeks around me toward where our house sits two down from where we are, then looks back at me with all the grave practicality of a lawyer preparing for cross-examination. “What about the fence?”

For one second I could laugh, though not because any of this is funny. It’s because even now with my pulse thundering and the past feeling as if it’s breathing down my neck, Matteo is still Matteo.

Still thoughtful and exact, remembering every rule I ever laid out for him and refusing to overstep those bounds without probable cause.

God, he would make an incredible capo…

“We’re going to climb over it,” I tell him.

His eyes practically bug out of his head. “But you told me you never wanted me to climb on it because it’s dangerous.”

“I know,” I say quickly, keeping my voice soft. “But this is only for our game, okay?”

I can see the battle happening behind his eyes. The thrill of a secret mission, the lure of the promise at the end of the mission, the confusion over me permitting something I have always forbidden. That instinct inherited from both sides of his bloodline to keep looking closer when something does not make sense is incredible to watch bloom in real-time.

“Okay,” he finally says, though I can tell he is not entirely convinced.

That is fine for now.

At this point, I do not need him to be convinced. I need him compliant.

“Good,” I say, straightening up once again. “Move quickly. Secret mission style.”

At that, a spark of excitement breaks through his uncertainty. He straightens a little, shoulders going back, eyes sharpening as his voice lowers automatically. “Like spies?”

“Exactly like spies,” I whisper back, leaning in conspiratorially.

A tiny grin tugs at the corner of his mouth, some of the tension leaving him, enough that he can play along.

Relief rushes through me so fast, it almost hurts. If I can keep this a game for two more minutes, maybe I can get him inside without him feeling the fear pouring off me like a heatwave.

The fence between the properties is not especially high, but it is high enough that Matteo will need help getting over it.

I have told him a dozen times not to climb it because of the splinters and falling, and because good neighbors do not treat shared fences like playground equipment.

Now my eyes scan the rough wood, already calculating for footholds.

“Ready?” I whisper, lowering myself into a running stance. It feels absurd to crouch there in a stranger’s backyard with my son and turn panic into playacting, but absurdity has no room in the same circle as survival.

He mimics me instantly, his little knees bent and shoulders hunched forward. “Ready.”

I force my mouth away from the tight line it’s fallen into. “Ready… go!”

He takes off ahead of me instantly, sprinting across our next neighbor’s back yard at breakneck speed, his cleats digging into the grass, his arms pumping hard at his sides. For one split second, watching him run with all that fearless momentum almost feels normal, like we really are just racing for the fun of it.

I cast one last glance around the corner of the brick siding before following after him, my folded chair bouncing against my side. The grass is uneven beneath my feet, soft in some places and packed hard in others.

My foot catches one small divot and for a terrible split second, my balance pitches, my body lurching sideways from the force of my own momentum, but instinct rights me before I can panic.

I keep moving, my pulse slamming so hard, it hurts.

He reaches the fence first. His small hands grapple for one of the horizontal boards nailed lengthwise across the back, using it to haul himself up. I pause the instant I hit our property line and flatten myself briefly behind the edge of the house, my breath snagging in my throat as my eyes dart back toward the SUV.

It has still not moved, but from here the angle is different. I can actually see through the windshield.

There are two men in the front seat, both of them turned toward the front of our house. Neither of them are glancing down at their phones waiting for something, nor are they talking to each other. All they are doing is sitting and watching.

The sight sends a cold, immediate wave through my body so sharp, it nearly buckles my knees.

They are watching the house.

Not the Thomasons’.

Mine.

Cursing under my breath, I turn back toward Matteo and strip the folded chair off my shoulder and toss it over the side of the fence. It thuds on the ground seconds later.

He already has both hands on the top of our fence and is trying to muscle himself higher, shoes scraping against the boards in desperate, determined little jerks. My hands come up automatically, fingers lacing together to form a step.

“Foot here, baby,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice steady.

He obeys without hesitation, planting one cleat squarely into my joined hands. The spikes dig into my skin uncomfortably, hard enough that I know I will have little half-moon bruises later if I bother to notice them after this.

Right now, I barely feel it, though. All I feel is the awful slowness of every second while those men sit in that SUV facing our front door like hunters waiting for movement.

For one terrible moment, he wobbles. His body pitches sideways, one knee slipping, fingers scrambling for a better grip, and I can already see the disaster in my mind of him falling back and hurting himself.

But then he gets his knee over the top edge and drags himself upward with a grunt of effort, pulling himself up to perch on the top rail like a triumphant little cat.

He glances down at me wild-eyed. “I did it!”

“Good job, baby,” I tell him, and I hear the shaking in my own voice no matter how hard I try to bury it. “Stay right there. I’ll help you get down.”

I climb after him quickly, far less gracefully than he did. My palms catch rough wood, one foot slips, and my sleeve snags on a splintered edge near the top.

I hear the fabric tear, a sharp little rip that would have annoyed me under any other circumstances, but right now, I do not care. I swing down into our yard first, landing harder on my feet than I intend, my knees jolting with the impact.

Then I turn back toward the fence and hold out my arms. “Okay. Jump.”

He drops into me with a muffled grunt. I catch him against my body with a force that knocks me back half a step and gather him close for one long second, one arm wrapped tight around his middle and the other bracing his back, steadying us both.

He laughs a little breathlessly into my shoulder. “That was awesome!”

The innocence of that nearly breaks something in me.

Safely tucked inside our own back yard should feel like relief, but it doesn’t. Not even a little.

All I can think about are those two men in the front seat of that SUV.

There is no doubt in my mind now that our house is being watched.

Why else would they be facing in this direction? We are the only house at the end of the cul-de-sac. Anyone parked there has direct sight of our property.

Matteo shifts in my arms until I finally drop him back down to his feet. His cheeks are a little flushed from running and climbing, his hair still messy from earlier. I brush it back from his forehead, unable to help myself.

“Do I still get extra ice cream even though you were the first one over the fence?” he asks.

For one stunned second, I almost laugh. “Of course, baby.”

I force myself to let him go and lean to grab the folded chair off the ground even though every instinct in me wants to keep him pressed to my chest forever.

He grins and darts toward the back steps, and I follow close behind. I hate how the yard feels exposed despite the fence. I can feel the weight of those unseen eyes even here on the other side of the house.

By the time Matteo reaches the back door, I am already fumbling for my keys with fingers that do not quite want to work. They feel clumsy and distant as if they belong to someone else.

The metal slips once against my skin before I catch it properly. All the while, Matteo is bouncing on his heels beside the door.

“And sprinkles,” he is saying, counting on his fingers now. “And chocolate syrup. And whipped cream. And maybe cookie pieces if we still have them, and if there’s only one cherry, I think I should get it because I scored twice and that should count for extra cherry privileges.”

Under any other circumstance, I would smile and tease him about re-negotiating our terms like that.

Instead, his words wash over me, all of my attention narrowed to the back door and the prickling awareness that danger may already be too close.

When I finally get the key into the lock, there is a slight catch in the mechanism that I am too distracted to notice right away.

I twist it until it finally unlatches, the click of it sounding wrong but something I file away to deal with later.

All I can focus on are the questions circling my mind like a vulture.

Do I call the local police?

Spin some story about a suspicious vehicle loitering close to our property?

Something that would bring a cruiser over here and might buy me time to come up with a plan?

Then again, what good would that do?

Local cops against syndicate enforcers will end only one way. I know how quickly ordinary law enforcement becomes collateral when they walk blindly into a threat they do not understand.

They would arrive thinking what awaits them is trespassing and maybe a domestic dispute involving too much paperwork back at the precinct.

They would not be prepared for men who see violence as nothing more than procedure.

Involving them would only paint a brighter target on our backs. It would create more witnesses and bring more attention to whoever is watching us and escalate things before I can find a way to control it.

I exhale slowly and push the door open at last, stepping aside so Matteo can run ahead of me.

My strategist’s mind is already moving three steps ahead whether I want it to or not, spinning contingencies with the ruthless efficiency I thought motherhood had softened out of me.

If we are being followed, changing routes will do little in the long run. If they know where we live, then this house is already compromised no matter how many deadbolts and locked doors sit between us and whatever threats linger outside it.

We need to leave.

Maybe tonight, maybe even before sunset if I can distract Matteo long enough to pack without making him panic.

We could drive up north, pay cash to sleep somewhere cheap until I can figure out where we can go.

Perhaps to another coastal town on the other side of the country, another alias we will have to live under.

God. How will I get him to understand?

I’ve done it before, I can do it again. But now I have a seven-year-old who is too curious for his own good and will be asking me questions. The first time I ran, I had been terrified, of course.

I had vanished because I had to, and necessity had made anything possible.

This time, though, there is a boy with soccer practice and a teacher who sends home gold stars on his spelling quizzes. One who believes this home is permanent because I made it look that way.

Uprooting him now will not just mean fleeing. It will mean breaking something in him I have spent seven years trying to protect.

But… broken trust is better than spilled blood.

Davide visiting my home has opened some can of worms I still cannot fully wrap my head around. That much is obvious now. His presence alone was a signal, a stone thrown into still water.

Tracking me down has stirred attention in my direction from someone clearly involved with him.

Maybe the family moving in on his territory has been sifting through old alliances to find a pressure point and mine surfaced the second Davide knocked on my door looking for help.

Perhaps whoever is outside thinks they can scare me into not taking Davide up on his offer despite already refusing it to begin with. That would fit the logic of the world I came from. A first no is rarely treated as a final answer by men raised on never accepting no, especially not when they believe the person saying it still has value.

Any syndicate worth their salt knows threats are the only true way to get people to comply.

I cross the kitchen and head for the living room, the folding chair heavy against my shoulder. I slip it down my arm and settle it next to the dining table, my thoughts moving too fast to settle anywhere for more than a second at a time.

Cash. Our documents. Matteo’s school things. His stuffed shark. I’ll have to get in touch with my old contact about getting new papers. Leave before dark or after? Call my contact before or after we settle? Avoid the highway. Keep the route irregular. Stop for gas now or farther north?

It is a grave mistake not to notice the sudden silence that has fallen over my house.

An even graver one to forget, even for one distracted heartbeat, the sound of my son racing down the hallway toward his room.

The familiar thud-thud-thud of him yanking open his dresser too hard and the running commentary he usually provides to himself when he is in a hurry.

I have listened to those sounds so many times, they should be stitched into my entire nervous system.

It is not until I reach the threshold of the living room that my eyes finally lift from the floor.

Within one single moment, my entire world shifts on its axis. Because sitting on the couch, with men surrounding him on all sides, is a man I never, ever thought I would see again.

For a second, my body completely freezes. Every organ, nerve, even the beat of my own heart has been violently interrupted by the sight of him in my home, in my life, in the place I built specifically to keep him and his world out.

He sits in my home like he has always belonged here—one ankle resting over the opposite knee, broad shoulders relaxed beneath a dark coat, one hand draped loosely along the back of the couch as if this is a social visit and not an invasion.

The room bends around him as if the center of gravity has no choice but to shift wherever he decides to place himself.

Those dark eyes pin me in place.

They move over me slowly.

Assessing.

It is so familiar, it hurts.

It sweeps over my face, my clothes, the keys still clutched in my hand, the tension bracing every line of my body. It feels like he is reading me down to my very bones, stripping away the years one quiet observation at a time.

When his lips finally part, the voice that comes out is the same timbre I remember falling in love with more than eight years ago.

“Hello, Isabella.”

This is not possible.

Not here.

Not after all these years.

Not after everything.

My eyes tear away from him and latch onto the figure standing nearest the couch, and the world suddenly shifts into a whole other nightmare. One of the men has a hand gripped tightly on Matteo’s shoulder, pinning him in place beside the armchair. His face is turned toward me, his honey-gold eyes wide and wild with confusion and fear, his chest rising too fast. His gaze darts around the room as he tries to understand why half a dozen strangers are in his house and why one of them just called his mother by a name he has never heard before.

Instinct surges through me like lightning. I lunge forward so fast, my vision narrows to that single point. “Get away from him!”

I do not think.

I move.

The first man reaches for me and I drive my elbow hard into his stomach with all the force I can gather, the keys in my hand stinging against my skin.

The impact jars up my arm with a brutal, satisfying thud, and he folds enough for me to break past him. A second body comes at my side and I throw my keys at his face before slamming my knee upward blindly, catching him hard enough that he curses and doubles over.

Someone grabs at my wrist, but I rip free and claw at the next one in my path.

A lifetime of training buried under years of civilian life comes roaring back to life within seconds. My father’s voice cuts through the chaos in my head, crisp as broken glass dragging against freshly exposed skin.

Never go quietly, Isabella. Make them bleed before they take you.

So I do.

I fight like a cornered animal.

But unfortunately, as I’ve come to learn time and time again, brute force overwhelms strategy as it does too often.

Bodies close around me faster than any openings appear. Someone catches my forearm and another blocks my path. Another moves behind me before I can turn, and I land one more hit before I feel a heavy body slam into me from behind.

The floor rises with sickening speed and I hit hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs, pain bursting across my chest and cheekbone as the hardwood cracks against me. Air leaves me in one helpless rush and for a second, I cannot drag any back in.

Matteo’s terrified scream rips through the room.

“Mom!”

I lunge toward his voice on pure instinct, dragging in a ragged breath as I claw at the floor for purchase. I kick backward, twist viciously, bite down on the cry tearing up my throat only long enough to scream his name instead.

“Matteo!” Hands haul me back. I thrash against them, screaming until my throat feels flayed open. “Let him go! Don’t you touch him! Don’t you touch my son!”

A knee plants in the middle of my back, pinning me flat to the floor again. Pain shoots white-hot along my spine. My arms are yanked behind me so hard, it makes my shoulders scream, and a second later, plastic zip ties bite savagely into my wrists.

“Stop!” Matteo is crying now, his voice cracking apart. “Stop, you’re hurting her! Stop!”

I twist my head and catch a glimpse of him through the bodies crowding the room. He is trying to pull free, jerking under the grip of the man holding him and pulling him out of the living room to the now open door. Tears streak down his face in large rivulets. He suddenly looks so little, so young. Not my brave soccer player with grass on his knees and sundae plans on his mind. Just a child in a room full of wolves.

“Matteo, look at me!” I shout, fighting for breath, for control, for anything. “Baby, it’s okay. It’s okay, we’re going to be okay.”

It is the worst lie I have ever told.

I am hauled up off the floor by my bound arms before the words even finish leaving me. Pain rips through my shoulders and I choke on it, my feet barely finding the ground before I am shoved forward, dragged across my own living room like dead weight toward the door. My knee clips the edge of the coffee table. I twist, trying again to reach him, but two men have me now and the leverage I had is now all theirs.

Matteo’s cries are distant now, muffled as the front door slams behind him and the man dragging him out of the house.

The man sitting on the couch finally lifts himself up from it. The motion is slow, controlled in a way that instantly sets me on edge. He who has never doubted he is in control of everything, who does not need to rush because he already knows the ending. A man who has always treated violence as both a first language and a birthright.

He has always been a predator no matter how easily he can pretend to play nice.

Even when he was younger and his mouth softened around the edges of my name. When he could look at me from across a dimly lit room and make me feel like I was the only thing there worth seeing. It had always been a trick of the light. A mask he’d used to get those he wanted into his bed and wrapped around his finger.

I know that now in ways I did not know it back then.

He is just as tall as I remember. I have spent so long forcing myself not to imagine what time would have done to his face, his body, his eyes. He is heavily muscled, built thick through the shoulders and chest like the fighter I know he is, the violence of his bloodline prominent even now.

He was always strong, always dangerous. But there is something harder about him now. Less of the young man who once leaned against doorways in rolled-up sleeves assessing from the shadows and more of the syndicate prince who has survived exactly by becoming worse than what hunts him.

His thick black hair is immaculately styled, but one hand pushes it back in that familiar gesture that nearly knocks the wind out of me yet again. Even now my body recognizes him before my mind can stop it.

Dark eyes, almost black, stare down at me with a blank mask. Unreadable to anyone else, maybe, but not to me. I know the stillness of that face and what it means when his expression locks down so completely, it looks cold.

With strangers it means calculation. With enemies it means someone is about to get hurt. With me, once upon a time, it usually meant he felt too much and hated himself for it.

Now I do not know where I fall on the spectrum.

Friend? Foe? Something infinitely worse?

“You always have to make everything so difficult,” he murmurs.

Elio Conti.

My first love.

My worst heartbreak.

The man who walked away eight years ago when I needed him most.

The man who chose family and duty over the woman who carried his child in secret. The underboss of the Conti syndicate, my ruthless protector turned enemy.

He has found me.

Whatever fragile peace I carved out for Matteo and I has been completely eviscerated.

9

ELIO

The safehouse feels too small with this many men packed inside it, despite being big enough on paper to pass for comfortable.

It is one of our family properties kept off the books and behind shell corporations that run deep enough to cross most accountants’ eyes.

A raised-ranch type structure tucked deep enough into the trees three hours outside of town that no passing stranger would clock it for what it really is.

From the outside it looks laughably ordinary. The outside is weathered with a gravel drive leading up to the front of the property, looking old enough that it could belong to any middle-aged couple who likes privacy and off the grid living.

Inside, it is another thing entirely.

Reinforced doors, security feeds glowing in the master-sized room, weapons cache at the back of the house.

Men are stationed at every window and entrance, covering every blind spot possible. Bootsteps thud faintly down the hall behind me, murmured updates drift from the main room.

Somewhere in the kitchen, a radio crackles with an incoming message and then goes silent again.

I stand outside the reinforced door of one of the two secured rooms this place has, my arms crossed over my chest and my jaw locked so tight, it aches all the way into my temples. I have been in this exact stance for long enough that the muscles across my shoulders have gone tight from the tension my body is carrying.

Still, I refuse to move.

Through the small, one-sided observation window, I watch the woman I have been hunting for years.

Isabella.

Not Marina Hayes, the careful, soft-spoken receptionist she has been pretending to be for almost six years. Not the single mother her neighborhood knew her as with her neutral sweaters and tied-back hair and small-town, friendly attitude designed to disappear into a crowd at first glance.

Those were all masks, brilliant ones. Convincing enough to keep her hidden far longer than anyone in our world should have been able to stay hidden.

The woman on the other side of the door is the one person who has haunted me for over half a decade, now twenty-seven and forged into something harsher than memory ever managed to preserve as her.

For a long time, all I had were fragments of her. After she vanished, those moments I could recall suddenly turned cruel with their details, the pieces of them jagged as they cut deep within me.

A bright laugh from across a banquet room, her chestnut hair spilling over white pillows.

Honey-gold eyes looking at me like I was still something worth saving. That furious light in her face the last time I saw her before everything completely crumbled.

For years, that was all I had—a half-dozen images I kept revisiting over and over to punish myself.

The woman inside the room in front of me is nothing like those memories. Even now with a bruised cheek and wrists reddened from the restraints we cut off the second she was shoved inside this room, she looks the complete opposite from frightened.

There are new angles to her now that I hadn’t been expecting upon breaking into her house and seeing, for the very first time, what the last eight years have done to her.

Motherhood and hiding have stripped away whatever remnants of innocence she still had when I last touched her. What remains is a woman built from the fires that forced her to leave in the first place.

Yet… some part of me still recognizes her all the same.

She paces the length of the room like a wild animal, checking the walls and the corners of it over and over, presumably for cameras. Her eyes focus on the only exit available at every pass, narrowing as they sweep over the door.

Ever the daughter of the strategist who taught her how to see and exploit weaknesses long before the rest of us even realize there were any on the board at all.

That is a Russo if I ever saw one.

Her father would have been proud to see her this composed. Proud that even furious and frightened, she is still collecting information instead of wasting all her energy on panicking. Amos Russo built his empire out of patience and coordinated attacks. He taught men twice his age how to play the game and taught his daughter those same lessons too, even if he never anticipated her using them.

My chest tightens every time she turns her head just enough that I catch a full glimpse of her face.

She is beautiful in a way that makes a man forget, for one fatal second, how badly he could bleed if given the right opportunity.

I have no doubt in my mind that if I were to let my guard down for one second, she would take that and use it to her full advantage.

She would take the softness that we both know still lingers inside my chest and gut me with it because she always knew where to dig the knife the deepest.

I nearly sigh.

I should not be thinking like that now.

Not with my men running security detail on the man who visited her less than a week ago.

Combing through camera footage, burner phone pings, vehicle routes, tailing known associates to find Davide Bianchi has been more than a chore since all of this started.

He is not one to make casual house calls to the daughters of past acquaintances, especially those who have vanished off every map possible. If he went to her himself, there is a reason for it, and I will find it.

I should be in the operations room reviewing the latest intel, deciding whether Bianchi’s sudden appearance in Isabella’s orbit has something to do with our civil war.

What I should be preparing for is retaliation from our last explosive interaction and making sure every man in this house understands exactly how quickly this disagreement between our families can turn into a bloodbath if one careless move reveals our hand.

Instead, I am standing outside her door like an idiot watching her pace.

My eyes slip from the window for a single moment, tracking down the hall to the other secured room.

Under guard and under a light sedative, her son is asleep two doors down. Our medics had insisted on sedating the kid after he fought so hard, he nearly made himself sick.

He had screamed until his throat went raw, then kept fighting even after his body started to shake from pure exhaustion.

Two of my men came out of that van bleeding from scratches they had no business getting from a small seven-year-old, and a bite bad enough to leave a crescent-shaped mark on one of their hands that I have no doubt in my mind would eventually scar.

He fought like he understood, on some animal level, that he and his mother were about to be pulled into a situation neither of them signed up for.

Isabella’s son.

Those words still unsettle me to think.

It would be easier if the boy remained an abstract concept I had no face to put to. If he were just another variable sitting outside my peripheral, one more complication on a sheet of paper or in a briefing file, I would know exactly where to place him in my mind.

I would slot him where all the other collateral lives go.

Protected if possible, moved if necessary. Regrettable, maybe, to lose, but manageable if it were to happen. Distance makes almost anything digestible.

That is the ugly truth of this life.

Plenty of innocent people have gotten caught in the syndicate world since the dawn of time—children, wives, siblings who wanted nothing to do with blood money or territory disputes or legacy by sharing the wrong last name.

We do not build our empires on the backs of willing men alone. The unwilling are always there too, ground into the foundation whether anyone wants them to be or not

I know how to compartmentalize. I learned it young.

You do not rise in my world without learning how to look at disaster and sort it by priority instead of horror.

You learn how to decide what gets protected first and why, how to measure the cost of every choice in lives, money, leverage, and optics.

Guilt is a luxury best indulged in private, if at all, because hesitation kills faster than cruelty ever could. When innocent people get dragged into something they never signed up for, you assess, contain, minimize, and move on.

I suppose it is not exactly unexpected for Isabella to have moved on with her life after fleeing her family. Eight years is enough time for anyone to build a new life, to fall in love again. To marry and have a child with another man and bury old feelings until they were nothing more than abstract concepts long forgotten.

It is rational.

Healthy, even, to expect that.

Normal people do that. Surviving people do that. Women abandoned by men like me should absolutely do that.

I know all of this. But all the rationality in the world does not stop the slow, ugly twist in my gut every time I picture her having a child with some nameless, faceless man.

Jealousy is too simple a word for it. It suggests something almost petty and youthful, some sour flare of possessiveness that should have burned out years ago. What sits inside me is worse than that. Darker and much more humiliating.

A visceral revulsion at the idea of another man in a space I used to imagine was mine. Another man hearing her laughter in the kitchen of that little blue house, knowing what she sounds like when she whispers a name instead of speaks it.

Another man being there for the life I forfeited before I even knew what I had before it was gone.

I hate that even now, after all the time that has passed and the blood that has stained my hands since, some primitive part of me still bucks hard at the thought of her building a life with anyone else.

I drag a hand over my mouth and force myself to step away from the door before I do something monumentally stupid such as opening it.

It is ridiculous to be jealous over a man clearly not in the picture.

I have done enough research to know there is no obvious husband or boyfriend moving in and out of that house, no steady male presence attached to her routines and to her child to suggest a father figure.

No second car left overnight, no school paperwork listing a spouse with pickup rights, nothing.

Whoever helped build that life with her has long since left.

Going out of my way to find out more details about him would only enrage me further than I already am since finding out she has a child in the first place.

That is the excuse I’ve been using with myself, anyway. Because the longer I dwell on it, the more the satisfaction of imagining myself killing him with my bare hands for leaving her tempts me.

Alessio’s voice greets me as soon as I enter the main room. “So, I’ve heard she’s pretending she has no involvement with Bianchi. How predictable.”

The words land with that infuriating ease only my brother can manage, light on the surface, almost conversational, as if we are discussing this week’s upcoming weather instead of a woman I haven’t stopped thinking about for years.

I hold back a sigh and cross the room without answering immediately.

The main room has been turned into an operations nest in the few hours since we arrived. Massive displays are anchored into the far wall, each one feeding a different angle of the outside perimeter. Maps are spread across the long dining table in front of the couch, weighted down with spare magazines and a half-finished mug of coffee gone cold hours ago.

I lower myself onto one of the couch cushions, feeling the ache in my shoulders and jaw more clearly the second I stop moving. Across from me, Alessio stands close to one of the monitors, his attention fixed on the camera angled down the drive leading up to the safehouse. He has one hand braced on the back of a chair and the other curled loosely around the same mug of coffee he has not touched since pouring it.

He looks perfectly composed, though of course he does. Even as boys, when I was still learning how to hide my emotions, he already understood that stillness frightened people more than raised voices ever could.

At forty, he has our father’s height and enough of our mother’s beauty to make the brutality of him unexpected to anyone unlucky enough to encounter him.

His jacket has long been shed. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled to the forearms.

His dark hair, like mine, is pushed back out of his face. To an outsider, he could be standing in a boardroom instead of a fortified safehouse holding a woman and her child against their will.

And though his tone remains light, there is a predatory satisfaction curling his lips upward that makes my shoulders tighten.

To Alessio, Isabella’s anger is proof that she is a threat.

Proof his instincts eight years ago, when he first accused her of conspiring in the move against her father, were not only correct but prophetic.

He has always loved being proven right more than he has loved almost anything else.

Especially when being right justifies his own personal cruelty.

“She hasn’t said anything specific to anyone,” I say at last, keeping my voice flat. “Only that he came to her house to visit and ask her for a favor.”

Alessio chuckles softly. He turns his head just enough to glance at me over his shoulder, and the look in his eyes makes it clear he thinks I’m insulting his intelligence by even repeating her version of events out loud.

“Brother,” he says, almost kindly, which somehow makes his tone even more grating, “please be rational. She is obviously funneling information back to him about something. Davide shows up at her door like they’re old friends catching up over tea? Please be serious. She is playing you. Again.”

I don’t deny it.

I also don’t defend her.

There is no point when I truly do not know why Davide made contact with Isabella to begin with, or what passed between them in that house before we got there.

So far, she has said nothing beyond the meeting lasting less than ten minutes. He came, he asked for a favor, she refused. That is all she has given us.

No names, no details, no strategy, and absolutely no explanation for why Bianchi found her now after years of silence.

But to what degree she is telling the truth, I don’t know.

None of us do.

And that uncertainty is precisely what Alessio feeds on.

He turns fully then, abandoning the monitor to face me, and I can already see where this conversation is going before he opens his mouth again. He thinks I am compromised in some way.

Maybe not irreparably, not yet, but enough that he has started circling it like a hound scenting weakness on the wind.

He sets the mug down on the console table beneath the screens, leaning back against it and crossing his legs at the ankles. “She didn’t just vanish into obscurity because she got tired of syndicate life. She vanished to keep herself from being dragged down with the rest of her family. That alone should tell you something, Brother. Women in her position do not disappear that effectively without help. Now Bianchi turns up on her porch unannounced and we’re supposed to believe she’s some innocent bystander? It is obvious he is the one who helped her out of her own mess eight years ago.”

I lean back into the couch and keep my expression blank, though my molars are grinding hard enough to ache. “She said no to him. Whatever favor he came knocking at her door to cash in obviously failed.”

“She said she said no to him,” Alessio corrects, spreading his hands in the air, the motion almost lazy. “How are we to know that is the actual truth? She has every reason to lie to us.”

Unfortunately, he is not entirely wrong. That is the problem.

Davide making contact with Isabella does look bad. The timing of our cold war turning hot makes it look even worse.

If I were looking at this from an outside perspective with no past attachment, and Isabella were just another daughter from a bloodline that is now gone, I would be asking the same questions.

Maybe harsher ones.

I know she was terrified when we took her. She fought like hell when she saw us taking her son away, not because she thought a scene might buy her sympathy.

That had nothing to do with theatrics and everything to do with real fear.

What happened in that house was absolutely not acting. There is no faking that kind of motherly rage, even if it’s to save your own skin from being questioned by an ally’s enemy.

I lift my eyes to Alessio. “She’s been out of our world for a long time. What would give her a reason to step back into it?”

He lifts a shoulder, the gesture casual. “Revenge, for one.”

It is the easiest answer. Revenge moves people to do irrational things all the time, turning patience into virtue and obsession into purpose. It keeps wounds fresh long after they should have scarred over and deems that righteousness.

Still, I hear myself say, “Eight years later?”

“When has revenge ever had a statute of limitation?” he counters, one brow lifting.

We have wars in our family records that outlived the men who started them.

Feuds that passed from father to son like heirlooms, grudges preserved longer than alliances.

Revenge does not rot in our world. It ferments and grows more potent with time, not less. Some need only a single reason to finish what’s already been started.

I drag a hand over my mouth and hold it there for a second, breathing through my nose while the thought settles where I do not want it.

I hate that it makes sense.

I can look at Isabella Russo, brilliant and angry, vanished for years, and imagine exactly how revenge might have helped her bide her time.

Waiting for the right opening, the right reason to step back onto the board where she could finally make old ghosts answer for what they cost her.

If revenge remains on the table as motive and there is even a chance she stepped back into this world through Davide for reasons that trace all the way back to us, then we cannot afford any kind of sentiment.

We cannot assume that because she built a softer life, she stopped being capable of hard choices.

She is still a Russo, after all.

Alessio straightens from where he has been leaning against the console table, lazy elegance draining out of him within the blink of an eye. What replaces it is colder, more final. “We will need to kill them both before Davide realizes we have his precious strategist. We cannot afford to hesitate on this.”

I say nothing.

I keep my eyes fixed on the monitor behind him, on the driveway feed. A squirrel bounds up one of the tree trunks at the edge of the frame, its tiny body moving in frantic jerks that look almost comical against the hard geometry of the rest of the world around it.

Years of training have made it easy to hold my face still. My hands do not curl even though I can feel the tendons in them wanting to fist tightly together. The squirrel disappears higher into the branches and out of view just as quickly as it had come.

I have just seen a small snippet of exactly what Isabella will do for that boy if harm comes to him. If someone threatened his life, she would talk.

Love, as my father and brother have always preached, make even the strongest people weak. The right threat aimed at the right pressure point can force open almost any door if you press hard and long enough on it.

Alessio is right about one thing. We can no longer hesitate.

Her presence here is already a weakness.

Every minute she remains close by, every second I stand outside that reinforced door instead of doing what must be done, the weakness within me deepens and the more certain I become that I will not let anyone, not my brother, not the syndicate, not even my own father, take her from me again.

That is exactly why it has to die.

Even if it means becoming the monster she already believes I am.

I glance down the hallway without meaning to, toward the locked room where the woman I once fantasized leaving everything for now rests.

The memory of that fantasy feels almost laughable now in its innocence.

Burning it all down for love… as if love has ever built anything in my world except softer targets.

“I’ll get the truth out of her,” I hear myself say, my voice sounding distant even to me. “To confirm your suspicions.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I find my brother studying me. He knows me too well. Better, maybe, than anyone still alive. Better than I would like, actually. I turn my head slowly to meet his gaze.

“Make sure you’re actually looking for the truth. Not an excuse to avoid what it really is,” he says at last.

I stand without another word. If I stay another thirty seconds alone with him, I may put my fist through his throat and turn this room into a different kind of problem entirely.

His mouth curves upward, but there is no humor in it. “Good luck.”

10

ELIO

I step into the small alcove just off the main room where one of the secondary terminals mirrors the feeds from the secured main rooms and rest my hand on the keyboard before I let myself think too hard about what I am doing.

The screen washes my skin in cold blue light. My fingers move with muscle memory. A few keystrokes is all it takes to disable the cameras inside Isabella’s room.

On the monitor, the room freezes for half a second on an image of Isabella standing near the wall with her arms folded, then it drops completely, replaced by a signal interruption icon that will look like a routine technical failure rather than sabotage.

I stare at the darkened square for a long moment. In hindsight, I already know what this will become the second Alessio notices. A problem. One question will soon multiply into ten.

Why disable the feed?

What are you hiding?

Why create privacy for a woman I keep insisting may be tied to Bianchi?

What conversation do you not want me to know about?

My brother will keep at it until whatever answer I give him finally satisfies him, or until he decides no answer exists that he trusts. Alessio not trusting me will not be some small inconvenience I’ll have to deal with for the time being.

He has lived his whole life waiting for the slightest proof that love makes men weak and weakness makes them disposable. If he smells either one on me where Isabella is concerned, he will not just question my judgment.

He will rid me of what he finds a distraction altogether.

Yet no matter how much of a pain in the ass that will be to deal with, it still doesn’t convince me to turn the feed back on.

I need privacy when I talk to her. I need her to speak without feeling the weight of a room full of eyes on me, especially my brother’s.

I exhale slowly and glance over around the wall and into the back room.

Through the doorway I can see Alessio half-turned away from me, one hand braced on the table while he listens to one of our men reading off the latest route reconstruction from Davide’s movements.

Bianchi currently has his full attention right now. That, at least, is the only silver lining I have at the moment.

That leaves me to take care of wringing as much information as I can from her before the room full of wolves decides their patience has expired.

I should be grateful for the opening but instead I feel something closer to dread. Now it will just be me walking into that room without witnesses, facing off against the woman who once could undo me with nothing more than the curve of her smile.

I flex my hands once over the keyboard before forcing myself to step back. The hall feels quieter on the way back.

Men still murmur in the other room, but all of it recedes as I approach her door.

My senses narrow until there are only the reinforced steel and a lock separating us both.

Whatever happens next will belong only to us.

I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I let out one slow breath through my nose and straighten my shoulders, forcing everything in me back into alignment.

Underboss.

A Conti.

Blade.

I pull those titles back over me the way one puts on a jacket, wrapping myself up until no one can see the storm brewing underneath.

The keys jingle inside my pocket when I fish them out. The noise is small, almost ridiculous in how domestic it sounds, like I’m unlocking a home office instead of a secured room holding a hostage. The key slides easily into the lock and the mechanism turns with a soft click on the other side, quiet enough that most people would miss it.

I don’t bother looking through the window to see her. I already know the sound of the door unlocking will be enough to rouse her from whatever it is she’s been doing. I swing it open and step inside, shoving the keys back into my pocket.

The air shifts the moment I cross the threshold.

Isabella is on her feet instantly. One second she is near the bed, the next she has moved, putting distance between herself and the door with the instinct of someone who has never once forgotten how quickly a room can turn deadly. Her gaze cuts to me in one sharp sweep.

There is no shock in them.

Only fury.

“Get out,” she snaps.

I close the door behind me and stay by it. My body leans back against the metal surface, and I roll my shoulders once, then again, trying to ease some of the tension locked through them before it turns visible in ways I cannot hide from her.

The movement is mostly useless because the tension stays right where it has been since I stepped foot inside her little blue house, coiled under my skin and too deep in my bones to shake loose with anything that simple.

There is no possible way she will get through me to escape, even with the door unlocked. Not physically, but she could try.

Hell, part of me expects her to.

But she knows it too. I can see the quick calculation in her face when she stares at me, the instant assessment of how much force it will take to remove the obstacle in her way.

She measures me the same way she had the rest of the room when she first arrived. When it’s obvious she’s decided the path in front of her is closed, the fury in her expression deepens further.

Good.

Anger is easier to deal with in this situation, anyway.

“I have questions you need to answer,” I finally say.

She laughs bitterly, but there is fire beneath it, the same fire that once drew me in like a moth to flame. Now it turns on me in full. “Are you kidding me? You kidnap me and my son, force us apart and take him to God knows where, and expect me to answer your fucking questions? Get bent, Conti.”

Her words land like punches, deserved in every sense. I can hear what she thinks of me in every syllable that comes rolling off her tongue.

Some part of me wants to cross this room and grab her and shake the anger out of her, while another part knows I have earned every bit of her hostility.

I keep my face still. “He is safe.”

Her eyes flash. “Do not lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

She takes a step toward me then. Her hair has fallen loose around her face, chestnut strands wild from fighting and the hours since we dragged her in here.

One sleeve of her sweater is torn near the wrist, exposing a strip of pale skin that should not still be capable of pulling my attention toward it. There is a fading mark on her cheek from where one of my men forced her to the floor to restrain her.

The bruise looks wrong on her. It sits on her skin like a signature I never wanted attached to her, let alone by my hand, even if indirectly. She looks every bit dragged through violence and coming out meaner on the other side of it.

Fear has not softened a thing about her. It has only burned away what little room was left for restraint and possibly negotiations.

There is something almost feral in the set of her mouth now along with the rigid lift of her shoulders.

Her eyes lock onto mine with such bright, vicious disbelief that for one second, I almost look away.

“Safe?” she spits. “You expect me to believe that?”

“What reason would we have to harm him?” I counter.

In my world, that is never a comforting sentence. All it really means is that I have not yet decided how I will use him against her.

How much pressure I need to break her, how much pain it will take to get what I want. How far I am willing to go before she gives me what I need.

She knows that better than anyone.

She was raised in the same blood-soaked cathedral I was. Different pew, perhaps, but under the same religion.

Her father perfected that tactic long before mine ever taught it to us. Amos Russo could pin a man to the proverbial cross with nothing but the threat of what might happen to the people he loved.

He didn’t need to speak violence aloud to get them to bend to his will.

Her expression shifts from raw, blazing maternal fury and pulls back by a few degrees.

Each inhale she drags in reels her farther from the edge until she gathers herself piece by jagged piece.

I can practically see her burying the instinct to lunge for my throat, fear for her son focusing her.

The woman standing in front of me now is no longer only a mother in panic. She is Amos Russo’s daughter, and Christ, she wears it beautifully.

“I want to see him,” she says.

For one reckless second, I almost give in.

I almost tell her I’ll take her to him now so she can touch him, hear him breathe, calm the terror I have no doubt is ripping through the both of them the longer they are forced to be apart.

Mercy almost wins. Or guilt. Whatever it is that remains inside me that still remembers how to feel something other than the comfortable numbness I’ve grown used to over the years when I look at her.

“You will after you answer my questions,” I tell her.

She holds my stare for a long, long time. There is nothing in her gaze now except contempt.

She looks at me like she can see every rotten layer beneath my clothing, under my title and the orders I give without hesitation, all the way down to the man who once agreed to impossible promises and just as quickly broke them.

There is hate in her eyes the longer that I hold her gaze with my own. But hatred from Isabella does not feel distant like it does with all of my other enemies. It feels deeply personal.

She is not looking at the underboss of the Conti syndicate. She is looking at me, Elio.

The man who rejected her nearly a decade ago and who came back with armed men and turned her life upside down.

If she slapped me, it would hurt less.

I force myself not to look away. Looking away first is surrender, and that is simply a weakness I cannot show her. Not with my brother already circling the scent of my hesitation like a wolf. “Davide Bianchi came to your house. Why?”

Her mouth twists. “I already told you. He came to ask me for a favor and I told him to leave and never come back.”

Every answer she gives feels plausible enough to trust and strategic enough to doubt. I push my tongue against the back of my teeth to keep my expression neutral. “What favor, Isabella?”

Her laugh is soft this time. “Does it matter? I turned him down.”

My patience is already starting to thin and we’ve barely made it through the beginning of this conversation. “Yes.”

She lifts her chin a fraction, that old, infuriating pride refusing to bow even when severely outnumbered. It used to thrill me, that small upward tilt of defiance. I used to want to pull her closer and argue until we ended up in my bed with the fight still burning between us.

“He wanted me to help him against a syndicate trying to move and take over some of his territory.” Her eyes roam me from head to toe slowly while she says it. By the time her gaze returns to mine, there is a brutal kind of understanding there. “I see now that the family must be yours.”

So, just as Alessio suspected, after all.

It shouldn’t surprise me. Alessio all but said it outright before I came in here. Bianchi has been losing ground ever since our war started over two years ago.

He would need someone clever to help him out of the mess he’s created, someone detached enough to see the angles his own people have missed with enough experience to understand how men like us build defenses and where they crack under pressure.

Who better for the job than a former ally?

Perhaps Davide also knew that if revenge had still been living inside her after all these years, he would only need to knock once on her door to wake it.

Tending to that fire, nursing it until it could grow on its own and lay waste to whatever he deemed necessary, that would make for a perfect weapon he would not need to monitor once it gained its own traction and pushed forward to fight his battles for him.

Isabella is not ordinary, no matter how soft her alias made her seem.

She is the exact polar opposite, which makes her the exact type of person never to underestimate regardless of the circumstances. Being at the helm of a syndicate and cultivating strategies to crush enemies are exactly what my family has been after to contain.

Now with her in the mix of it, even with her promise of turning him down, it changes everything.

Before I’m conscious of it, I close the distance until we are merely inches apart, towering over her smaller frame. She doesn’t back down, though that shouldn’t at all surprise me. Realistically, she never has. This woman could stand toe-to-toe with an underboss of any syndicate, friend or foe, and make him question not only his strategy but the center of his own convictions.

My hand lifts before I can stop it, fingers brushing a loose strand of chestnut hair away from her face. The contact is barely anything, more of a whisper of skin against her silk-soft hair—the smallest theft I’ve ever taken for myself.

When she flinches, the movement is slight, but I feel it like a knife jabbing between my ribs and twisting. Even though she does not pull away, that small motion is enough to almost make me back off. A smarter man would. A better man would apologize and leave.

But I am neither.

After eight years of starvation, touching her like this sends a wave of electricity pulsing through my veins. For one cursed second, I am not in this reinforced room in a safehouse with disabled cameras and my own family circling.

I am in my apartment eight years ago with her hair spread out on white sheets and her mouth on mine, our limbs tangled together as I bury deep inside her.

My fingers hesitate when they brush her cheek. Some sick part of me, some starving, jealous, self-destructive part, opens its mouth and asks the question I have been trying not to let fully form since the second I saw that boy but have been dying to know, nonetheless.

“Who is he?”

Confusion tightens around her eyes. “Who?”

“Your son’s father,” I say. “Tell me his name.”

Isabella’s eyes widen for a fraction of a second, then narrow to dangerous slits. “That’s none of your business.”

I grab her upper arms when she moves to push me away, not hard enough to bruise but firm enough to feel the defined muscle beneath her sleeves.

The contact burns through me. “Tell me, Isabella.”

Her mouth twists, and all that Russo fire rises to the surface. “Fuck you.”

The words should make me release her. Instead, they strike sparks off the jealousy to tear through me. The thought of a nameless man touching her makes me see red.

A phantom with hands where mine used to be, a man who might have watched her belly swell with a child, might have stood beside her in a hospital room while I was miles away, ignorant and loyal to a family that has taken everything from me and labeled it as duty.

My mouth twists into a deep frown. “Did he know exactly how to touch you, how to make you forget your own name? Or did you think of me every time another man was inside you?”

I should stop. I know that I need to. But the jealousy has teeth now, and it is chewing through every voice of reason faster than I can kill it. I hate myself the instant they leave my mouth, though not enough to take them back.

There is still too much poison moving through me to be sorry about it now, too much rage at a man I cannot kill because I have no idea what his identity is.

Who helped her build the life I had no right to want and no strength to choose? Who was there when I wasn’t?

I want to know like a gaping wound needs pressure to keep the heart beating, like a starving man needs food to keep his feet moving one in front of the other. I want a name to hate, a target to picture for all of these ugly feelings to focus on. Having nowhere else to go, the person I hate most in this room is myself.

She shoves at my chest. “As if you have any right to know anything about me or my son.”

I move with her until her back meets the cold concrete wall beside the cot, caging her in with my body. The room shrinks to the space between just her and me. Her breathing comes faster now, chest rising and falling in sharp bursts. Her eyes flare with rage, but beneath that, something more painful flickers.

An old current between us wakes, tangling up with too much damage to be anything considered uncomplicated. Desire, hatred, grief, betrayal, all of it churns together until the room feels oxygen-starved.

The jealousy within me does not die the longer I stare down at her trying to force myself back behind the disciplined neutrality I’ve always hid behind. It merely twists into something much darker.

I lean in until my forehead nearly rests against hers, my voice a rough growl. “Tell me.”

“No.”

My hands slide down her arms before I can stop them, pausing at her waist for one dangerous, suspended second. She goes rigid under my touch, and I feel the exact instant her body remembers me just as her mind rejects the memory.

The collision is there in the faint catch of her breath and the way her lashes flutter.

It is a cruel thing, the body, how it keeps records the heart tries to burn out of self preservation. For this one moment in time, the cycle we have never truly escaped reignites with the same fire that once consumed us both.

When my lips meet hers, it is a spark striking oil. The first taste of her after eight years nearly drops me to my knees. I am no longer an underboss standing in a locked room with an ally turned enemy.

Now I am simply a starving man beckoning at the altar of the only woman who has ever made hunger feel like devotion.

She makes a small sound against me.

Her hands come up between us, curling around the fabric of my shirt. Pathetically, I rationalize it as her way of pulling me closer, wanting me just as badly as I do her. Perhaps she’s just as lost in this as I am. Maybe even more so.

But then I feel her palms flatten, and without warning, she shoves me back with a surprising amount of strength.

The loss of contact is brutal.

I stumble back half a step before catching myself on the wall, my hand jutting out to keep me steady. Her eyes are wide and furious and slightly wet with something that looks too much like hurt to be mistaken for anything else. Her hand lifts, and the crack of her palm across my face slices through the room like a gunshot.

My head turns with the impact.

For a moment, neither of us speaks.

“You don’t get to do that,” she finally says after a while.

I look back at her slowly. The sting in my cheek is nothing compared to the thing splitting open behind my sternum. Her entire body is trembling with barely contained rage, her hand still slightly raised in the space between us.

There is no defense. Not one worth insulting her with, anyway. I could say I lost control, that seeing her again has dragged every dead thing in me clawing back to the surface.

After spending eight years trying to cut her out of my system, I thought I’d gotten every last fragment. But clearly, I was wrong. Because the second I touched her, the past yawned its mouth wide and swallowed me whole.

Though, none of that matters in the grand scheme of things. It does not matter that I wanted her, or that she remembers it too. What we are now is enemies and that will never change. Not as long as she’s helping Bianchi like Alessio suspects.

I step away from her with my jaw locked, every muscle in me coiled with the need to drag her back into my arms and finish what was started. But instead, I turn toward the door, the protector and the monster continuing to war inside me.

When my hand reaches the handle to leave, I look back over my shoulder at her. “This isn’t over, Isabella. I will be back.”

She says nothing in return.

The door locks behind me with brutal finality, and I stand in the corridor for a long time breathing hard. The jealousy from before curdles into shame so fast, I almost choke on it. My cheek still burns where she struck me, but the rest of me has gone cold.

For the first time since I walked away eight years ago, I am not sure how to move on from this, or her.

Christ.

What have I become?

11

ELIO

I find Alessio back in the main common area after I finally force myself away from Isabella’s door.

Every step away from that reinforced room is another reminder that she is close enough to reach and still locked away because of the circumstances that have led our paths to collide in the first place. Yet despite all of that, leaving her in there feels like tearing skin from bone.

My brother leans against the wall over by the camera feeds again, arms crossed over his chest, wearing that predatory calm mask like usual. He watches me for a silent moment, his face betraying nothing as my eyes drift up to the feeds to take in the outside perimeter again.

“You disabled the cameras. Care to explain why?” he finally asks.

I don’t answer him and instead bypass him altogether.

My feet carry me down the hallway toward the back room. The last thing I am in the mood for is my brother’s inquisition.

No answer I give will satisfy him and save me from a lecture, that I know for certain. There is nothing I can say that will not eventually become the rope tied around my neck courtesy of Alessio’s own unforgiving hands.

So why bother trying to explain myself?

He follows me down the hallway, silent at my back.

It bothers me more than if he were to shout at me because I know exactly what he is doing. Alessio has always been most dangerous when quiet.

Our father has always used biting comments when he wanted obedience, but my brother learned early on that the absence of that always makes men fill it with their own anxious chatter. Now with each step behind me, I can feel him measuring the tightness of my shoulders and my stride.

Before I get the chance to cross the threshold into the back room, a hand wraps around my arm and yanks me back.

“Elio,” my brother says.

I shove him off. “Don’t.”

He ignores it and grabs me again, this time nearly slamming me against the wall before I twist enough to catch the impact with my shoulder instead of my spine. The framed security schematics rattle beside my head. Somewhere beyond us, voices hush in the back room, only picking up after another moment of silence when they think better of moving any farther.

“Then answer me,” Alessio says.

His face is close now, eyes dark and cold, the polished mask cracking just enough for the violence underneath to breathe.

“I have nothing to say,” I growl through my teeth.

His grip tightens on my shirt near the collar. “That is the problem.”

I stare at him.

For one second, we are not underboss and Don’s heir—two grown men standing inside a safehouse surrounded by soldiers and guns and a woman whose existence could detonate half our alliances.

We are boys again, two sons raised under the same roof, taught the same lessons with wildly different outcomes.

“Move,” I tell him, shoving at him again.

“No.”

My hands curl at my sides. “This is not the time to be monitoring me. We both have better things to do.”

“I want to know whether my brother is still capable of thinking with the correct organ.” His voice drops, his hand tightening around the fabric of my shirt. “You need to get it together. Whatever spell she has you under, it needs to break. We can’t afford for you to get distracted just because some woman you were interested in nearly a decade ago has suddenly reappeared.”

I laugh, the sound cold. “I’m not distracted. I told you I’d get you the information, but she has nothing. She turned Bianchi down and has had no further contact with him.”

“And you believe a whore like her?” he challenges.

I move before I fully register the motion. My forearm drives into his chest and shoves him back hard enough that he hits the opposite wall with a loud thud. He absorbs the impact with a grunt, the noise turning strained the longer I hold him there.

I look at the man who shares my blood and feel nothing brotherly or tender pulsing through me at the moment, only danger.

There is suddenly a black, very familiar understanding that loyalty in this family has always come with a cost.

What you are willing to lose because of it must be weighed accordingly against all that will eventually be gained.

“Careful,” he murmurs. “That temper has always made you sloppy.”

The urge to hit him is sudden and savage, enough to whiten the edges of my vision with an anger that makes my teeth clench.

I hate him for catching every small piece of weakness within me and turning it around to use against me.

Moreover, I hate myself for even showing it. I know better than to give my brother an easy avenue to torture me.

He sighs at me. “She’s playing you, Elio. Feeding information to Davide while you’re busy imagining playing house with her and that boy.”

I release him with a shove. “She has no access to the outside world. How would she be in communication with Bianchi from inside here? The safehouse is sealed. You know that.”

“What I know,” he says, straightening up slowly, his back still pressed against the wall, “is that you’re letting her get under your skin again the same way she did before Amos died. Before I had to force you to choose our family over pussy. With Davide still breathing, we can’t have an unvetted Russo living under our roof. I will kill them both before she turns you into a damn traitor.”

Revulsion coils in my gut.

The thought of standing over their bodies, of being the one to order it, let alone being the one forced to carry it out, makes bile rise in my throat.

I have ended men without hesitation, tortured them for less than what Isabella is being accused of.

I have burned entire territories to ash when our syndicate has demanded it.

But the idea of her eyes growing lifeless beneath my watch, of her son’s blood on my hands…

“That is not happening,” I snap. “Killing them serves no purpose except to satisfy your delusional paranoia.”

Alessio’s eyes narrow. “Clearly, you’re still too blinded by her cunt to see the real issues at hand. We should have killed her the night Amos fell like I suggested. She should never have been allowed to survive long enough to become Davide’s asset. Or apparently, a living reminder of how close you came to betraying everything our family has built.”

Something inside me snaps and I lunge.

My fist connects with Alessio’s jaw with a sickening crack.

He slams against the wall behind him again for a brief moment before coming back swinging, years of shared training turning our fight into a brutal, mirrored battle.

I drive my knee into his ribs, and he slams an elbow into my temple, both of us quickly colliding with the floor.

While we are evenly matched in every way, tonight I fight with something Alessio has never had. The feral need to protect what is mine.

I land another heavy blow to his mouth, splitting the skin. “You touch her or that boy and I will kill you myself.”

Alessio laughs through bloodied teeth, a manic edge bleeding into his voice. “You would choose her over me? Pathetic. She already has you on your knees begging.”

The sound of our violence echoes down the hallway, drawing the attention from every man within the vicinity.

The ones who pour out of the back room wisely stay just inside the doorway, leaving us to finish what we started on our own.

The fight only ends when our father’s voice booms from the doorway.

“Enough!” He is flanked by two of our senior capos, his face carved with disappointment.

Hands pull us apart within seconds, both of our blood coating the floor as we’re dragged in opposite directions. Alessio spits more of it at my feet, his eyes gleaming with barely contained anger.

I shrug off the hands holding me and swipe at my mouth, feeling blood trickling from the corner of it.

Father’s gaze moves between us slowly. “Violence between us solves nothing. Whatever has gotten into you two, solve it. Or else you will both be getting shipped back home and stripped of your duties.”

The threat hangs in the air.

I meet his gaze without flinching, but inside, something fundamental has shifted. For the first time in my life, loyalty to my family’s name has started to feel like chains instead of armor.

There had been a time long ago when I had asked myself if burning the ties to my own blood would be worth the woman I wanted.

Back then, I had never allowed myself to figure out that answer. Now that the choice is being presented to me yet again, I am left with the knife at my throat.

12

ISABELLA

It’s been three days since Elio stormed out after our confrontation. Three entire days since his mouth on mine felt like a sin being dragged back to the surface from its gravesite.

I slapped him hard enough to make my palm ache and still somehow felt the echo of him under my skin long after he left.

Since then, there has only been sterile silence broken only by the slide of meal trays across my floor and the soft mechanical click of cameras that never stop watching me pace.

Pacing is all I can do to keep myself from surrendering. If I sit too long, my thoughts start to eat away at me. Every step keeps the panic moving through my body instead of letting it settle in my chest where it might finally crush me.

And I refuse to let that happen.

Though no matter what I do, I still feel Elio everywhere, his presence slowly suffocating me from every corner of this small room.

Sometimes, I catch the faint trace of his cologne when one of the enforcers steps in with my food, dark and clean beneath the usual smell of gun oil.

It hits me without warning and yanks me back so violently, I have to grip the wall until the wave passes.

Other times, I swear the camera moves to focus solely on me and not the entirety of the room, like he is on the other side of that feed watching me, those dark eyes tracing every inch of my body the same way they did when he was standing right in front of me.

Maybe I am giving him too much credit.

Maybe it’s not even Elio Conti watching me at all.

I tell myself I hate him. I repeat it like a prayer, holding it between my teeth like a blade that will cut the sides of my mouth the minute I relax around the edges of it.

I hate him for finding me, for dragging Matteo into this nightmare.

I hate him for touching me like the years between us were nothing, kissing me and making my body remember a version of him my heart has spent years trying to bury.

Most of all, I hate him for proving that the pull between us is not gone.

I thought it was.

God, I needed it to be. For years, I fed that old ache every ugly truth I had until I believed I had finally starved it dead. I reminded myself over and over of the way Elio chose his own blood and duty over me when I needed him most.

I poisoned the memory with abandonment. With childbirth alone under a false name, and every night I rocked Matteo through fevers and fears and had no one else there to comfort me too.

I ignored that small voice inside my head that wondered what kind of man could walk away from something before even knowing what he had left behind and if he ever felt there was some piece of him out there he had yet to discover.

Yet no matter what poison I fed that small flame inside me, it still lives.

The chemistry between us has always been a part of me that refuses to die no matter how many times I try to cut it out of me. It rises when I least expect it, dragging itself out of ash with blackened hands and hungry eyes.

That is the cruelty of whatever Elio and I once were and continue to be. We are stuck in this sick cycle neither of us wants to name.

I hate myself for still feeling the ghost of our old fire flare to life while my son is somewhere beyond my reach because of him.

But hatred has not made me immune to Elio the way I want, and that is the most dangerous truth I carry within me besides Matteo’s parentage.

Elio does not know, at least not yet, from what I’ve seen.

Or maybe he suspects it. Maybe that sharp mind has already done the math and that is why he asked about Matteo’s father with fury burning bright in his eyes.

I press my palm to my stomach as the acid in it rises.

I have only heard bits and pieces about where my son is now and how he is doing.

The enforcers are careful around me now, more than they were the first day, which tells me Elio has given them orders not to speak about it when they’re around me.

I have squeezed what I can from them, but no one lingers long enough to answer my questions completely.

Matteo has never gone to bed without knowing where I am, not once in seven years.

Even when he was a baby and I worked two jobs to keep food on our table, after I would come home exhausted enough to feel hollow, I would always be there to take him from his babysitter and sing him to sleep.

I told myself that as long as he was breathing safely in the room next to mine, I could survive anything.

Now he is somewhere in this safehouse surrounded by strangers where I cannot reach him. I cannot answer the questions he must be carrying in that bright, perceptive mind of his.

Why do they call you Isabella?

Why did they take us?

Why won’t they let me see you?

Who is that man?

That last question is the one that hollows me out the deepest. What do I tell him when the time comes?

The truth is a loaded gun aimed at my forehead with six bullets in the chamber. One I can’t think about or else I’ll be driven insane.

None of the men I have managed to question have given me any indication that Matteo is being mistreated, but that does not comfort me in the slightest.

Mistreatment is not only fists and hunger and bruises.

Sometimes, mistreatment is fear and confusion, being torn from the only safe thing you have ever known and placed behind a locked door by people who speak in clipped orders and carry weapons under their jackets.

There is no doubt in my mind that my child is suffering.

How can he not be?

His mother, the one constant in his life, is no longer with him. For seven years, I have been his fixed point, his answer to every nightmare, no matter what it is.

Now he is alone because Elio found us.

Because Davide knocked on my door, and Isabella Russo was never as dead as Marina Hayes needed her to be.

I sink down onto the edge of the cot, the thin mattress dipping beneath me with a tired creak.

The room is too cold, or maybe I am. I rub my hands over my arms, feeling the faint ache of sore muscles I overused while fighting men who were always going to overpower me eventually.

When I close my eyes, I see Matteo at three standing on a chair in our tiny kitchen, helping me stir pancake batter with more enthusiasm than skill.

At five, I watch him falling asleep with a picture book open across his chest. At seven, he is sprinting across a soccer field with his hair bouncing and his whole face lit with victory.

Then I see him being held by a stranger in my living room, eyes wide and terrified.

My breath catches so sharply, I press a fist against my mouth to keep the sound from escaping.

I hate this room. I hate this cot bolted to the wall. I hate the cold concrete beneath my bare feet.

I hate the camera perched above me like an unblinking eagle eye. I hate the fact that I have started measuring time by the slide of meal trays and the shift changes outside my door.

I can’t do this.

I refuse to let anyone keep my son from me any longer.

A faint sound comes from the camera above me, jarring me out of my thoughts.

It’s a tiny adjustment of the tilt of the lens, the mechanical sound almost politely quiet. My head lifts slowly, every nerve in my body tensing as I stare straight into the lens.

For a long moment, I say nothing. The little red light glows back at me. I have absolutely no confirmation that it is Elio watching from the other side.

It could be Alessio or one of their men bored from cataloguing my pacing and meal refusals for a report no one will read. But something deep inside me tells me I am right.

Maybe it’s because my body has always been cursed with a terrible awareness of him, a sick little compass that points toward Elio Conti no matter how far I run or how many names I bury myself beneath.

I slide off the cot and turn to face it fully.

The floor is cold beneath my feet. I smooth my hands down the front of my sweater even though there is nothing to fix. My voice is hoarse from disuse, but it does not shake.

“Come here,” I say.

The camera does nothing for a long moment. Only that hateful red light glows back at me. My chest tightens when slowly, it fades, and I stare at it for a long time.

I shuffle to the left.

The camera does not follow. Instead, it stays fixed in the same position, dead or disabled or pretending to be to catch me off guard. My hands curl into fists at my sides as I slowly turn to the door, then back to the lens again.

Surely, they wouldn’t leave me here to rot… right?

My heart starts to beat harder as the room grows smaller around me by the second. I take one step toward the door, then stop myself. If I’m being ignored for whatever reason, there will be no point in trying to bang my fist against the door to grab someone’s attention. Clearly, no one is coming to rescue me.

The lock disengaging on the door startles me. I turn quickly as the reinforced door swings inward.

For a second, everything in me goes still when Elio steps inside alone. His dark eyes lock on me with an intensity that steals the breath from my lungs.

He looks nothing like the polished underboss who invaded my house or the controlled monster who stood in this room three days ago with a question he knew I couldn’t answer.

He is disheveled in a way I have rarely seen. His jacket is gone, his shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, revealing scarred forearms dusted with dark hair.

A fresh bruise blooms along his jaw, deep purple beneath the stubble shadowing his face.

There is a split near his lower lip, not fully open anymore, but angry looking enough to make my eyes catch on it before I can stop them.

His hair, usually pushed back from his forehead, is slightly mussed like his hands have been dragged through it too many times.

He looks… tired.

Elio closes the door behind him. The lock engages with a heavy finality that sounds like surrender and damnation all at once. He doesn’t speak to me and simply stares, his chest rising and falling slowly.

The silence stretches between us.

My mouth opens to ask him what happened, then slowly shuts again. It is not exactly my place to dig into the goings-on of life outside this containment room. I am not his lover, nor his confidante. I don’t get the privilege of being the girl who watches him come back bruised from some ugly family errand and tend to the blood scabbing his knuckles.

That person is long gone.

But… then again, I have never been able to help myself when it comes to him. That has always been the first crack in my own armor.

“What happened?”

The corners of his eyes tighten. He gives me nothing for several long moments. Only that dark stare and the faint flex of his jaw tell me he has not solidified into a statue right in front of me.

The bruise along it moves with the tension, his face tensing from the pain just enough to be noticeable before he locks it down again.

It is a small thing—a blink-and-miss-it type. Unfortunately for him, I have spent most of my life surviving by noticing the things men try to hide.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” he finally says.

A humorless laugh slips out of me. “An argument with your family, then?”

His gaze narrows faintly. Not surprise, exactly. Elio Conti does not allow himself anything as vulnerable as that kind of emotion to slip through unless he is alone or dying. But something close to it flickers through his eyes before the shutters come down again.

A part of me, small and buried deep under my anger, is amused by it. He hates that I can still read him.

We hadn’t known each other intimately for long before everything between us shattered into oblivion, but I had been watching Elio Conti for a long while before we ever found ourselves tangled up at that gala.

Long before his mouth ruined me and those hands of his taught my body a language I spent years pretending to forget.

I had watched him across crowded rooms while the old men around us traded threats wrapped in polite smiles.

I’d admired the way soldiers stepped aside before he ever reached them and how his father’s lieutenants never failed to lower their voices whenever he came near.

Most people saw the Conti underboss whenever they looked at him.

That was the mistake people made with him. They mistook discipline for lack of feeling.

They looked at the expensively tailored black suits, the calm voice, the violence that never seemed to show itself until the precise moment it needed to strike, and decided he was nothing more than his father’s son.

I knew better, but maybe that was my first mistake. Maybe girls like me should never look for softness inside wolves.

My eyes flick up to the camera then. “You turned it off.”

“I did.”

“Why?” The question comes too quickly for my liking.

He glances at the camera then too, then back at me. “Because what happens in this room does not need witnesses.”

The room seems to shrink around us, drawing the cot, the concrete walls, the locked door, and us two ruined people into the same cruel little orbit that we can never seem to abstain from falling into.

My pulse stumbles once, then corrects itself with a hard beat. “That sounds like a threat.”

“It isn’t, Isabella.”

I hate when he does that. When he refuses to play the game and just lets the truth sit between us without dressing up any of it with that cruelty he’s shown me before.

I need this anger in me to stay strong enough to keep my body from remembering what it was like being with him when I still believed some parts of him felt human. If I don’t, I’ll do something reckless I know I will regret.

For a second, the room disappears. I am nineteen again standing in his apartment with the city bleeding gold light through the windows, thinking I am old enough to understand danger because I grew up among it.

Believing I could love a man like Elio and not be consumed by him because I would know better than to allow that to happen. Thinking the way he looked at me had meant I had found a place inside him no one else could reach.

Then morning comes and he is gone.

He left.

He chose them.

He let me wake up alone in that apartment.

Those are the familiar mantras I have told myself over and over for years. They have become a kind of private scripture, verses I repeat in the dark whenever memory grows teeth and sinks in deep into my heart.

I remember whispering them through sleepless nights with Matteo fever-hot against my chest, murmuring them to myself while washing bottles alone and every time my son laughed in a way that pulled Elio’s ghost from its grave.

I fold my arms across my chest, needing the barrier even if it’s useless. “I want to see Matteo.”

“I know.”

“So bring me to him.”

“I can’t do that.”

Of course he can’t, and I already know exactly why. His father will find out and question his judgment, his brother will see and interrogate him.

The entire Conti empire is built on those who pretend their hearts have been cut cleanly out of their chests at birth, and Elio, despite all his darkness and blood-soaked discipline, has always had the fatal flaw of feeling too much.

It’s a shame he’s never had the courage to do anything about it.

“You’re a coward,” I spit at him.

His eyes flash with a brief spark of anger. “You think I wanted this?”

“I think what you want has no bearing on what happens to me or my child. So what does it matter?”

His gaze holds mine. For a moment I think I see something flicker through him—pain, maybe.

Frustration?

Then his face hardens. “You aren’t in a position to be demanding anything regardless of whether or not I am feeling gracious enough to grant you a favor. So long as you continue not to cooperate, this is how it will be. In our world, that can be the only difference between life and death. You know that.”

There is the Conti in him again. The prince of a rotten kingdom, reminding the captive that mercy is a gift he refuses to grant those below him.

To him and the rest of his family I am nothing more than a means to an end, scum on the bottom of their shoes they can’t wait to wipe off on the nearest hard-edged surface.

“Our world?” I scoff. Unbelievable. Of all the things to say to me… he could have dressed up any other insult to masquerade as logic and he picks that one. “I left your world and built another one. Did you forget that?”

“And yet it found you anyway.”

All I can hear is Matteo laughing on that soccer field before everything came crashing down around us.

His hand in mine as we walked back home while he bartered for more toppings on his ice cream. Then his screams while Elio’s men dragged him from the only home he ever knew.

The rage washes over me so fast, it burns away every remnant of fear I have left. I take another step toward him before I think better of it, fury rushing up through my body hot enough for a slight feverish sheen to prickle at my skin.

“Because men like you keep dragging it to my door,” I snap.

He flinches then, though it’s barely perceptible. Not enough for most people to see, but I do.

The sight does not satisfy me as much as I wished it did. I want the satisfaction of feeling that deep sense of hatred I did the moment I found out my father was dead and he knew about it and left me anyway.

I want to look at the man who’s haunted my every waking moment and feel absolutely nothing but unfiltered rage.

For a moment, neither of us speaks.

He stands with his back toward the door. His eyes dance in the low light as they flit between my own.

I stand barefoot in front of him in a room he locked me inside, all the while pretending I cannot feel the terrible gravity between us waking up again.

It moves beneath the anger and the fear, beneath that iron wall I have spent years building between the woman I am and the girl I used to be.

It is the same pull that once drew me across crowded rooms toward him before I knew his mouth would become a memory I could never fully destroy. The same pulse that made his hand at my waist feel like danger and shelter all at once.

I see the ruin of him and remember that he was never only a monster to me once upon a time.

“What happened?” I ask again, softer this time despite myself.

His brows pull together slowly. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t.”

His mouth curves faintly, but there is no humor in it. “Still lying beautifully, I see.”

I lift my chin. “Still avoiding the question.”

He exhales through his nose and looks away for the first time, toward the blank camera, the cot, the concrete wall, anywhere but me. That tells me more than he probably wants it to.

Elio has always been able to endure direct fire whether it be accusations, threats, bullets, fists flying, but there have always been certain truths he can’t help turning from.

“Alessio and I...” He pauses. “Disagreed.”

A chill moves through me. My arms tighten over my chest. “About me.”

His gaze returns to mine. “Yes.”

“And Matteo.”

The silence that follows is answer enough to send pricks of anxiety racing up my spine. The room seems to shrink around me, narrowing in on the small space left between us.

I hate Alessio Conti more than I ever have his own brother. It is one of the few uncomplicated emotions left in me after everything that’s happened and has never once changed or softened as the years have gone on.

Even eight years ago, I remember he used to look at me like I was a rot spreading through both our family lines, as if my very existence threatened some grand design he had planned.

Alessio has always been the polished blade beside Elio’s darker fire, the one who smiles when he cuts because he believes restraint makes the cruelty he wields easier to swallow.

In my opinion, it is simply another side of the same coin his younger brother occupies.

“What did he say about my son?” I ask.

He says nothing, continuing to just stare at me.

“Elio.” His name leaves me quietly this time. That seems to get his attention because his shoulders stiffen. “What did he say?”

The bruise along his jaw pulses faintly as his teeth clench again. “It isn’t anything you need to worry about.”

I watch him for a moment. “Your brother wants to kill my child. Is that it?”

There would be no other reason for Elio to remain this guarded about it. If Alessio were focused on anything other than my child, there would be no reason to hide it from me. It isn’t as if I’m all that surprised about being threatened.

When it comes to my child, though… that is an entirely different story.

He lifts a hand then, though not to grab me. It hovers in the air near me for half a second as if some instinct in him is compelling him to reach out and touch me, drag the backs of his fingers down my face gently like he used to. I wait, bracing myself for it to come.

He drops them just as quickly. “No one is killing him.”

I frown. “You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“Because why?” I demand, my voice rising. “You gave them an order not to? Silly me, I forgot you Conti men are known to always obey the wishes of others instead of following through with your own agendas.”

His eyes flash again. “It isn’t going to happen because I will stop anyone who tries.”

I stare at him, my eyes widening slightly. My throat tightens until it hurts, the next question leaving me before I can stop it.

“Why?” I whisper.

He swallows, his throat bobbling visibly. “You know why.”

Then he moves.

In two strides, he bridges the distance between us and grabs my waist with a bruising possession. He turns me until I’m backed up against the cold concrete wall. His mouth crashes down on mine without warning. There is nothing at all gentle about this kiss. In the eight years of suppressed hunger and want, all of it explodes all at once. I taste the metallic tang of blood as our teeth clash and our tongues tangle together.

I should push him away and tell him to never touch me again. Scream and kick and fight him until he backs away and slips out that door the same way he’d come. Instead, my hands fist in his shirt, yanking him closer and moaning the second his body molds against mine.

A low growl rumbles from his chest as he lifts me effortlessly, my legs wrapping around his hips on instinct.

The hard length of him presses against my core through our clothes, thick and insistent as it grinds exactly where I need it to.

A broken little moan escapes me before I can stop it, and he swallows the sound, devouring me like a man who has been dying of thirst and finally finding water.

Every clash from the past week and harsh words thrown across a never ending battle field fuels the gasoline lit fire until it burns and consumes everything.

He lifts me away from the wall and carries me to the cot, practically tumbling onto it with me.

His hands tug at my sweater and shove it up and over my head. The cool air hits my skin when its pulled off of me but his mouth follows immediately after, closing over one lace-covered breast.

He sucks hard through the fabric, teeth grazing my nipple until I arch with a sharp gasp.

My back arches. “Elio!”

“Mine,” he growls against my chest, the word dark and possessive. “You have always been mine. Even when I was too fucking stupid to keep you.”

His hands work my jeans apart, yanking them down my legs along with my panties in one rough motion.

The sound of them hitting the floor is the only warning I get before he moves off the cot and drops down to his knees on the stone floor. I push myself up onto my elbows to look at him, finding his broad shoulders spreading my thighs wide.

I gasp when he buries his face between my legs. “Oh!”

The first stroke of his tongue up the length of my folds rips a choked cry from my throat.

He licks me until my hips arch off the cot, moving his tongue in deep strokes through my folds, circling my clit with ruthless precision, then thrusting inside me like he wants to devour every drop of my arousal.

My hands fist in his thick black hair, hips rocking desperately against his mouth as pleasure coils tight and vicious. Eight years of forced denial have made every sensation that much more devastating.

He groans against me. “Still so fucking sweet. Still so wet for me. No one else has ever had this, have they?”

I can’t answer. I can only moan as he sucks my clit between his lips and slides two thick fingers deep inside me, curling them against that spot that makes stars burst behind my eyelids.

I come hard, biting my lip to keep from screaming his name as my body shudders violently with waves of pleasure that crash through me.

Elio rises, dragging that tongue along his lips to lap up my arousal. His eyes are black with lust and something far more dangerous that sends a chill rushing up my spine, possession bordering on obsession.

He frees himself from his pants, his thick cock bouncing slightly. The head is already glistening. He is bigger than I remember.

After planting one knee down onto the cot, he grabs my hips and angles himself against me. The head of his cock brushes against my aching hole, lining it up before thrusting into me in one deep, punishing move.

The stretch burns in the most exquisite way. I gasp and dig my nails into the sheet under me. He fills me until our hips are pressed flush against mine. For a moment he stills and lets me breathe. His dark eyes watch me, taking in the slightly twitches in my expression.

Then he starts to move.

There is nothing slow or tender about this. It is raw and desperate, filled with years of grief, betrayal and starvation that is then poured into every brutal thrust he punishes me with. The cot creaks beneath us, our skin slapping against each other.

His hands grip my hips hard enough to leave marks and I meet him thrust for thrust, my legs locking around his waist to take everything he gives and demanding more on top of it.

“Fuck, Isabella,” he groans. “You feel exactly the same. So fucking tight and perfect.”

I hate how good this feels. I hate how my body still recognizes him as what I have always wanted and can never have. Even while rage and grief tear through me, pleasure builds again, even more exquisite than the last time.

He angles his hips, hitting that spot inside me with every stroke, one hand sliding between us to circle my clit. “Come for me again. Let me feel you fall apart on my cock like you used to.”

The orgasm rips through me with violent intensity, my inner walls clenching around him so tightly he curses.

He follows me over the edge with a guttural groan, burying himself deep as he spills inside me, hot pulses that mark me from the inside as his all over again.

I collapse back onto the cot and pant at the ceiling. He hovers over me for a few seconds before slowly leaning forward.

His forehead rests against mine, his dark eyes searching my face with something I can’t even begin to name. For one fragile moment, the walls around my heart begin to crack.

Should I…?

Reality crashes back the moment my eyes dart away from his and I recognize the stone walls surrounding me.

I am in a prison created by the man currently buried inside me.

My son is being kept from me and the only one capable of bringing him back is the same one who abandoned me when I needed him most.

I shove at his chest. “Get off me.”

“Isabella—”

“Off.”

His expression flickers but he obeys and pulls out slowly. His hands frame my face for a second longer, thumbs brushing my cheeks with a gentleness that feels like a lie. I shove at him again until he finally stands.

His cock twitches at his hips, still glistening from my slick coating him. I sit up and wince slightly as the burn between my legs pinches.

“This changes nothing,” I whisper, tears I refuse to shed burning behind my eyes. “I want my son. Bring him to me or I will never open my mouth and talk again. You can kiss trying to figure out whatever the hell you think I know goodbye.”

His jaw tightens, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he grabs my face in a tight enough hold that I can’t jerk away from and presses one last bruising kiss to my swollen lips.

“We will see,” he murmurs against my mouth.

He steps back, tucking himself back into his pants and straightening his clothes. He picks mine up off the floor and tosses them onto the cot next to me. He leaves without another word, the door locking behind him with brutal finality.

I slide off the cot on shaky legs and pull my clothes back on.

God, what the hell is wrong with me? The fragile balance we have been fighting to maintain has shattered completely. Our love is a wound that has never healed.

What hope do we have for separation when every attempt at distance only drags us closer together?

When every time we try to walk away, something inside us breaks enough that we end up running straight back?

It is a cycle neither of us can endure anymore, yet both of us are helpless to escape it.

13

ISABELLA

Hours later, the lock disengaging from the door pulls me out of a restless sleep.

I jolt awake before I fully understand why, my hand already reaching toward empty space next to me like Matteo might somehow be sleeping beside me.

For one disoriented second, the old panic blooms fresh and black in my chest when I feel the space next to me is completely cold.

Then memory returns.

I blink blearily and force myself upright, my body stiff from the thin mattress pad beneath me, if it can even be called that.

It is little more than a strip of foam pretending to offer a soft landing pad for me to pass out on for a few hours in between pacing.

I can feel every hard line of the metal frame underneath it, every bar and seam pressed into my hip and shoulder.

When I finally sit up, my shoulders pop in protest, and pain rolls down my spine in a dull wave.

The door swings open and I blink at the sight of one of Elio’s guards standing in the doorway, his expression impassive in that blank, trained way that is typical of their soldiers.

Even without asking him, I already know it is too early for breakfast. The hallway behind him is dimly lit, still caught somewhere between night and dawn.

As soon as I notice there is no tray in his hands, I immediately know something is wrong. Or something is finally happening.

I swing my legs over the edge of the cot and push myself to my feet, every muscle bracing for whatever it is I’m about to be put through.

“What is it?” I start to ask.

Before I even get the full sentence out, the guard shifts slightly to grab something from behind him.

My breath catches when Matteo suddenly comes into view, and for a second I cannot move. My mind refuses to accept the reality of him standing in the doorway just out of reach.

My son.

My baby.

He looks pale beneath the lighting coming down the hallway. His dark hair is sticking up on one side of his head, mussed from sleep. His face is faintly streaked with tears.

He looks so much younger than the brave boy I’ve raised him to be. Nowhere do I see the strong, confident young man running across the soccer field and grinning after scoring a goal, or the harsh negotiator debating with me about having sweets for dinner instead of vegetables.

He is pushed into the room with a rough hand between his shoulder blades, causing him to stumble and nearly fall to the floor.

I dart toward him with my arms out without another thought passing through my mind, my heart shattering and stitching back together all in the same breath as I finally get within reach of him.

“Matteo.”

His head snaps up from where he’d been staring at the floor and finally finds me.

The second he sees me, his face crumples and tears begin to fall again. His arms reach for me, his entire body pitching forward, and I am the only place left for him to fall toward.

I catch him and sink down to my knees so fast, pain sparks through my legs when I hit the hard concrete floor, but I barely feel it. My arms close around him with a force that would scare me if he were not clinging just as tightly.

His small body sags into mine, shaking, his hot tears wetting my sweater as he buries his face into my chest and sobs so loudly, it breaks whatever is left in me that has remained steadfast until now.

I wrap myself around him, curling to shield as much of him as I can from the guard, the camera sitting above us, the entire rotted world that dared put its hands on him and take him from me.

“I’m here, baby. I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” I whisper, though it comes out ragged.

He sobs harder. “I kept asking… I kept asking t-to see you… and they wouldn’t let me.”

My eyes burn so violently, the room blurs. I press my mouth to his hair and breathe him in, peppering his head with kisses. “I know, baby. I’m so sorry.”

“I was so scared.” The words are muffled against me.

I squeeze my eyes shut as tears spill down my cheeks silently. “It’s okay. I’m here now. I’m not letting them take you from me again.”

I barely register the door closing behind him, the lock reengaging with a heavy click.

For the first time since they brought me here, that sound does not make me want to scream. If anything, I’m happy he’s now safely tucked inside this room with me away from the rest of the wolves prowling outside it.

I rock him slowly, instinct taking over when language fails.

Back and forth, back and forth, the way I used to when he was small enough to fit entirely against my chest and the world outside our apartment didn’t feel too enormous to survive.

I hold him tight and murmur nonsense into his hair. Soft, useless things that only a mother can offer when the truth is too ugly.

His sobs begin to break apart into smaller, hiccupping breaths, though he does not loosen his grip. If anything, he clings harder. I pull back only enough to cup his face in both hands.

His eyes are swollen and red, that honey-brown gaze that makes my soul ache every time I look at them. I wipe his tears away with my thumbs, even as new ones slide free from the corners of his eyes.

“Why did they take us?” he whispers.

“Because some bad people found us,” I say carefully.

His lower lip trembles. “Are they going to hurt us?”

I think of Elio standing in the doorway with his bruised jaw and dark eyes full of wreckage while promising to keep our child safe, and then of Alessio somewhere in this safehouse, determined to label Matteo and me as a liability to be taken care of once we are no longer useful.

My throat tightens.

Both brothers are two sides of the same dangerous coin, tossed up into the air by fate as we all wait with bated breath to see which one it finally lands on.

“Some of them are dangerous,” I tell him, because that is the closest truth I can bear to give him at this point. “But I am going to keep you safe.”

His eyes search mine with complete trust. “Do you promise?”

I nearly break again.

“I promise.” Those words are a vow, a death sentence for anyone who tries to make a liar of me.

He throws his arms around my neck again, and I pull him close, tucking his head beneath my chin.

I run my palm over his back, counting each breath as it slowly steadies. Only then do my eyes lift and move to the camera in the corner of the ceiling watching us.

The familiar red light blinks slowly at me.

I stare at it.

He brought Matteo to me.

A dangerous thing, gratitude. It slips in quietly where hatred leaves the smallest crack in my armor, convincing me that things aren’t as bad as they seem to be. I hate him still.

That will never change. But I look into that red light and for one fragile moment, I do not think of the man who took Matteo from me but the one who gave him back.

My mouth moves before I can stop it, and I mouth, thank you. Then I bury my face in Matteo’s hair and breathe him in until I’m lightheaded.

I hold him until my arms ache.

14

ISABELLA

The days after that blur into a haze.

Elio’s touch still lingers on my skin like a brand—bruises on my hips shaped like his fingers, the faint ache between my thighs that reminds me every time I move how desperately our bodies craved each other even when our hearts are at war.

Since then, I avoid looking at the camera.

He hasn’t come back into the room since he gave me back Matteo. I try to not take that as a sign we’re being left alone and instead choose to prepare myself for what’s next to come.

I’m not naive enough to believe our business is finished. I know it’s far from over, especially since I know they have not gotten a satisfying answer out of me regarding Davide.

Matteo senses it too even though I try to shield him from the worst of my anxieties.

He watches me with those unnervingly perceptive eyes, asking few questions but absorbing every interaction I have with the guards who bring us food and water with the same kind of interest he’s inherited from his father.

“Are we in trouble?” he asks me once, curled against my side on the cot after our dinner meal, his voice small and quiet in the empty space.

I smooth my hand through his hair, fighting with myself to lie and tell him that I have figured out a way out of here.

I’m desperate to get his hopes up, to chase away that fear I can see still lingering in his gaze from being separated from me for so long. “No, baby. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

He tilts his head back to look at me properly. “Then why can’t we go home?”

The question hollows me out as my stomach gives a hard squeeze.

I already miss our little blue house with the porch flowers I always forgot to water and the fridge covered in school papers with their glowing remarks.

I miss the glow-in-the-dark stars on his bedroom ceiling I used to point to at night while he fell asleep, his soccer ball abandoned by the front steps that I nearly trip on running out to get to the mail, and his cleats kicked off by the door.

Our entire life has been reduced to simple, far away memories that seem impossible to reach now. Ones I’m afraid we will never go back to.

What will happen once the Contis no longer have the patience to keep us around?

They won’t let us go, I know that much. Our freedom will not be a prize granted to us even if I somehow find the information they are looking for.

So, what’s next, then? Death? Isolation in another prison cell farther away than this one?

I press my lips to his forehead. “Because home isn’t safe right now.”

He is quiet for a long time after that. Then he asks, “Is it because of your other name? Isabella?”

It sounds strange coming from him, the name I had been running from for the past eight years. My arms tighten around him before I can stop them. “Sort of.”

He looks at me for a long time. “Is that your real name?”

I pull back enough to look at him fully, brushing my thumb beneath one tired eye.

He looks so young and so old at the same time, my beautiful boy with fear already tightening his open features, causing unsettling lines to form creases around his eyes and mouth.

I smooth them away with my thumb, trying desperately to erase them before they become permanent.

“Yes.” I say finally, because I cannot keep filling his world with lies if the truth beneath them is already starting to crack and show through. “It was my first name. Marina is the name I have been using to keep us safe.”

His brow furrows. “So… Marina isn’t fake?”

“No. Marina is still me. She’s just… the quieter part.”

He thinks about that with the same little crease between his brows Elio gets when he is sorting through his emotions. Then Matteo asks, “Who is that guy? Elio?”

His father’s name hovers in the space between us like a swinging guillotine.

I could lie.

I should lie.

Some instinct, old and desperate, reaches for the familiar shelter of half-truths that I’ve used to escape the harsh realities of my past since he was born to protect him from this world.

I could tell him Elio is a dangerous man. It isn’t exactly a lie. That he knew me before, which is also true.

I look down at him, at the tired curve of my son’s face and the way his dark hair falls into his eyes from running my hands through it over and over.

My mouth opens to say just that, my lips forming the words right as they die on my tongue.

He is watching me with that unnerving stillness, absorbing every hesitation and detail he can see written all over my face even if he has no understanding as to why it’s there in the first place.

“He is… someone I knew a long time ago,” I finally say.

Matteo’s eyes narrow slightly. “Did you like him back then?”

The question nearly makes me laugh. Or cry. Maybe both, judging by the way my eyes begin to burn so suddenly that I have to blink and look away for a second, pretending to adjust the thin blanket over his legs.

“Yes,” I say softly. “I did.”

For a second, Matteo says nothing. His brows draw together as if he is trying to fit this new piece of me into the picture of the mother he knows.

The mother who makes pancakes and reminds him to floss his teeth before bed, who folds laundry on Sunday morning while humming under her breath the same tune from his morning cartoons.

His mother named Marina, not Isabella.

“Do you still?” he asks.

I don’t know how to answer that.

These are one of those questions children ask that unknowingly cut deeper than they will ever realize. Matteo doesn’t mean to rip open a wound like this.

His innocence has no idea the nerve it has just brushed up against. He is only trying to understand the impossible situation we have been put into.

“I don’t know what I feel,” I tell him.

It is the most honest thing I have said in days.

Matteo leans against me again, quiet.

One of his hands curls around the fabric of my sweater, the same way he used to hold onto my shirt when he was little and afraid of thunderstorms.

I run my fingers through his hair, gently untangling the strands. For a while, neither of us says anything.

“I don’t trust him,” he mumbles.

It breaks my heart to hear my sweet, bright boy already understanding that in this world, trust is not owed simply because a man stands tall or claims to be protecting you from some threat unseen on the other side of a locked door. He should not have to know that.

He should not have to sort adults into categories of safe or unsafe at seven years old.

That was the whole point of running. Of hiding and becoming Marina Hayes in a sleepy little town where the worst thing that happened was Monday morning traffic and being late to the field for his soccer practice.

“You don’t have to,” I say.

He exhales softly.

There is no real space on the cot for comfort when he curls into me. The mattress is too narrow for both of us, the blanket too thin to keep us warm in this cold, sterile room.

I curl my body around his anyway to try and keep him as comfortable as possible.

His body fits against mine the way it did when he was small, and for a while I can almost pretend he is three again, feverish and safe in my arms while the rest of the world leaves us alone.

I whisper the same bedtime stories I remember from our old life, his favorite about the moon rabbit who stole stars to make soup, and the stubborn little prince who turned himself into a bird so he could find his way home.

Matteo has heard them all a hundred times, but tonight he listens quietly without interrupting.

“The fox one, please,” he murmurs, his voice syrupy with sleep.

So I do.

I tell him about the fox who outsmarts hunters by pretending to be smaller and sweeter than she really is.

I tell the story barely above a whisper, one hand stroking through his hair while the other rests over his back, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath my palm. By the time the fox escapes into the woods, Matteo’s breathing has gone slow and deep, his body going limp against mine.

In the background of my mind, the faint ache in my body reminds me of Elio every time I shift on the cot, a soreness that should feel only like shame and instead keeps twisting into something far more complicated.

Desire, I have found, is much crueler than hatred. At least hatred has a direction.

It knows what it wants to destroy. Desire crawls into the wreckage of what once was and stokes the embers of what should only be ash.

I hate what he has done to me. That he found us and pulled Matteo and me from the only peaceful life my son has ever known, locked us behind this steel door and somehow twisted it around to redefine it as protection.

I hate that his brother’s shadow stretches over my child, threatening him without reason. I hate that the Conti name, the very thing I ran from before Matteo had even taken his first breath, has finally found him.

Yet above all of that, my body remembers Elio like grief remembers the living.

The fact that after eight years of telling myself I had burned Elio Conti out of me, one moment with his mouth on mine was enough to prove there was still something viable under all that ruin.

I lie awake and let my strategist’s mind turn relentlessly.

There must be a fracture in this prison.

There always is.

My father’s voice returns to me in the dark. No structure is perfect, Isabella. Men build prisons around what they fear and leave weaknesses where they overcompensate. No cage is seamless. No fortress is without a fault line. Use that to your advantage. Don’t allow yourself to believe they’ve outsmarted you.

I breathe in slowly.

The next opportunity that arises, I will take it.

Even if it kills me.

15

ELIO

It is a full week after my night with Isabella that my brother finally finds a new thread to pull. By then, the safehouse has become its own kind of purgatory.

The walls feel like they are closing in more than they did when we first arrived, suffocating me with each passing day I watch the sun rise and set with little sleep in between.

Every hallway carries too much silence and even the air tastes stale on my tongue, no matter how often the windows are cracked to let in the fresh breeze.

At least Isabella and Matteo remain in the reinforced room, together now. I watch them on the monitors when I know no one else is around.

Matteo is most often curled into her side on the cot as Isabella’s fingers glide through his hair to soothe him.

Sometimes, he wakes up crying in the middle of the night, his limbs flailing while his eyes stare wide-eyed at the ceiling.

Those are the nights she rocks him to sleep, whispering things I cannot hear through the feed even when I turn the audio up.

Afterward, she always looks straight at the camera. Whether she knows I am watching or not, I feel the accusation all the same. You did this.

I carry that with me everywhere now.

So when Alessio appears in the main room with the first real excitement I have seen on his face in days, I already know whatever it is isn’t going to be pleasant. He stands in front of the monitors, blocking them, his eyes bright with a predatory kind of satisfaction as he holds up a file that is held loosely in one hand.

“We found Giovano Russo.”

The name stills the entire room.

Amos’s younger brother. Isabella’s uncle. The last surviving piece of her father’s inner circle.

The consigliere who fled after Amos’s assassination, vanishing before the city could finish tearing whatever remained of the Russo family apart. Some said he ran to protect the remnants of their bloodline.

Others questioned his motives because they suspected he knew more than he was willing to die for. In our world, both can be true, though neither would ever be enough to save you.

I haven’t seen him since the week after his brother died.

From what I remember, he was a grim man with silver at his temples and a hard attitude that matched the permanent scowl etched onto his face. At Amos’s funeral he had stood beside Isabella’s grandmother, one hand on her elbow. His face had been tight with exhaustion, his eyes darting around the procession as the priest gave final rites.

I had stood across the church aisle with my family and watched him from a distance, wondering over and over if he had any contact with Isabella after she disappeared.

I remember Giovano looking at me once, finding the hatred reflecting in his eyes had been pure enough to leave a mark in my mind permanently.

Even remembering it now it sends a shiver rolling down my spine.

It takes less than an hour for them to bring him in. He is dragged through the back entrance bound and gagged, two of Alessio’s men lifting him up high enough from the ground that his feet barely touch the floor.

He has aged in the years since I last saw him. His face is gaunter, his hair more silver than it once was. There is also a cut that bleeds sluggishly near his temple, and one eye is already beginning to swell.

Still, when the gag is pulled away, he bares his teeth at us before he says a word.

“Fuck you,” he spits out.

A Russo to the bone.

I stand near the back wall with my arms folded, keeping my expression blank.

The room is on the opposite side of the safehouse and had been cleared out and turned into a pseudo-interrogation room the moment Alessio’s announcement had been made. It is not built for this, not properly, at least, but Alessio has decided to make do.

A metal chair is bolted to the floor and plastic sheeting covers nearly every inch of the room.

A table with a recorder, a file stack, and a tray of instruments I recognize all too well sits in front of him. The second his ass hits the chair, he’s handcuffed to both arms and legs of it, giving him no room to squeeze out and make a run for it.

Alessio stands in front of him, looking almost elegant beneath the fluorescent light with the way his hair is pushed back from his face and both sleeves are rolled up neatly to his forearms.

He leans back against the edge of the table, his body weight shifted in a casual lean. My brother has always enjoyed dressing up interrogations like formal conversations.

Which is exactly what makes him monstrous.

He holds up the folder in his hand and twists his torso just enough to slap it down onto the table. The sound cracks through the silence. “We’ve found everything. Months of correspondence between you and the Bianchi branch. You’ve been feeding Davide information about our family, haven’t you? Planning to use the last Russo loyalist to bring us down.”

When there is no answer, Alessio rears his fist back and hits him square in the jaw. Giovano’s head snaps back from the force, a soft grunt escaping him before he can temper it back into submission.

“Haven’t you?” my brother says again.

Giovano’s head hangs forward for a beat, dragging in a rough lungful of air through his throat. Blood gathers at the corner of his mouth before he lifts his face again.

“I would never align myself with another syndicate after what was done to my own,” he rasps. “I know you Contis had something to do with what happened to Amos. You don’t think we suspected your involvement when it happened?”

Alessio snorts softly. “And why is that? All we did was offer help in finding the true assassin. What gain would we get by killing the head of our closest ally?”

Giovano bares his teeth at my brother again. “You tell me. You all swooped in to soak up our territory the moment it happened.”

My brother lifts a shoulder casually. “You were all too busy infighting. Someone had to pick up your slack so our operations weren’t destroyed.”

The man surges against his bindings, the chair scraping violently against the floor before the bolts catch. “You’re all vultures. You Contis love to dress yourselves up as allies. All the while, you were waiting to pick at my brother’s bones before he was even lowered into the ground. Your family made out good with what you took from us.”

“Careful, Giovano,” my father rumbles from near the doorway. “Threatening someone while you’re in this position will get you nowhere but left in an unmarked grave.”

The energy inside the room shifts the second his voice enters it.

His authority moves ahead of him like a weather front, pressing in from all sides until every man in this room recognizes that compliance is the only way through it.

Even Alessio stills slightly at the sound of him, though he would rather cut out his own tongue than admit it out loud.

Vittorio Conti looks untouched by the late hour and the old Russo consigliere bound to the chair in front of us.

He takes in the room in one slow sweep, not at all looking surprised by the violence, only faintly inconvenienced by its lack of resolution.

Giovano laughs, but it is wet and slightly rough sounding. “My brother was a fool to trust you. That was his mistake. ”

My father’s expression does not change, though mine nearly does.

I think of Amos Russo in the days leading up to his assassination sitting across from my father with a glass of scotch between them. Their meetings had always seemed innocuous from the outside, casual gatherings of two powerful forces turned allies. Quiet conversations behind dark closed doors neither I, nor Alessio, were ever allowed to be privy to.

From what I saw, there had never been any true hostility breeding between them. Not enough for the Russo family to suspect ours was behind the attack. It would make no sense for my father to kill Amos Russo.

The Russo alliance brought stability and kept profits on both our sides consistent, and enemies cautious. Amos had influence my father respected, and my father respects very few things he does not own.

Killing him would have created chaos. The kind that costs money and invites vultures just as Giovano is accusing us of being now.

The next thought comes sharp and unwelcome.

Except… we did benefit from chaos.

After Amos died, the Russo family fractured almost immediately. Old loyalties turned brittle while the men in Amos’s inner circle who had once smiled at one another across wedding tables and formal dinners began whispering about succession and territory, none of which they wanted to share.

There were no loyalties left after those first few months. Not a single hand strong enough to hold the syndicate together remained once internal conflict grew.

That was when my family stepped in. To stabilize operations, my father had said, and prevent outside exploitation in order to protect shared interests.

At the time, I swallowed those ideas back then because I needed them to be true. Because if they were not true, then what did that make me?

What did that make the choice I made when I walked away from Isabella? Foolish? Misguided?

My father moves closer to Giovano now, his polished shoes near silent against the floor. “Your brother understood the nature of power. You never did. That is why Amos led and you advised.”

Giovano snarls at him with bloodied teeth. “I advised him not to trust snakes. Look at what good that did when he ignored me.”

My father stops in front of him, towering over him with an old king’s calm. “Perhaps that says more about your value as consigliere than it says about his judgment.”

Giovano surges against the restraints again

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch Alessio watching with the smallest curl of satisfaction tugging at his mouth, but I do not look at him for long.

My attention is fixed on my father and the controlled line of his shoulders. On the faint boredom in his voice and the fact that he has not once denied anything.

Not directly, at least.

Something restless begins moving under my skin.

Giovano spits blood onto the floor near my father’s shoes. “My brother was going to pull away from you. That is what this has always been about. Amos saw what you were becoming. He saw how much control you wanted over territory that wasn’t yours and what you were willing to do to gain control over it.”

My father lifts a shoulder in response. “Amos was a businessman. He understood negotiation. Sometimes, that led to a difference of opinions.”

“He refused you.”

“We disagreed,” my father corrects.

“He refused you,” Giovano repeats, voice gaining strength through sheer fury. “Two days later, he was dead.”

My father’s mouth tightens. “It seems you have spent eight years building resentment out of your own misplaced grief. That is understandable. Pathetic, but understandable.”

Giovano laughs again, and this time it nearly breaks into a cough. “You always did mistake emotions for weakness. I see nothing has changed.”

Alessio sighs then, the sound cutting into the conversation. “We are getting off topic.”

The fluorescent lights hum overhead, the sound irritatingly loud. Giovano breathes harshly through his bloodied lips before sitting up fully and rolling his shoulders back.

His bound hands flex uselessly against the restraints, though that seems of little interest to him now as he pulls his gaze away from my father to focus it on my brother instead.

Alessio smiles at him. “Shall we bring your niece in, then?”

Giovano’s eyes widen.

For the first time since they dragged him into this room, real fear cracks through the old man’s defiance.

Not fear for himself. A man like Giovano has long since made peace with pain and even death.

That has, and will always be, the inevitable conclusion for a consigliere of a once powerful family.

Men like him do not survive the collapse of an entire bloodline without learning how to look at their own impending gravesite and give it the finger in response.

No, this fear is purely for Isabella.

Alessio sees it too, and satisfaction curls through his expression slowly. “I’m sure having her here to witness this will help soften that mouth of yours. Perhaps even get you to talk about what we’ve found in the correspondence between you and Davide.”

His fingers tap the file twice behind him.

My heart stutters in my chest and the room tilts for half a second as everything inside me shifts dangerously.

The thought of Isabella being dragged here as Matteo is left behind screaming for her, or worse, brought too, makes my stomach roll violently.

I won’t be able to handle Isabella’s face when she sees her uncle bound and bloodied in front of her. Giovano will try to straighten in the chair despite the pain because he will not want her to see him broken, but that won’t matter. She will see what has been done to him.

And if Giovano does not give Alessio what he wants?

Then she will watch him die.

Before I can stop myself, I push away from the wall and drop my arms back down to my sides. “We don’t need to involve her.”

Alessio drags his gaze back over to me slowly. He looks almost amused, but his eyes are black glass. “And why not?”

My mouth opens to argue, because she has already lost enough and I will not allow you to use her grief against her like a tool until she breaks, before I stop myself.

If she walks into this room and sees what we are doing to the last living connection to her father, she will never look at me again without seeing the monster she already has accused my bloodline of being. I cannot stand there and watch her break. It might actually kill me.

Alessio’s mouth curves again at my silence. “All she’s been doing is sucking up resources since she’s been here. Guards, food, medical attention. Your attention.” His eyes narrow on the last two words. “We might as well make use of her, even if it’s someone else’s pressure point.”

The thing about Alessio is that he knows how to make cruelty sound practical. He takes horror and dresses it in logic that no amount of arguing against can make it sound less so.

Revealing my ever growing underbelly that has become Isabella Russo will not only be detrimental to me but to her as well.

My brother’s cruelty toward Isabella will force her to have a front row seat to whatever depraved actions he plans to take in order to punish her uncle for refusing to cooperate.

My hands fist at my sides. I can feel my father’s stare on the side of my face the longer my silence continues. It’s heavier than any gun held to my forehead before now.

Giovano snarls weakly. “Keep her out of this.”

“If you still have affection for your niece, then her presence should provide you with ample encouragement to start talking.” His gaze lands on me next. “And if she has been telling the truth about her involvement, or lack thereof, with Davide, then perhaps seeing the man who no doubt helped her disappear exposed as a traitor will clarify certain loyalties.”

He strains against his bindings again. “She has nothing to do with this!”

“Then prove it,” Alessio says.

“I would rather die.”

He leans closer to Giovano, his voice touched with amusement. “Yes. I believe you would. Shall we test that?”

“Enough,” I snap.

He straightens slowly, twisting around to look at me, his brows pulling together in confusion.

My father’s eyes narrow out of the corner of my eye, his entire body turning to face me. I feel the entire room pivot toward me even if most of the men in here hardly move from their statuesque positions.

My brother tilts his head. “Excuse me?”

I look at him and let him see the proverbial line I’ve drawn in the sand because there is no point in subtlety now.

It died somewhere between my father refusing to refute the truth about Amos’s death and my brother deciding Isabella’s grief could be another instrument to play with at his leisure.

“You heard me,” I say.

The amusement in my brother’s expression disappears completely.

My father’s voice lowers. “Elio.”

The warning should work. It has my entire life up until this point. My name in that tone used to pull my spine straight and reel my conscience back into whatever locked drawer he preferred it stored.

I have killed men after hearing that tone without question. I have swallowed every question that rose in me because Vittorio Conti did not raise sons to question the architect of our family’s empire.

Tonight, the tone only irritates me. I do not look at him, only at my brother. “Isabella stays where she is. She has no reason to be involved in any of this.”

Alessio laughs once, disbelieving. “Are you giving orders now?”

“I am the underboss.”

He watches me for a long moment. “You think she’ll thank you for this?”

“No.” The answer is immediate.

Isabella will not thank me for keeping her out of this room, nor will she thank me for protecting her from any sort of grief involving her family after I have already dragged it right to her doorstep.

She will never forgive me because I stopped one cruelty from happening after committing ten others. She may never even look at me without seeing the man who shattered the life she once had.

I know that, yet it changes nothing.

Protecting them openly creates a target on Isabella and her son’s backs, one that I’m well aware is already beginning to form right here in this room.

It gives my enemies, my brother, my father, and anyone else willing to try to harm them a direct line to my largest vulnerabilities. The moment I claim them, I endanger them. The moment I refuse to claim them, I abandon them.

There is no winning here.

Quite frankly, there never was. Not from the moment Davide found Isabella or even now. Every path is poisoned, built off the remnants of a dynasty my own sought to claim after its collapse. My whole life, I have been taught to look for the efficient road, the least messy solution. But I am done pretending those are the only choices worth making.

I lift my chin and meet my father’s eyes. “If anyone touches them, they will have to go through me first.”

“Stand down,” he says.

My hand drops to the gun at my side in response. Every man in this room understands the language of that movement and it causes everyone to freeze in place. Alessio’s face tightens. For a second, I can read him as clearly as Isabella reads me.

He sees the danger now that is the fracture running straight through the Conti household, me on one side and them on the other. He looks at me as if I am a stranger, some foreign entity inhabiting the body of his younger brother.

My brother has always believed our family could survive anything as long as we remained loyal to the genesis that made us. What he does not understand is that same structure has been eating us alive since we were boys.

Or maybe he does and simply considers that the price of power.

My father’s eyes narrow to slits. “You would draw on family for them?”

My hand doesn’t move. “Only if you force my hand.”

His eyes harden, though for a fleeting second, I see something almost like pride pass through the anger boiling there. It disgusts me more than his contempt would have because I know what he sees.

It isn’t the courage of a man finally standing between his family and the people that would love nothing more than to destroy it. He sees the violence in me, the willingness to draw a line and enforce it without question, only now, the weapon is aimed in the wrong direction.

I know some part of him admires my tenacity even as he hates being the target.

Family has been the altar at which I have sacrificed every piece of my soul and never asked for anything in return.

It took Isabella from me and stole the life I wanted to have with her, torturing me with the knowledge of her finding it with someone else while I lived and died for the same people who are now eager to harm her.

Never once have I questioned any of that until now.

My father studies me for a long time. When he exhales, there is a quiet laugh attached to it. “You see? This is what love does. It makes them weak and untrustworthy.” Then he turns away, heading for the door. “Enjoy your victory, Elio. Small ones are often the most expensive.”

I don't move. My hand stays near my gun until his back disappears through the doorway. Alessio follows, but not before giving me one final look.

It is full of warning and disappointment and something sadder than both. Grief, maybe, buried so deep, he would rather slit his own throat before admitting to it.

His eyes flick once toward Giovano, then back to me, a silent promise flashing in his eyes.

This is not over.

I answer with nothing but my stare.

When the door closes behind him, I am left in the interrogation room with Giovano Russo’s blood on the floor and his eyes on me. Blood has dried in dark streaks along his chin and has painted the front of his shirt in thin rivulets, his left eye swelling shut from Alessio’s blow.

I know what he sees, someone standing between him and death, but still a Conti.

The son of the man who he believes destroyed his brother. Trust is not something men like me get to demand after an event like this.

It is built slowly over time or destroyed quickly, and everything my family has ever touched has apparently ended in ruin.

But that does not stop the question that has been chewing at the inside of my skull. “Do you truly believe my father was behind Amos’s death?”

For a second, he does not answer. His chest rises and falls in shallow, painful pulls, his breath rasping faintly through his nose.

Then he coughs, a wet, brutal sound that bends him forward as far as the restraints allow. The chair creaks beneath him as pain flashes across his face, tight enough that even his hatred cannot fully hide it.

When he recovers, he spits blood onto the plastic sheeting at his feet and winces as he lifts his head again.

“Yes.”

I feel something in me resist it on instinct. Some old, loyal part of me that still flinches away from the possibility of my family being involved, reaching for explanations or some version of history I was fed and swallowed obediently.

“What proof do you have?” I ask. “Other than what you have already said.”

He pulls in a ragged breath, spitting out more blood before rolling his shoulders back. “There was a ledger my brother wrote in religiously back then. One he never left the estate without. After his death, I had been searching for information to help piece together a timeline of his movements the day of the assassination. That’s when I found the ledger.”

There is a faint ache behind his eyes.

Amos Russo with a ledger.

Of course, it fits too well.

I remember seeing him at meetings with his hand sometimes resting over a closed leather book beside his glass. I never thought much of it then.

Amos had always seemed like the type to keep evidence close, though not because he feared betrayal, exactly. There always seemed to be another hidden agenda within him. One I never cared to question until now.

Had he planned on needing an insurance policy? Proof for something?

Giovano swallows, his throat working hard. “After his death, I searched for information. Who he met, which routes he took and if they changed for some reason, what calls came in before he left the estate for the gala. I wanted to know every step he took that night leading up to what happened.” His eyes harden. “That is when I found the ledger.”

My hand drops from my gun.

Something has shifted inside me again, a slow grinding turn of machinery that cannot be reversed. This is no longer an accusation he has shouted out of anger.

Unlike what my father suspected, I cannot definitely say this is his grief sharpened into suspicion and aimed at the wrong target. If there is a record that may have survived the fall of Isabella’s father, then it needs to be examined thoroughly.

I glance back over my shoulder to make sure the door is still closed before walking toward Giovano. He watches me warily, his body tensing even before I reach him, bracing for whatever pain he thinks will come next.

I hate that I cannot blame him. He has no reason to believe I am different from any of my family members.

Quite honestly, I’m not. Maybe the only thing separating me from my brother in this moment is the simple fact that my curiosity has been piqued.

My hand rests over the file left behind by him.

The folder is still open on the metal table, pages inside marked with printouts of messages between Giovano and Davide, timestamps, routing chains, all of it neat and damning and now suddenly suspect.

The elegant little noose Alessio had been so pleased to tighten is now being called into question.

I press my palm down over the paper.

“Where is this ledger?”

He doesn’t answer me right away. His one open eye tracks my face, searching for the trap. His suspicion breathes between us and I understand too well why.

Standing here and asking for the one thing that may prove my father’s guilt will undoubtedly put Giovano in a precarious position.

One where he will be forced to decide whether handing the information over will guarantee his and Isabella’s safety or damn them.

“Why protect her?” he asks suddenly.

Why now?

Why her?

Why stand up to your father after eight years of kneeling?

I could give him the simple answer, because Isabella is mine, though not in any way I have the right to say out loud. My father just proved every fear she ever had was justified, as did my brother.

The thought of her standing in this room, forced to watch the last living piece of her father’s world die under Conti hands, makes something in me grow violent.

I think of Matteo’s frightened eyes looking at me from his mother’s arms. I look at the blood on the floor and think of Isabella at just nineteen standing by my apartment windows with tears in her eyes she refused to let fall. I think of her asking me to run away with her, and of myself saying I couldn’t.

Regret is a horrid beast.

“Because someone should have,” I finally say.

I press my tongue hard to the back of my teeth until pain steadies me. I turn away before he can see too much written on my face. There is already too much of me exposed in this room.

If I let myself feel all of it now, I will not make it down the hallway without tearing this house apart trying to get back to her.

Behind me, Giovano speaks again. “If you want to protect her, protect her from all of it. Including yourself.”

I close my eyes for half a second, my hand pausing on the door handle.

In a way, he is right. I am part of the danger closing in around Isabella and her son.

I have been from the beginning, even when I thought I was keeping my distance to spare her.

I told myself my absence was a mercy, a brutal kindness and the only gift I knew how to give a woman born too close to the same violence that made me.

I was the blade hanging over her head, polished enough to reflect whatever lie I needed to believe in order to push her away.

I still am.

And yet, I still want to be her shield.

What a grotesque kind of arrogance.

I step out and lock the door behind me. For a moment, I stand in the hallway with my hand still on the knob while the safehouse moves around me.

Men murmur somewhere down the corridor while a radio crackles. Boots move across the hardwood in steady increments.

Life continues on in the belly of the monster as if nothing fundamental has changed at all. Inside me, an old allegiance has cracked, however. I can no longer ignore what is blatantly standing right in front of me.

By the time I reach the end of the hallway, I know one thing with absolute clarity. I need to find that ledger.

16

ELIO

I fly back to Italy under the cover of a business trip alone and without an entourage.

That alone has made half my men nervous the moment my announcement made it through the chains of command. Underbosses do not travel without their shadows.

It’s considered dangerous for men like me to move through the world unguarded.

Oftentimes, when going on business trips similar to this one, we turn hotels into temporary fortresses and restaurant reservations into perimeter checks.

Every public step is measured, every private one documented by someone loyal or too afraid of the repercussions to not keep us breathing.

For the next two days, though, it will just be me, a forged itinerary, a private jet logged for a meeting with investors in Milan, and a dark suspicion sitting heavily in my chest.

The flight there feels endless.

Outside the window, the sky stretches on endlessly. I sit in the cabin with one glass of whiskey untouched on the table in front of me and my phone lying face down beside it, silent except for one encrypted message sent to my brother and father detailing the takeoff.

The long hours stretch on, giving me time to get lost in my own thoughts, though I try to stay away from thinking about Isabella left behind in that room. I’m sure she’d be elated to know I’m gone, far enough away from her that I can no longer reach her or her son.

Her hatred I can understand. I can carry it because it is well deserved, much like most of the vitriol and insults she’s hurled at me thus far.

It keeps distance between us even if I hate it, reminding me once again that I am the one who stormed into her life and dragged her back into this darkness.

What I never expected was for Isabella Russo to thank me.

I wasn’t looking for anything to come from reuniting her with her son, least of all that.

I gave Matteo back because keeping him from her had become unbearable to watch.

For years I let myself imagine she disappeared because she wanted to punish me. Because she found a life better than the one I refused to choose and maybe, somewhere far away from me, she had learned to breathe easier without me.

I had held onto that resentment and anger for years, allowing it to excuse the hurt I continued to inflict on her the longer I kept her separated from her son.

Yet every hour I kept them apart, something in me tightened.

Watching her pace that room, her eyes lifting every time to the camera like she knew I was there witnessing her impending breakdown, felt the claws dragging down my chest and splitting me open.

I told myself giving him back was the only logical conclusion. It was a way to calm her and stabilize an already toxic situation from becoming worse than it already had turned into.

I could not keep watching her suffer and still pretend I was anything other than my father’s son.

That should have been the end of it, a wrong made slightly less wrong though never quite undone. I expected relief from her and maybe rage once she realized the gesture did not mean freedom.

But then she did something I never accounted for. She turned her eyes up to the camera I watch every single night and thanked it—thanked me.

I grip the armrest of the jet seat and stare out the small oval window at the black sky beyond it, but there is nothing out there to anchor me. My reflection stares back at me in the glass.

Gratitude is a small, treacherous thing. It slips beneath my armor and finds the soft places still left inside me and whispers that maybe she believes I am not entirely beyond saving, after all. If Isabella hates me, I at least know where I stand. I can survive as a villain in her world because that’s what I’ve been for almost the past decade.

But this… this tenderness… I don’t know how to deal with it.

She is planning something. I know it by the way she watches the hallway outside when the guards come and go with her food. That should alarm me. Instead, a grim sort of pride rises in my chest before I can kill it.

Of course she is planning to do something. Isabella Russo could be chained in the belly of hell and still be looking for loose stones to wiggle and escape through.

She was born for strategy, trained by a man who understood that power is not always held by the person holding the gun. Sometimes, it belongs to the one patient enough to know where the gun will be pointed to next.

My father never understood that about her. That is why he believes she is worth nothing more than to use as a pressure point against someone else. Alessio does, and that is why he fears her influence over me.

My mouth almost curves up despite myself. Then the pride curdles into something heavier, flattening my expression once again. If she is planning something, then she is planning against me too.

She has to.

I am not separate from the system she’s trapped inside. I am not some guard standing outside the cage with orders I cannot refuse and regret in my heart.

I’ve kept the keys to her freedom in my pocket while telling myself I am protecting her from dangers worse than me, as if that absolves the fact that she still wakes behind a locked door each and every morning.

Giovano’s words move through me again.

Protect her from all of it. Including yourself.

I stare down at my hands.

They are the same ones that have signed orders, broken bones, pulled triggers, dragged men out of hiding, and held Isabella’s face when I had no right to ever touch her again.

The Conti in me wants to claim what is mine while the man in me, whatever is left of him, knows I have not earned that right in the slightest.

Flying back to the birthplace of her grief with the taste of my family’s sins still bitter on my tongue feels both overwhelming and impractical. Chasing the remains of a dead man’s ledger and the possibility that every lie I have lived under was built with my own father’s hands comes with its own high price.

One I am willing to pay if it means finally finding out the truth.

Italy rises beneath me in glittering fragments.

The faintly illuminated coastline breaks when it touches the scattered lights of the residential areas beyond it. Roads stretch through them like veins beneath the skin of the land. I watch it appear and feel no homecoming, only the sick sense of dread slowly washing over me.

By the time the plane touches down, I have folded every feeling back into its proper boxes and pulled the familiar mask of my family’s underboss over me.

It doesn’t take long to move through the private terminal under a false passport and head for the main entrance leading out into the cool morning air.

A car is already waiting for me at the front terminal, parked exactly where I arranged for it to be dropped off.

I take the keys from the valet and go.

The road out of the city is quiet beneath the dark wash of early morning.

Fog still clings thickly over the road, making it almost impossible to see through even with the car’s lights cutting through it.

The closer I get to the Russos’ former territory, the more the landscape seems to withdraw into itself.

I remember coming here with my father years before its downfall and finding myself bored by the beauty because I was young and stupid enough to think it resembled exactly what I had at home.

I remember Isabella walking ahead of me through one of the gardens at the estate while her father guided us on a tour of the property, finding myself drawn to her with no reasons as to why.

Her dress had been pale blue then, complimenting the color of her hair that had been loose down her back in thick waves.

She had turned once to glance over her shoulder, catching me looking, and instead of blushing, she lifted a brow as if daring me to deny it.

I had wanted her even then.

Maybe that was why Alessio saw the danger before I did.

I thought attraction was something I could control, but perhaps he had recognized worship in its earliest form taking root and believed crushing it would save us all from future disputes.

In hindsight, it had been a noble effort.

One done far too late.

The abandoned Russo estate appears through the thinning fog, emerging slowly as the car takes the winding road up to it. At first, it is only a vague shape of pale stone and black iron, half swallowed by the morning mist clinging low over the grounds.

Then the road bends again and the cypress trees fall away, the house revealing itself piece by piece.

Even after eight years with neglect pulling it apart by the seams, the estate still has a grand presence, that old Russo arrogance carved into stone with its tall windows, wide terraces, and iron balconies twisted with dead vines.

My hands tighten around the wheel. I park far enough from the entrance that the car is hidden by overgrowth, pulling it into a gap between wild hedges and a collapsed stretch of stone wall.

I kill the engine and sit there for a moment, listening to the ticking heat of the car settle around me. The silence feels unnatural without the usual machinery of my life moving around me.

I step out of the car and close the door quietly, adjusting my coat as I scan the road behind me. Only fog eats the distance in both directions. While I doubt any syndicate would be stupid enough to still patrol this dead section of Russo territory, I am also not in the mood to unexpectedly involve myself in a shoot-out over it.

Gravel crunches quietly beneath my shoes as I move toward the entrance.

The sound feels too loud in the morning hush. The gates are chained shut, the iron old and weather-bitten, dark with rust where rain has eaten through the metal.

The chain is rusted badly enough that a few hard kicks sever it apart.

The metal snaps with a brittle groan, falling against the gate in a clatter that slices through the fog. I exhale slowly and push the gate open.

It complains the whole way, hinges shrieking softly as if the estate itself resents being disturbed.

The path heading up to the front doors is choked with weeds, the roots splitting through the gravel in thick, stubborn clusters that swallow the once refined structure of what was once a manicured drive.

The fountain in the middle of the circular carport is cracked through the center, its basin empty except for leaves, rainwater, and a thin film of green rot.

Vines crawl all over the stone faces carved along its sides, strangling cherubs and saints and whatever Old-World symbolism Amos once paid someone too much money to install. The figures stare out from beneath the growth with blind, eroded eyes.

Roses have grown wild on either side of the estate’s walls. They bloom beautifully despite being completely abandoned, thorns tangled through stonework, red petals opening bright against the gray morning.

I stop when I reach the marble steps, finding something I’m not expecting.

The stain is still there.

It’s faint, browned by time and nearly invisible unless someone were to know what had taken place here years prior.

This is where Isabella’s father bled out under the open sky. The first domino to fall, setting off a chain of events none of us could have ever predicted. Though perhaps my father’s hand had tipped it long before that.

I crouch near the stain before I can stop myself, my fingers hovering over it but not quite touching it.

“I’m sorry,” I say. The words disappear almost immediately into the fog, swallowed by the wet morning air and the silence of the abandoned grounds.

A useless offering.

The words are barely audible, and I realize belatedly that it is pointless to do so. The dead do not need apologies as much as the living do. I have given Isabella nothing but reason after reason to spit mine back in my face, all the while expecting something different from her. As if guilt counts when it never reaches the person it first wounded.

I am sorry I left.

I am sorry I believed them.

I am sorry I let your grief become inconvenient.

I am sorry I did not come back.

The list is endless.

No apology will ever be good enough to give to her. And yet some selfish part of me still wants her to understand, to look at me and see that I did not know the full weight of my actions and the consequences they would have on her future.

But ignorance is not innocence, and I am done hiding behind it. I don’t deserve to.

I rise slowly and step back from the stain, careful not to put my shoe over it. A ridiculous courtesy, maybe. Or an empty one. But I give it anyway because there are so few decent things left in me that haven’t already been tainted.

I move around the side of the house, pushing through wet branches and overgrown rose canes that snag at my coat with thorned fingers.

Their petals are dark red, almost black where dampness clings to them, and the sight sends a twist of nostalgia curling in my chest. Beauty surviving neglect, softness armed with thorns. It reminds me of Isabella.

She would hate the comparison if I ever said it to her.

The service entrance is where I remember it being, half hidden behind ivy crawling up the stone wall.

The narrow door is weathered, paint peeled in strips, brass handle darkened with age. I take one step back and give the door a solid kick near the jamb. The sound rips through the quiet like a gunshot as the wood splinters from the siding.

I freeze, one hand dropping instinctively toward the weapon at my side, listening for movement inside the house or on the grounds. But there is nothing.

I breathe out slowly before pushing the door open fully. It gives way with a groan that sounds too loud and foreboding against the eerie quiet.

Inside, dust hangs in the weak light slanting through the cracked windows. Each slow-moving particle suspends for a brief moment frozen in time, like the house is still trying to exhale the last breath it took eight years ago.

The halls are colder inside and it seeps beneath my coat through the fabric of my shirt, sending a shiver rolling up my spine.

Sheets cover furniture in soft, ghostly shapes like bodies arranged for viewing.

My flashlight cuts across them, and the shadows bend strangely, making it seem for one second as though the house is full of people who have turned their backs to me. I pass a narrow table where a silver tray still sits tarnished beneath the grime. Beside it, a crystal decanter rests empty, its stopper missing.

I pause there for a second too long, staring at it before forcing myself to move on.

The war room sits exactly how it was left years ago. Maps are still pinned to walls with routes marked in faded ink. Long strings sag between pins that connect through all of the territories surrounding this one.

Amos’s heavy oak desk sits beneath a thick layer of dust, looking like an altar no one has dared disturb since his death. The chair behind it remains pushed back at an angle as though he rose quickly and expected to return to it soon.

I stand in the doorway for a long moment and can almost see him there in this room, sharp-eyed and patient as always with one hand resting on the ledger Giovano told me about.

The picture of a man who knew betrayal would come one day and still let the wrong allies get too close anyway.

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps he never saw it and simply ran out of time.

Letting out a slow breath, I cross to the desk to search it first. Dust coats my hands the moment my palms settle on the old wood. It clings to my skin and gathers in the creases of my knuckles as I pull open the drawers one by one, each of them groaning softly on swollen tracks.

What I find first is nothing of importance, just old records from years past of invoices and shipping manifests that are now nothing more than wrinkled paper creating clutter.

I try the drawer below it and find much the same, all of it one useless document after another.

Frustration starts to crawl beneath my skin the longer I sift through it.

Giovano had said Amos wrote in his ledger religiously. Why wouldn’t it be with the rest of the other pieces that helped run his empire? If he were a smart man, he would never have allowed it to leave this room except for business ventures.

I shut the third drawer harder than necessary, the sound cracking through the room. The maps on the walls seem to stare at me. For a moment, I brace both hands on the desk and lower my head, breathing through the pressure building in my chest. If there is a chance the ledger was stolen—or worse, destroyed—then there is no hope of proving his claims.

I am not an anxious man. I have never had the luxury of being anything but steady in everything that I do. But this house is getting under my skin in a way I had not expected since the moment I crossed the service entrance.

I force myself to slow down and think like Amos.

Not like Alessio, who would tear the room apart and give up at the first sign of finding nothing on the surface. Like Amos Russo, the strategist. A man who might have known betrayal would come wearing a familiar face and needed to ensure the survival of the only piece of proof he had.

I crouch down to the floor, running my fingers along the underside of the desk. The wood is smooth in most places, rough where age has warped it. My fingers follow the seams and grooves of it, finding nothing at first. Then a subtle ridge catches beneath my index finger, too deliberate to be damage.

My pulse slows to a brutal, focused beat. I hook my fingers around the small latch and pry it away from the desk. It resists, years of disuse holding it stubbornly shut, but I work it loose with the edge of my nail until something clicks and a narrow panel drops open.

For several seconds, I do not move as I stare down at it. Inside is a leather-bound journal, exactly like Giovano described. The leather is stiff beneath my fingers, a soft smear leaving traces of dust behind when my fingers glide over the top cover. It is heavier than I expect, thick with pages of proof and whatever truth it holds after being trapped inside it for too long.

The first few pages are covered in Amos’s slanted handwriting. I flip through the early entries that are filled with details regarding his family’s alliances and strategies, payments made to other various syndicates in Italy before striking a deal with ours.

Some he describes in cool, concise words while cataloging their weaknesses while others are simple notes attached with deeper thoughts about interpersonal relationships and future agreements to be made.

I keep turning the pages one after the other. It isn’t until I reach the final few that my hands begin to shake.

The first entries are calmly written, though laced with obvious concern about shifting alliances with both of our families. Pressure from eastern route disagreements has caused my father’s requests for preemptive strikes against the smaller syndicates to become more aggressive.

The notes then shift to my brother, about pushing through intermediaries, Bianchi’s name surfacing more frequently in relation to potential countermeasures that may be called on to quell the budding hostility.

Then the tone changes. The handwriting grows slightly more forceful, each letter pressed harder into the page, the ink biting deeper into the paper and making it practically bleed through.

My eyes land on one entry and my body goes cold.

Alessio Conti approached me privately to offer a deal to consolidate our territory with the Contis’. Promised money in exchange for stepping back. He wants to take over both families and absorb them into one, creating a stronger force to move against other syndicates. When I refused, he threatened to remove me as an obstacle in his way.

I read it again and again, each time, the words become less comprehensible and more absolute.

My first instinct is denial. Not because Alessio is incapable of murder.

Christ, no. My brother has enough blood on his hands to fill this room ten times over with it. But against Amos, our closest ally?

A man whose death would knowingly shift the balance of power so completely that even now, eight years later, the ground beneath us is still moving with uncertainty?

He would never be that stupid, that brash, to think the repercussions of assassinating Amos would be absorbed easily.

I turn the page with fingers that no longer feel like mine.

Met with Davide tonight for advice. Warned him Alessio is moving against us. Something is wrong inside the Conti family—Vittorio may know about plans, no confirmation currently. Elio is being kept in the dark. He would not want this.

A rough breath leaves me.

He saw me, perhaps better than my own father ever has. He knew I would not be leading the move against him because I had no reason to. I did not understand there was a game being played around me, that I was standing in a room full of traitors with knives drawn behind their backs, waiting to strike at the perfect moment.

The words should absolve me from this crushing guilt, but all it does is deepen the wound forming.

Blindness is not a virtue to celebrate. It is what made me useful in allowing my brother to scheme behind my back and let my family’s empire remain intact while Amos’s life burned to the ground.

If I had been less trusting, perhaps none of this would have happened.

I keep reading.

Giovano—If anything happens to me, protect Isabella. She is the only one who can see the board clearly. Show her these journals.

My throat burns as I flip to the final entry. It is dated the night Amos died.

The handwriting is still neat as it always is, but there is tension in every stroke, a pressure that nearly tears through the page with each curled letter.

Alessio called. Said it was time to choose sides. I chose my daughter and our family. I chose what my ancestors built. May God forgive me for what comes next.

I stare down at the cold, irrefutable proof that my family—no, Alessio—orchestrated Amos Russo’s assassination.

My brother.

The boy I grew up beside.

The heir who smiled at dinners across from Amos while plotting to remove him from the board because he was inconveniently getting in the way.

None of this had been for the syndicate or because our family had been facing a catastrophic end and had been backed into a corner with nowhere else to go.

This has all been for his own personal ambition to monopolize the market. To take power he could not wait to inherit and expand it further.

And he let my father believe what?

That Amos had become unstable and needed to be taken out?

That Bianchi was involved and that is why we have spent the last six years trying to eradicate his syndicate from existence?

Or perhaps my father never knew, only discovering the truth afterward and choosing silence because the outcome had served him better.

That thought sits in me like poison.

My own brother had tried to warp me into believing Isabella had been the one playing me, that she had been the hand behind the knife all along.

All the while, he murdered her father and forced me to choose the same family that had already destroyed hers.

My brother stole not just Amos’s life, but Isabella’s innocence, her inheritance, safety, trust, and her future with me.

I helped him by not seeing clearly.

By obeying the rules I have always known and believing what was easiest because I have never had to question otherwise.

I had thought cowardice looked like running.

Like hiding under another name and disappearing from the world to start a life with someone else far away from the one that had molded you.

Now I understand cowardice can wear a suit and stand in war rooms. It can follow orders and call it honor.

It can look the woman you love in the eyes and tell her how things must end because fighting the inevitable seems foolish.

Because duty has already built the road.

Because family has already chosen the direction of the compass.

Because standing against your own blood feels like stepping off a roof and expecting the ground below to save you.

I told myself leaving Isabella alone was mercy. I believed it because I needed to. The alternative was looking directly at the truth and admitting that fighting for her would have required me to become someone I was not brave enough to be. It was easier to stand beside Alessio and my father and pretend the world had arranged itself beyond my control.

But there is nothing noble in surrendering someone else’s heart because yours is too afraid to revolt.

I press the heel of my hand against my sternum as if I can force the pain back. It sits there immovable, lodged beneath muscle and bone.

It’s guilt with a pulse, rage with nowhere to go, shame so deep, it feels inherited, as if the Conti name has stopped being armor to protect myself with and finally revealed itself as the very chains locked around my throat.

I will not be returning to the safehouse as the loyal underboss.

I can’t.

That man died the moment I recognized the bloodstain on the marble steps and read Amos’s final entry.

Or maybe he died eight years ago and has only now had the decency to show.

I look around the war room once more—at the maps pinned to the walls, the sagging strings connecting territories men have bled over, at the dust covering everything like the slow hand of judgment.

This room belonged to a dead man who saw the board clearly enough to understand the threat before it killed him and had been too late to stop it from happening.

Protect Isabella.

His words were not written to me, but they might as well have been. I failed her once. More than once. I failed her in the silence after her father’s death and when I let Alessio’s suspicion become an excuse to push her away. I failed her every year I let resentment take the place over wanting her because that would have required me to admit I still loved her.

And Matteo.

Christ.

Matteo.

He isn’t mine in any sense, but in some strange way, I still feel the ache of those seven years of his life all the same.

His mother spent all that time building a life with someone else because I was too stubborn to allow myself to claim her like we both wanted.

I cannot go back in time and convince her not to have a child with someone else, but I can be there for them both now without question.

For the first time in my life, that feels more than just a strategy detailed over a war table to punish my enemies.

It feels like penance for every hurt I’ve ever caused the one person I care about most in this world.

I gather the journal carefully and press the pages back together, slipping it into the inside pocket of my coat to keep safe.

It belongs to Isabella. She deserves to have the only piece of her father that is still left in this world.

I do not expect gratitude or forgiveness for returning the journal to her once I get back to the safehouse. She may still hate me, she has every right to, but I will tear the Conti syndicate apart from the inside before I let Alessio touch her or her son.

Once, the idea of destroying my family would have felt like treason. Now it feels like cutting rot from a wound before the infection reaches the heart.

Alessio has been the festering blight for years now, smiling at dinner tables while arranging our allies’ deaths and calling them opportunity.

My father may not have been the one to pull the trigger, but his silence built the gun Alessio fired from. His empire has always rewarded the kind of monster my brother became.

And I, the loyal son, obedient weapon, blind and ignorant underboss, helped keep it standing.

No more.

I am done putting family above the woman I love.

17

ISABELLA

Tonight is the night.

A routine supply drop is scheduled for 2:17 a.m., the conversation about it overheard from one careless sentence dropped while one of the guards was shutting the door to mine and Matteo’s room after a lunch drop-off.

“Supplies are being dropped in the morning. 2:17. Boss said all hands need to be ready to bring the crates in. There’s over fifty of them.”

He said it as a complaint, some bored little muttering about their routine he didn’t think mattered being overheard because women like me are supposed to be too frightened to do anything except pace, cry, and wait for the men with guns to decide what happens next.

A prisoner like me is supposed to look at a safehouse crawling with enforcers and see impossibility.

Men like that are so often ruined by what they assume.

For the last week I have studied everything. If things go as I predict they will, the hallway leading down to this room will be lightly guarded, if at all, while most of the enforcers will be outside bringing in the crates.

Their attention will be scattered to the outer perimeter and the vehicles bringing in whatever logistics are helping to keep this place fed, armed, and operational.

Matteo and I haven’t posed a threat thus far, and that has been deliberate. We have remained quiet enough to be underestimated, giving each and every guard enough time to grow used to us acting scared and docile. Hopefully, it will lead to no one questioning pulling additional hands from our rotation and allocating them for the drop-off, giving us enough time to escape without being caught before our feet ever reach the front porch.

The only problem will be Elio…

I haven’t seen him since we had sex, but that doesn’t mean he’s been absent. My eyes slowly shift to the camera and its blinking light. I cannot predict him anymore, not completely, at least.

Which makes him more dangerous than all the other factors I’m working against combined. If he were to catch Matteo and me, I’m not sure what would happen.

Separation at the very least, I would imagine.

I look down at my son asleep beside me on the narrow cot. His cheek is pressed into the thin pillow, one hand tucked beneath his chin, dark hair falling into his eyes. Even in sleep, he looks tense.

He should be in his own bed under his glow-in-the-dark stars with his soccer cleats tossed carelessly near the closet because he never remembers to put them away no matter how many times I ask.

He should be complaining about math homework, not worrying if we’ll both live to see tomorrow.

My hand moves through his hair. I touch him lightly, barely brushing the strands from his forehead.

He stirs immediately, his fingers tightening around the thin blanket covering him.

I freeze as I watch him shift his body around, one hand hovering above his shoulder while I wait for his breathing to deepen back into sleep.

“Shh, it’s okay,” I whisper.

When he relaxes again, I slip silently off the cot and stand.

The room is still mostly dark, washed in the dim red blink of the camera and the thin gray strip of light spilling in from the hallway beneath the door. I know every inch of this place by now, memorized by my time spent pacing until my feet hurt.

I kneel by the cot and reach beneath the thin mattress pad toward the far corner closest to the wall.

My fingers close around the bent piece of metal from the underside of the frame, the one I worked loose over the last three nights after lights out.

It took patience, more than I thought I still had.

Every scrape of metal against metal sounded deafening in the dark, every tiny movement stretched over minutes that felt close to hours while Matteo slept curled into my side and the camera blinked its slow red eye above us.

When I pull the metal out now, I rotate it in my hand a few times.

It is not much, just a thin, warped strip with one jagged edge and a slight curve where I bent it back and forth until the metal finally snapped free. It would not win me a fight against a trained enforcer or even help me pry open the lock on the door.

But the serrated edge is sharp enough to draw blood if I need to defend myself.

I tuck the metal up into my tattered sleeve, sliding it along the inside of my forearm where the loose fabric hides it.

The cold press of it against my skin steadies me more than I’m expecting. I stand slowly, keeping my movements controlled as I move back to where Matteo is.

I kneel beside him and gently shake his shoulder.

“Matteo,” I whisper.

His eyes flutter open, unfocused and heavy. For one second, he looks like any other sleepy child pulled from a dream too early. “Mom? What’s going on?”

“Shh.” I place a finger against my lips immediately. “Quiet, baby. I need you to listen to me.”

Fear cuts through his sleep. It breaks my heart to see that sudden realization of where he is wash over him. He should be grumpy and limp-limbed, whining about wanting five more minutes of sleep before school, not alert and ready to obey.

His brows pull together. “What’s happening?”

I force a small smile onto my face, hating the lie even as I use it. “Remember that backyard game we played coming back from your soccer game? When we climbed the fence?”

He nods, slower this time. His eyes flick to the door for a brief moment then come back to me.

I pull in a slow breath. “We’re going to have to do that again.”

His little throat works as he swallows. “Are we leaving?”

I hesitate for a second before answering.

The problem is I do not know if we will get that far. I do not know if tonight ends with freedom or punishment or Elio standing at the end of the hallway with betrayal written across his face, his dark eyes hard with anger while his body blocks the only way out.

But we have to try.

I cup his face in both hands and whisper, “Yes, but I’m going to need you to be a very brave boy. Okay?”

His eyes fill with unshed tears, but he swallows them back before they can fall. He nods his head slightly. “Okay.”

I squeeze his cheeks gently, my thumbs brushing beneath his eyes. “You need to do exactly what I say. If I tell you to run, you run. If I tell you to hide, you hide. If I tell you not to look, you don’t. Understand?”

He nods again.

I grip his chin gently, making sure he hears the part that matters most. “Matteo.”

His eyes lock on mine. “I understand.”

“Good boy.”

I help him sit up and pull the oversized sweater I begged one of the guards to get him a few days ago over his head.

It swallows him, the sleeves hanging over his hands even when I roll the cuffs up his arms and smooth the fabric over his chest.

I grab his sneakers and slide them onto his feet, tightening the knots and checking each lace with obsessive care.

It is a ridiculous thing to focus on, but the panic racing through me has to go somewhere. If I let it flood my system, I will drown in it before that door even opens.

I cross to the door and lower myself to the floor to watch the light on the other side glow beneath the frame. A shadow passes by our door, followed quickly by a few more sets.

Faintly in the distance, I can hear masculine voices talking. I get back up to my feet and close my fist in a tight curl. Then I pound it against the door relentlessly.

For a moment, nothing happens and all I can hear is the sound of my fist against metal and the pounding of my own heart.

When footsteps finally approach, I quickly move away from the door. It swings open and a slice of a man’s face appears beyond it.

I recognize him instantly, the one who avoids looking at Matteo every time he brings us food because the guilt has clearly already found a home in him.

It’s perfect to use to my advantage.

“What?” he mutters at me.

I make my voice frantic and urgent sounding. “My son is sick.”

The guard’s eyes flick past me to Matteo, my own gaze following. My son is hunched perfectly on the edge of the cot with his head down, one hand pressed to his stomach while his shoulders bunch up near his ears.

The guard stiffens. “What do you mean, sick?”

“He’s really dizzy,” I lie. “I think whatever was in the food earlier got him sick. He needs to see a doctor.”

He hesitates. He looks over his shoulder toward the noise coming from down the hallway, the noise more distant. No one is near enough to help him decide.

“I can call someone to drive down to⁠—”

“No.” I let panic sharpen my voice. “Look at him. Please. Just take him to see a doctor at the hospital.”

The guard swallows. His eyes dart around my face, clearly searching for some kind of discrepancy. When he finds nothing, he pushes the door further open. “Step back from the door.”

I do, giving him enough room to cross the threshold without touching me. Behind him, the door yawns open just enough for me to see down the rest of the hallway. Instead of the usual set of guards lingering just beyond the doorway, all I see are dark shadows.

Perfect.

I move the second he starts toward Matteo. I slip the metal piece from my sleeve into my hand and then charge for him. I do not go for his throat when my body slams into the back of his. That would be far too messy to deal with and too loud if he got a scream out before I can finish.

Instead, I slash up the side of his face, near his eye. He hisses and instinctively jerks back. I drive my shoulder into his shoulder from behind and shove him down to the ground with every ounce of strength terror has gifted me.

He stumbles and falls to his knees.

“Run, Matteo!” I whisper.

He bolts.

I catch the guard’s arm with both hands before he can grab my son and twist, using the motion my father drilled into me until the joint pops in my hold.

The guard gasps in pain and arches to the side to yank himself from my grasp. I slam the heel of my palm into his nose right as his mouth opens to scream.

He falls onto the floor with a choked curse.

I am already moving before he can try to get up again. I find Matteo huddled in one of the shadowed corners of the hallway. I grab his hand and pull him with me. The corridor is dim, lit by low strips of light along the floor.

Most of the noise comes from the far end near the lower entrance in the opposite direction I pull us in.

Matteo’s hand is slick in mine, his breathing turning ragged. I duck my head and pull him close to the wall to keep him out of view because I do not know whether Elio is watching the feeds or not.

Someone will soon discover the guard struggling on the floor and call for backup if they haven’t already.

I guide us to a recessed doorway nearly hidden around the next corner and press him flat against the wall behind me just as two enforcers pass the hallway junction carrying heavy wooden crates in their arms.

Matteo makes a tiny sound, barely perceptible, and presses into my back, his entire body shaking.

The men continue past us, their boots heavy against the floor as the crates creak in their arms. I hold perfectly still, every muscle locked as their retreating footsteps fade. One of them laughs at something under his breath. It is such an ordinary sound, so careless and human that rage flashes white behind my eyes.

When they disappear around the next corner, I count three silent beats. Then I tug Matteo with me again and turn toward what I pray is a storage exit or a garage access to the outside. There has to be one. Safehouses like this are built for discretion to keep things moving where police or enemies are least likely to see.

I find a door at the end of the next hallway and reach for the door handle, surprised to find it already unlocked. For one wild, blinding second, hope rises so quickly in my chest that I nearly choke on it. As I pull the door open, the last thing I’m expecting to see is a room encased in plastic.

For a moment, all I can do is blink at the bizarre display.

Milky sheets hang from the ceiling and walls, taped down in overlapping layers that ripple faintly from the movement of the door opening. The floor is covered too, plastic stretched beneath dark smears that immortalize the boot prints that walked through it. A single overhead light glows from the corner, turning the entire room into something out of a movie.

Through the milky film, I can see what looks like a figure hunched over. My stomach turns so violently, I have to tighten my grip on Matteo’s hand to keep from stumbling back. The figure inside the plastic-covered room moves suddenly, one twitch of a shoulder that freezes me in place.

The plastic distorts him, blurring the lines of his body and face from view, but something about the shape of him sends a cold chill sliding down my spine. My mind rejects it before I know what I am seeing.

No, no, no.

I take one step closer while letting go of Matteo’s hand, peeling back the first layer of plastic despite every survival instinct screaming at me to turn around and keep running in the opposite direction. The room seems to tilt as the figure finally comes into view.

He lifts his face slowly, the light catching the harsh lines of his bloodied and broken face. It’s a face I remember from my childhood, from family dinners and my father’s funeral, those last few days before he helped me flee Italy and I became nothing more than a memory.

“Uncle Giovano?” I choke out.

His head turns slowly toward the sound of my voice.

Suddenly, I am not in a safehouse anymore. I am eight years younger, standing in my father’s study as rain patters against the windows outside. Giovano is in front of me, one hand steady on my shoulder, his face pale but composed as he gives me a fake passport and visa and tells me I need to be careful.

That is the last time I ever saw and spoke to him.

And now I’m here again inside this safehouse, standing in front of him bound to a chair in a room lined with plastic sheets. A sound tears out of me, but I swallow the rest before it becomes a scream.

From behind me, Matteo says, “Mom?”

“Stay there,” I tell him, my voice harsh enough to keep him from coming over here. “Close your eyes. Don’t look.”

I move toward Giovano, each step torturously slow. His wrists are bound to the arms of the chair. His shirt is torn open at the collar and stained in dark streaks. Bruises mark his face and the floor beneath him is spotted with blood, some fresh and some dried into ugly brown smears.

My vision pulses red.

Alessio.

It has to be.

There is cruelty in Elio, I know that better than anyone now, but this room feels like Alessio’s mind made tangible. He has always had a strange signature when it comes to his torture methods—methodical and detailed in a way that I have found always borders on obsessive.

Giovano’s one good eye fixes on me. “You shouldn’t be here.”

A laugh breaks from me, ragged sounding. Of all the things to say, of course that is what he chooses. “I could say the same thing about you.”

His gaze shifts toward the hallway beyond the plastic. Even half-conscious and beaten, he looks terrified. “You need to go. Now, before they come back.”

That old familiar ache crashes through me so hard, I almost cannot breathe. I reach for his restraints, my fingers shaking despite my effort to steady them. “You’re coming with us.”

“No.” The word is weak, but firm.

My head snaps up. “Don’t start.”

His mouth twitches faintly, grotesque looking from being split and healing badly. But then his expression hardens. “Go, Isabella. They won’t be gone for long.”

“I’m not leaving you.” My fingers search the bindings, finding metal cuffs and not the zip ties like I’m expecting. I yank at them anyway, rage making me stupid for one second before discipline slams back into place.

The metal in my sleeve.

I pull it free and wedge the jagged edge into the cuff’s small locking seam. It is a terrible tool for this, too wide and blunt at the wrong point. My hands slip once and the serrated edge slices my thumb open. Blood wells instantly.

Giovano watches me with growing alarm. “Isabella.”

“Stop,” I grit through my teeth.

He shakes his head at me, the motion strained. “Climb out the window. There’s one just beyond the plastic there.” He gestures with his chin toward the wall on his left. “Go before they catch you and your boy.”

The metal slips in my hand again and clatters to the floor. My breath comes out too fast now, causing my pulse to stutter violently in my chest.

Giovano leans as close as the restraints allow. “Take him and go. Now.”

Tears well up in my eyes. “I’m not leaving you behind.”

His expression twists, and for one unbearable moment, I see my father in him. Not his face, exactly, but that old Russo authority that I’ve missed so desperately. It’s a ruthless love that expects obedience, demands it, because survival matters more than sentiment.

It always has in the eyes of my family.

Just as it does now.

“You are a mother before you are a niece,” he rasps. “Act like it.”

The words hit me like a slap to the face. Pain blooms in my chest, bright and savage, as I stare up at him through the tears threatening to fall.

He is right.

I know he is, and I hate him for it.

I want to save him because he is the only piece of my father that I have left. I want to tear these cuffs apart with my teeth and drag him out with us and make every Conti in this safehouse choke on the fact that they failed to finish what they started.

But my first duty is standing twenty feet away with his eyes squeezed shut because I told him not to look.

Giovano’s face softens the moment he sees me understand. “Your father would be proud of you.”

Tears slip down my cheeks. “Don’t you dare make this sound like a goodbye.”

He gives me a look so full of grief, I know before he speaks what he is about to say. “Everything in our world is goodbye eventually.”

A sound outside the room snaps both our heads toward the door.

Footsteps.

I turn quickly and shove the metal piece into his hand. I don’t know if there is any point in arming him to defend himself, but I can’t stand the idea of leaving him completely defenseless. I lean in close to wrap my arms around him quickly, hugging him.

For eight years I have trained myself not to mourn what I could not afford to carry. I buried Isabella Russo beneath Marina Hayes along with the memories of my father because every one of them came with teeth. Giovano leaning against me makes all of it rise to the surface once again.

I am not the woman standing in front of him, but rather, the little girl who used to sit by my father’s desk while he and Giovano argued strategy over maps and documents. The teenager who pretended not to eavesdrop while they discussed alliances and betrayals. The daughter standing beside her father’s grave with Giovano’s hand heavy on her shoulder, the only thing keeping me upright when grief tried to pull me under.

He is not supposed to be here like this, broken in a plastic-lined room still trying to save me.

His bound shoulder shifts hard against mine, shoving me back with what little strength he has left. “Go, Isabella. Out the window.”

I want to say I will come back for him. I want to believe there is a version of this escape plan where I get my son out of this place and still drag my uncle out of this slaughter room alive. But I am my father’s daughter. I know when a checkmate is about to be called.

My throat tightens until it feels impossible to swallow.

I step through the plastic again and grab Matteo’s hand. He stumbles when I yank him against me, my hand coming up to curl around the back of his head to press his face against my body before he can open his eyes too fully and see the full extent of Giovano's injuries.

Plastic crackles beneath our feet as we move carefully through the room to the other side of it. The sound is too loud, but then again, everything is now. My breathing, Matteo’s, Giovano’s ragged inhale behind us, the distant movement of men in the hallway outside, all of it grows closer with each passing second.

I feel my uncle’s eyes bore into us from behind.

I shove the last sheet of plastic aside when I reach the other side, and sure enough, there is a window. Its warped wooden frame is chipped in places, the window dulled by dust, creating a frosted glass effect. I let go of Matteo long enough to test it. The frame groans but does not move. Panic crawls up my throat.

Behind us, Giovano coughs wetly.

“Latch,” he grits out.

My eyes dart to the side. A tiny rusted latch, almost invisible beneath grime and a strip of clear tape sealing the frame together, is visible. I dig my nail along the tape to peel it away from the frame, the tackiness sticking to my fingers.

The footsteps beyond the room grow louder, following a distant shout.

Matteo whispers, “Mom.”

“I know.”

I shove the metal latch away from the window and try again. Pain sparks through my hands as the frame jerks, then rises with a shriek that feels loud enough to wake the dead. It catches halfway, something farther up the channel blocking it from fully opening.

A voice outside the interrogation room snaps, “What was that?”

I bend, gather Matteo into my arms, and lift him toward the open window.

“Feet first,” I whisper.

I hoist him higher, guiding his legs through the narrow opening. Cold night air rushes in, damp and earthy compared to the room behind us. Matteo whimpers when his knee catches on the frame. I angle him with one hand on his back, the other bracing his thigh. He slips through and dangles on the other side.

I lean through the window as far as I can and lower him until his sneakers find something beneath him. I cannot see clearly in the dark, but I feel the tension leave his body once he finds solid ground. I let go of his hands slowly before moving back to turn my body around and hook my leg through the opening.

Behind me, the interrogation room door slams against the inside wall.

My body goes cold.

Giovano’s voice cuts across the room, suddenly loud. “Took you long enough, you useless bastards.”

I look back and see one of the enforcers step inside, gun half-raised. The plastic between us blurs the scene, but not enough. Giovano remains slumped in the chair, his head angled toward the man as the gun is slowly turned toward him.

“You planning on finishing the job, or are you just going to stand there all night?” my uncle says. Even half-dead, he sounds irritated.

The guard snarls and moves toward him. “Sounds like you’re begging for a bullet in your skull.”

My stomach clenches violently.

I can’t watch.

Instead, I turn back to the window and force myself through the small opening. The frame bites into my ribs, the old wood warped from years of damp weather and neglect, the sill jagged beneath my palms. Splintered wood catches my sweater, tearing the fabric near my wrist. A sharp edge scrapes skin, and heat blooms there, but I bite back a curse and wiggle harder.

Behind me, laughter erupts out of Giovano. “Go on, then. All you Contis are cowards, anyway.”

The sound is cut off by the sickening crack of the butt of a gun hitting flesh. My uncle lets out a choked sound from the impact.

Panic becomes momentum. I twist hard, ignoring the hot rip of pain across my side, and tumble out through the window. The world drops beneath me faster than I expect. For one weightless second, cold air rushes over my face as my hands reach blindly for something that isn’t there. Then I hit the damp ground on the other side. Pain flashes white-hot through my hip and shoulder. The impact knocks the breath from my lungs, the world blurring instantly.

Matteo drops beside me immediately. “Mom!”

“I’m okay,” I gasp out.

I lift my head up to look at him. His face is pale in the dark, eyes huge, cheeks wet. His little hands hover over me like he wants to help but does not know where to touch without hurting me. Then a quick flash of light shoots through the dark, following the sound of a gun going off.

For a second, I cannot breathe.

The sound of the shot seems to stretch endlessly, bouncing off the side of the safehouse and ripping through the night. My fingers dig into the wet earth as tears form and fall from my eyes. I clamp one hand over my own mouth, forcing air back into my lungs through the pain rippling through my body.

Matteo flinches so hard, he nearly falls into me. I grab him with my good arm and pull us both up from the ground, pressing his face into my shoulder before he can look toward the window as I stand.

Shouting erupts from inside.

I do not have time to look back and see if there is blood splattering the plastic sheets. I only have time to move. We move beneath the line of windows, keeping our bodies low toward the wet earth. The open grounds stretch somewhere ahead, but I cannot see enough through the darkness and fog to know which direction gives us the best chance of getting out of here.

We reach the corner of the building, and I press him flat behind me. My breath comes hard and fast, but I force myself to look around. The supply drop is still in motion near the opposite side of the building. Men are walking back and forth with crates in their arms surrounded by three transporter trucks. Two SUVs sit with their rear doors open as another set of enforcers continue to pack the trunk with wrapped boxes.

I pull back and look at Matteo. He is crying silently, tears tracking down his face while he bites his lower lip to keep from making noise. That sight goes through me with such force, I almost double over.

I cup his face with both hands. “Listen to me. We’re going to run to those trees. Do you see them?”

He nods shakily, his eyes darting away from mine for a brief moment and over to the trees.

“If you hear shouting, just keep running. If you hear anything, keep running. Do not stop until you get to the road.”

His eyes widen. “What if you fall?”

I press my forehead to his. “Then you keep running.”

“No,” he chokes out.

“Matteo.”

“No.” His whisper is fierce now, terrified and furious all at once. “I’m not leaving you.”

I do not have time for this. I do not have time for the wild, aching pride that rises in me. “You will do what I tell you.”

His face crumples.

“I will be right behind you,” I say, hating myself for needing to prepare him for the possibility that I might not make it out of this with him. “But if something happens, you need to run until you hit the road. Flag someone down. They will help you. You do not come back for me.”

His little hands grip my wrists. “Mom.”

I kiss his forehead hard. “Run.”

We bolt.

The first few steps are agony. My hip protests violently as I force myself into an unsteady jog, pain tearing hot through the joint with every impact of my foot against the wet earth. My shoulder screams from where I hit the ground, the muscles there already stiffening, already warning me that I am asking too much from a body that has been starved of sleep, bruised by captivity, and dragged through terror until terror itself has become fuel.

Matteo’s hand is clamped in mine so tightly, our fingers feel fused together. He is half running, half stumbling beside me, his short legs struggling to match the pace I set. Every few seconds, I feel him falter, and each time, I tighten my grip, hauling him forward with a force that will undoubtedly make me apologize later.

The wet grass slips beneath our feet. Fog hangs thick over the property, dense enough to conceal the full perimeter from view beyond the first stretch of trees surrounding the safehouse. It should help us. It should swallow us whole and keep us concealed in the dark like some merciful beast with a soft mouth.

Just as we cross the first hundred feet, a flashlight swings toward us.

“Hey!”

The shout cracks through the night.

Matteo stumbles. For one horrible second, his hand tears away from mine, his body pitching forward toward the ground. I grab him before that happens and yank him upright so hard, he gasps from pain, his little shoulder jerking beneath my grip.

A gunshot rings out from behind us.

The sound explodes through the fog, too loud, too close. The ground near my left foot spits mud as a bullet strikes, wet earth bursting upward and splattering my ankle.

Matteo screams.

I pull him harder. “Run!”

The tree line seems impossibly far away, both out of reach and just close enough to make hope seem possible. My legs pump faster even as my hip threatens to buckle. My breath comes ragged. Somewhere behind us, men are shouting over one another, the sound distorted by fog and trees.

“East side!”

“Cut them off!”

“Do not lose them!”

As soon as we clear the first set of trees, more gunfire goes off. Bark splinters into the air near my head, ricocheting around me like macabre confetti. Tiny fragments sting my cheek and neck. I duck instinctively, dragging Matteo down with me for half a step before forcing us upright again.

Branches whip at my arms and face. Thorns snag my sweater and tear at the already ruined fabric. Roots rise out of the dark like hands trying to trip us. Matteo sobs once, only once, then clamps down on the sound so fiercely, I feel sick with pride.

Another bullet slams into a tree somewhere behind us. The impact sends birds exploding upward from the branches, their wings beating frantically through the fog. The sound adds to the chaos, a dizzying cacophony of gunfire, shouting, snapping branches, and the ragged, animalistic sounds of our breathing.

I do not know where Elio is.

That thought flashes through me with unwanted force.

Is he behind us?

Is he the one shouting orders?

Is he trying to stop them from shooting, or is he standing at the helm because I dared to run with his son?

Matteo is stumbling more than running now, his whole body shaking, his face drained of color. Then the trees break and we spill out onto the shoulder of a busy road. Cars rush past in both directions, headlights cutting through the fog in bright, blinding bands. The sound of them hits with a different kind of distortion—engines roaring, tires hissing over damp pavement, the normal world moving at full speed while my son and I flee from gunfire.

I let go of Matteo’s hand only long enough to lift both of my arms in the air and wave them around frantically.

“Stop!” I scream. “Please! Stop!”

My voice tears out of me raw and desperate. I move into the edge of the road, ignoring Matteo’s panicked cry behind me and the danger of stepping too close to the traffic. Headlights flare in my eyes, temporarily blinding me.

A set of tires screech against the road as one of the cars jerks to a stop several yards ahead, angled halfway onto the shoulder. Hazard lights begin blinking, red and gold against the fog. I squint through the glare and turn to grab Matteo, lifting him off his feet with a strength I do not have but find anyway. He clutches onto me with a death grip, his little legs wrapping around my waist, arms locked around my neck so tightly, I can barely breathe.

“It’s okay,” I breathe into his hair. “We’re going to be okay.”

I run toward the driver’s side of the vehicle just as an older man pushes the door open and steps out. He is maybe in his sixties, gray hair, glasses, a windbreaker zipped halfway up. His face is creased with confusion and alarm, the expression of a normal man who has stopped for what he thinks is an emergency and has no understanding of what.

“Miss? Are you okay?” he calls to me.

For a fraction of a second, the question hits me so strangely, I almost laugh.

Am I okay?

I am running for my life with my seven-year-old son in my arms as men who were once tied to my family are hunting us for sport. My uncle may be dead and the father of my child may be the one giving the orders to shoot on sight or drag us back to our prison cell, and I do not know which version of him will reach me first.

Adrenaline crashes through me as I reach out and grab the older man by the front of his shirt.

His eyes widen. “What are you⁠—”

“I need your car.”

I shoulder-check him out of the way, shoving him back hard enough that he stumbles and has to catch himself on the side of the vehicle.

Guilt flashes through me, though it is gone before it can slow my hands.

“I need your car,” I say again, harsher this time, already leaning inside.

“What?” he shouts.

“I’m sorry.” It’s all the apology I give him before dumping Matteo into the passenger seat. He lands awkwardly with a small cry, twisting toward me immediately, one hand reaching for my sleeve.

“Seat belt,” I snap.

His hands shake too badly to force his hands to work. I reach across him and yank the belt down, clicking it into place with fumbling fingers.

The man outside recovers enough to grab at my arm. “Lady, stop! That’s my car!”

I twist away from him and climb behind the wheel, slamming the door shut and locking it before he can pull it open again. He slams his fists against the window next to me, shouting, his words muffled by the glass.

“Open the door! What the hell are you doing?”

I don’t look at him. My foot finds the brake, then I shift the car into drive. From the tree line, a flashlight beam slices through the fog, then another. One of them swings toward the road.

The older man pounds harder on the window. “Stop!”

I floor it.

The car lurches forward so violently, Matteo’s body slams back into the seat. The older man jumps away with a shout, barely avoiding the side mirror as the car tears off the shoulder and back onto the highway. A horn blares immediately and headlights swell in the driver’s side window.

Matteo screams.

“Hold on!” I shout.

I jerk the wheel, cutting into the lane too sharply. The tires skid over wet pavement, the back end of the car fishtailing for one terrifying second before traction catches and the car rights itself again. The highway stretches ahead, both directions unknown. Fog curls over the road, swallowing taillights and road signs ahead of us until they appear too late to see. My hands grip the wheel so tightly, my knuckles go white, my eyes flicking down to the speedometer as it climbs.

I do not know where I am going.

That is the first brutal truth.

The second is that I have no one else I can call.

The realization sits beside me in the stolen car like another passenger, silent and heavy, its hands folded neatly in its lap while my son shakes in the seat next to me. Any ally my family once had would never willingly turn against Vittorio Conti. Not unless I had something valuable to offer— territory, money, a secret, a favor powerful enough to outweigh the risk of helping Amos Russo’s daughter and inciting Vittorio’s wrath.

I have none of those things.

Once, the Russo name meant doors opening and men standing when my family entered rooms. Allies would fall over themselves in order to make promises and strike bargains over wine and food. Back then, my family had reach and influence. Now all that is left of it is me, a woman with a false name, stolen vehicle, and a seven-year-old trying not to cry too loudly in the passenger seat next to me.

My hands tighten around the steering wheel. Outside, the road unfurls beneath weak streetlights and patches of fog. A town rises slowly into view. I drive past all of the shops because normal places have cameras and clerks and the police called by well-meaning strangers.

A motel sign flickers ahead beyond the road. The letters pulses in and out, sickly red against the night sky. For a second, I consider it. A room with a locked door I can control and a bathroom where Matteo and I can clean up while I figure out where to go from here are incredibly tempting.

But if the Contis are following us, and I suspect they are, motels will be among the first places they check.

Beside the motel sits a self-storage facility with its gate half open and no attendant visible in the booth. Rows of metal units stretch back behind the lot, swallowed by darkness. The sign near the entrance is cracked, one bulb out, the whole place forgotten. I swing into the parking lot and immediately cut the headlights.

Matteo sucks in a breath. “Mom?”

“It’s okay.”

The car rolls forward slowly, tires crunching over loose pieces of asphalt. Rows of corrugated metal units pass on either side, each with a painted number and a padlock glinting dully in the gloom. I’ve found storage facilities always have a strange sadness to them, all those locked little rooms filled with pieces of people’s lives they couldn’t keep close but couldn’t quite throw away.

I turn down one row, then another. The deeper we go, the dimmer the lot becomes. The lights near the entrance fade behind us. At the far end, where the lot’s weak security lamps can’t reach, a row of larger RV storage bays sits like dark monoliths along the fence line. I turn behind them, easing the stolen car into the narrow shadow between two parked trailers, and finally cut the engine.

I sit frozen behind the wheel, hands locked at ten and two, staring at the rearview mirror as cars pass lazily on the road behind us. Their headlights drift by like distant ships, indifferent and unreachable.

For a few stolen minutes, we are hidden.

Not safe.

Hidden.

There is a difference so vast, it feels almost comical to put the words beside each other.

Safety is doors that lock from the inside, a bed with clean sheets. The smell of laundry detergent and pancakes on Sunday mornings. Safety is our blue house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac where neighbors wave and no one thinks twice about the single mother with tired eyes and a careful smile.

Hidden is a stolen car tucked behind a storage facility where my son sits beside me with dried tears on his cheeks. It’s waiting for headlights to turn the corner and knowing every second you remain still is one more closer to the men hunting you closing the distance.

This won’t last for long.

The thought settles like a stone in my stomach.

What do I do now?

My fingers tighten around the wheel while my mind turns over every possibility I can think of. I need to take Matteo and disappear again. That is the only real option. But without my uncle’s help, I have no idea how to secure new documentation. Not forged well enough to pass through border patrol, banking systems, school enrollment, and medical files like last time. I won’t be able to make them convincing enough to flee to another country without the Contis knowing.

I glance at Matteo and find him curled into the passenger seat, the oversized sweater wrapped tightly around him. His face is pale except for the red around his eyes, his lips parted slightly when he sniffles. He keeps looking out the windshield, then the mirror next to him, and then back again.

I close my eyes for a second, pressing my forehead against the steering wheel.

All I want to do is go back to our little blue house on the cul-de-sac. For one weak moment, I let myself imagine the life we were forced to leave behind. I want to return to them and forget all of this. I want to wake up tomorrow and pack Matteo’s lunch and complain about being late. I want him to roll his eyes when I tell him to grab a jacket. I want people to only know me as Marina Hayes, the quiet receptionist with a tired laugh.

I want the damn past to stay dead.

Suddenly, a memory flashes in my mind so quickly, my eyes snap open.

“I need a brilliant strategist like your father was to help me make moves against them. I know he taught you well, Isabella.”

His voice returns with startling clarity.

At the time, the offer had felt like a hand reaching up from a grave to wrap around my throat and squeeze the life out of me.

Davide Bianchi is a syndicate boss with blood on his hands and enemies knocking at his gates. A man desperate enough to track down Amos Russo’s daughter and ask for help against an encroaching family. He knows how to move people, hide them, forge documents, shift money, bury names, and he has the resources I don’t.

More importantly, he has reason to move against the Contis. If the family pressing into his territory is tied to the Contis, then Davide does not need much incentive to help me so long as I hand over everything I know about them.

My hand reaches down to the shifter, the other traveling to flick the headlights back on. The beams cut across the storage units ahead, bouncing off the metal doors of the units.

Beside me, Matteo shifts in his seat, a small sniffle leaving him.

“Where are we going?”

I turn and reach for him carefully, wiping the tear tracks from his cheeks with my thumbs. “We’re going to go see an old friend.”

His brow furrows. “A friend like Mrs. Keller?”

Despite everything, a broken laugh almost rises in me. Mrs. Keller, known for making terrible lentil soup and knitting scarves for half the neighborhood that never quite come out right, and whose idea of danger was once a raccoon getting into everyone’s trash bins right before the holiday season.

“Sort of,” I say before turning back to the road. “You’ll see when we get there.”

18

ISABELLA

The golden rays of the rising sun illuminate the fortified safehouse in a halo-like effect when we pull up to it, making it look almost holy.

The sky behind the estate is still bruised purple at the edges of the horizon, night still clinging stubbornly to the tree line while dawn splits gold across the stone walls.

The light catches on the upper windows first, turning the glass into sheets of fire, then rolls slowly down over the ivy-choked exterior, the iron balconies, the arched front doors, and the armed men patrolling the grounds with rifles resting against their chests.

Unlike the Conti safehouse, this one is much grander and looks more like a second home than a place to stay hidden while conducting business.

It does not have the sterile brutality of reinforced walls or the cold, functional layout of a house designed to contain threats. This place is older and prettier. And for that reason, it is much more dangerous.

I pull the car up to the front car port. Armed men move around the perimeter of the drive, spreading out with practiced ease as we approach.

One man lifts a hand toward his earpiece, talking into it for a brief moment while the others scan the road behind us.

Matteo lifts his head slightly to look out the window, his eyes slightly wide and afraid. “Are we there?”

“Yes,” I say and shift the car into park.

His gaze moves past me to the men outside. His body sinks further into the seat. “Do we have to get out?”

The question nearly breaks me. No child should sound so scared.

I can’t imagine what all of this looks like to a boy who, less than two weeks ago, believed the worst that could happen to him was bringing home a bad grade or breaking a bone.

I brush his hair away from his forehead. “Yes, baby. But you stay with me.”

One of the guards branches off to meet us, his hand nowhere near his weapon but his body tense all the same.

He is tall with dark hair that is trimmed tight to his head and a beard to match.

His eyes roam over both of us through the windshield, giving us a firm nod before stopping right next to the driver’s side door.

“Ms. Russo,” he says when I shut the car off and push the door open.

I nod at him and then turn to Matteo. “Ready?”

His eyes dart out the windshield, moving from the stone walls to the armed guards to the open front doors. He eyes the men warily before looking back at me.

He gives me a small nod, but his body remains sunk deep into the seat.

My chest aches.

He is trying so hard to be brave.

I reach over and unbuckle him before hooking my arms under his and sliding him across the center console.

He comes easily, his limbs wrapping around my body the same way they had earlier, arms locking around my neck, legs curling against my hip.

He is too big for me to carry like this for long, especially with my body screaming from the run and fall, but at this point, I don’t care.

The guard shuts the door behind me once we’re out, then escorts us up the front steps. The graveled drive shifts slightly under my shoes, each crunch too loud in the waiting silence. Armed men watch us from a distance.

Their gazes do not linger on us for long, which I appreciate. Or maybe Davide ordered them not to stare.

The steps are wide, old stone worn smooth in the center from years of polished shoes passing over them.

Warm light spills from the open doorway, golden and almost inviting.

There is danger in a place that knows how to appear welcoming. The Contis always favored brutality in its most natural form. It seems Bianchi violence comes wrapped in Old-World hospitality.

Inside, the foyer gleams. Dark wood floors and vaulted ceilings of the same color open up in front of me. An iron chandelier hangs in the entryway, lit low enough to soften every shadow but not banish them. Oil paintings line the walls farther down the closest hallway, portraits of old architecture and flower-covered fields. A sweeping staircase curves upward along one wall, its banister carved and polished from the same wood as the floor.

Matteo lifts his head slightly. His eyes go wide at the foyer with wonder, his head craning around to look at everything while the guard leads us down a long hallway. At the end of it, two men stand outside a pair of large double doors. They open them as we approach.

The room beyond is a study.

Of course it is.

Men like Davide always prefer rooms like this one. They like desks, leather chairs, decanters, bookshelves filled with titles they may have never read but keep on hand, anyway. They like rooms where power can sit down and appear civilized while deciding which enemies need to be buried before dawn.

Davide Bianchi stands near the window with a phone in one hand. He turns as I enter, speaking into it softly before ending the call and lowering his arm back down to his side. In a strange way, he looks exactly as he did on my doorstep and also completely different.

Here, in his own stronghold, surrounded by his men and his walls and the quiet machinery of his power, he looks every inch the boss I remember from childhood.

His eyes.

His suit is as immaculate as it was the last time I’d seen him, this one a charcoal gray with no tie and the shirt open at the collar.

There is a wedding ring on his finger that catches the morning light when he lifts his hand in greeting, though I vaguely remember his wife dying over a decade ago.

“Isabella,” he says, a slight smile curling his lips. “It’s so nice to see you. Though, I am sorry for the circumstances.”

My arms tighten around Matteo. “Me too.”

Davide’s eyes lower briefly to Matteo, careful enough not to linger. That restraint is the first kindness anyone has offered me since this mess began. Firelight burns low in the hearth despite the morning sun beginning to creep through the windows.

The walls are lined with bookshelves, the dark wood gleaming beneath the soft glow. Everything smells faintly of coffee and cedar polish.

It should feel comforting after the Conti safehouse, but it doesn’t. It’s simply a prettier cage than the last one I found myself inside.

I settle down on the couch near the window and shift Matteo in my arms. My body protests the movement, pain blooming through my hip and shoulder, both throbbing in time with my pulse. Matteo leans back from me to look around again, his eyes growing more curious than scared.

Davide turns his head toward the guard who escorted us in. “Thank you. Please let the kitchen know food and water are to be brought over immediately. And have housekeeping make up beds and bring a fresh change of clothes for them both.”

The guard gives a firm nod before leaving, pulling the door softly shut behind him.

He joins us a moment later, taking the opposite couch across the way. “Once you’re both fed, I’ll have my guards escort you to your room. I’m sure you’re both exhausted.”

I cannot help sinking back into the couch. After the cot and being trapped in that cold room, the couch feels like a luxury. Fatigue hits me in heavy waves, pulling at my muscles and blurring the edges of the room.

After convincing the front desk at the motel to lend me their phone, I called the number I’d memorized from Davide’s card immediately. As strange as it had been to hear Davide answer on the other end, relief had washed over me so deeply, it nearly buckled my knees. I’d only half explained the situation Matteo and I had gotten caught up in before he cut me off.

“Where are you?” he’d asked.

The moment I told him, he’d given me the address to this safehouse. Now sitting across from him, everything that happened at the Conti safehouse feels surreal.

“Thank you,” I say to him.

Davide inclines his head. “I’m just glad you both made it out alive.”

The window beside us overlooks the front drive where morning has fully broken over the grounds. Sunlight gleams on the gravel and black cars parked on the drive. Beyond the stone wall, trees sway gently in the wind.

The beautiful day feels almost obscene.

The door opens a few minutes later and a woman enters with a tray. She is older with silver-streaked hair pulled neatly back and kind eyes she does not let linger on my face too long when she smiles at me.

She places the food and water on the table in front of us. The plates are filled with eggs, toast, fruit, and small pastries dusted with sugar.

She leaves as quietly as she entered.

I pick up a piece of toast and hand it to Matteo. “Eat.”

He takes it slowly and nibbles the crust obediently. I put a small plate in his lap and keep one hand near his knee as he eats. Only then do I take a sip of coffee. The warmth hits my tongue and nearly makes me cry.

Davide waits until Matteo has eaten half the toast before speaking again.

“I need to know exactly what happened.”

My hand tightens around the coffee cup. “We were taken in the middle of the day about two weeks ago. Since then, we’ve been trapped inside one of the Contis’ safehouses that is about half an hour from here. From what I’ve gathered, they’ve had surveillance on you for a while. When you stopped by my house, they took that as an opportunity to take us for interrogation.”

His voice lowers. “I am sorry, Isabella. I should have been more proactive in making sure you remained safe after my visit.” He hesitates before adding, “It was never my intention to put either of you in any danger.”

Logically, I know that. Davide was not the one to drag us out of our house and separate me from my son. He did not keep Matteo under guard and away from me as a way to pressure me into spilling whatever secrets he believed I held for the enemy.

Unfortunately, logic has never been good at soothing harsh truths. Over the past few weeks, I have begun growing tired of feeling empathy toward those around me causing my son and me pain, even if inadvertently.

Matteo looks up at me, sensing the shift in my tone. I immediately soften my hand on his back, moving in slow circles between his shoulder blades.

Davide’s eyes follow the gesture, then he returns his gaze to mine. “Whatever you need, name it. It will be done.”

There was a time in my life when that kind of promise would have sounded like salvation. A man with power and enough influence that with a snap of his fingers could offer sanctuary and a way out would have been a lifeline.

The problem is I am no longer naive enough to mistake a velvet-lined offer for kindness like that just because it does not come with a knife pressed openly to my throat.

In this world, generosity is rarely ever given for free.

I laugh, but it comes out brittle sounding. “With a price, right?”

He studies me for a long moment.

I let him take in the exhaustion beneath my eyes, the tension in my shoulders, the way my hand rests against Matteo while the other keeps a tight hold of my coffee, and see what remains of Isabella Russo after years of pretending to be Marina Hayes.

At last, he sighs. “I won’t lie to you. When you called, that was a part of the reason I wanted to help you. Not the full reason, of course. I would never want to leave an old friend’s daughter stranded with nowhere left to go.” His gaze flicks briefly toward Matteo, then back to me. “But I would be lying if I said the thought of your helping me with the Contis didn’t cross my mind.”

The honesty is refreshing in a strange way.

“It isn’t exactly what I want to hear. But at the very least, you’re being honest,” I say.

Davide’s expression softens slightly. “I respect you too much to pretend otherwise.”

I smile faintly, but there is no warmth in it.

I wonder what my father would think if he could see me now sitting across from one of his old friends with my son beside me, bargaining over the wreckage of the life I built from the ashes of his.

I wonder if he would be proud that I survived that kind of tragedy or furious that it has led me right back to the same table he spent years teaching me to understand.

A part of me already knows where this is headed. Maybe I have known from the moment I saw Elio Conti again.

Even if I take Davide’s offer tomorrow, even if he gives me passports, cash, a route out of the country, another name to wear like ill-fitting clothing, there is no guarantee it will be enough.

In fact, there might never be enough distance to put between my son and me and this world now.

Davide found me after years of silence, years of no contact and erasing every piece of Isabella Russo I could live without. If he found me, then Elio could find me.

If Elio found me, so could the others in his family, and any enemy who still remembers what my father’s bloodline is worth.

There is no disappearing back into life in the blue house no matter how badly my heart aches at the thought.

There is no returning to the woman who packed lunches for her son every morning, paid bills, kissed scraped knees, and pretended she had no history in the world of crime.

Marina Hayes is compromised.

There is no other truth to it.

My father would have said the same thing if he were sitting in Davide’s spot across from me instead.

He would have looked at me with those dark, knowing eyes and told me that the only way forward is through, no matter how much it hurts to put one foot in front of the other.

That is the part no one tells you about motherhood. They talk about the warmth of tiny hands reaching for you in the morning and the sweetness of first words.

The ache of watching them grow and finally letting them go once they are ready. They do not tell you there will be days when protecting your child means stepping straight back into the darkness you spent years escaping.

I look back at Davide. “If you can offer me protection for both my son and me, I will help you.”

For the first time since arriving, he smiles.

“Consider it done.”

19

ISABELLA

We work through the morning and into the afternoon.

At first, I tell myself I am only listening to absorb the details Davide lays out.

There is no sense in overstepping and taking control of a plan when I do not yet know where the mess lies, which men have betrayed him, and which parts of his territory have already changed hands.

I write everything down because my hands need something to do. If I stop moving them, I might reach for Matteo even though he is sitting only a few feet away, curled against the side of the couch with a tablet balanced in his lap.

One of Davide’s men brought it to him after breakfast, along with headphones and a soft blanket folded over his lap.

It comforts me just a little to see him being taken care of.

However, what doesn’t is that the longer Davide talks, the less I can pretend the old rhythm does not come back to me. By the time his second cup of coffee has gone cold beside him, I am no longer simply taking notes.

I am moving pieces across the board in my head. I am already seeing which men will fold under pressure and which will bend beneath money and who will smile while selling both sides to the same bidder.

The realization makes my stomach twist because it feels too natural to fall into these old habits.

For years I tried to convince myself that whatever my father taught me had died with Isabella Russo. Apparently, sometimes, those traits simply hibernate, patient as winter, until the world demands for them to rise again.

Davide leans back into the couch, his expression tight from fatigue and restrained fury. “The Contis are the ones who have been pushing their way into my territory. I am unsure when they began to view my syndicate as their enemy. But over the last two years, I have been doing everything I can to stop their advancement.”

Even though I knew it was coming, my hand tightens around the pen, hard enough that the plastic creaks softly between my fingers.

Vittorio Conti has always been dangerous. I knew that even when I was still a girl listening from the shadows of my father’s study.

He trusted few people fully, but there was a special kind of stillness that washed over him whenever Vittorio’s name came up in conversation. On the outside, they were allies working toward a common goal. But behind closed doors, my father always told a different story.

Vittorio, he once told me, is not the type to betray you to your face. He will do so with a smile on his face and an arm behind his back. When he reaches for you with that hand, it will not be for a handshake.

I was sixteen when he said that, old enough to understand what he was implying and also too young to understand the depth and gravity behind his words. I had been under the delusional impression that our family could never be on the receiving end of the Contis’ desire for infinite expansion.

Now I know firsthand how naive I had truly been back then.

“I doubt they see you as an enemy,” I say.

Davide’s brows draw together.

I force my grip on the pen to loosen before it snaps in my hand and betrays more than I want him to see. “I would wager they are viewing this as an expansion opportunity rather than punishing your syndicate for something.”

A complicated look passes over his face. Not surprise, exactly, more like something he did not want confirmed and now has no choice but to accept. I do not blame him for feeling troubled.

If there is one thing to worry about in a situation like this, it is unpredictability. If something had happened to give the Contis reason to incite violence against the Bianchis, then at least their actions would have merit.

Not moral merit, of course. A strategic one.

That kind of violence can be negotiated because it wants something specific, whether that be payment with money, blood, or an apology for whatever slight has been deemed worthy enough to burn bridges.

But expansion?

That is a hunger that does not negotiate with the hand it intends to bite.

Davide sits forward slowly, elbows resting on his knees. “You think this is ambition.”

“I think the Contis’ appetite has grown tired of what they currently have. They are looking for something new to devour.”

His mouth tightens while he watches me silently.

I continue. “If Vittorio wanted compensation for something, he would have demanded payment already. If he wanted revenge, he would’ve named his price. None of those things have happened, so that leads me to believe what he really wants is what he cannot have.”

“Every man has a number,” he says.

I shrug. “Not every man wants money, though. He wants your territory simply because he believes he can take it from you. There is no version of this where you both shake hands and agree to a ceasefire.”

Davide’s gaze hardens at that.

The door to the study bursts open without warning.

The sound cracks through the room like a gunshot, slamming against the walls and tearing straight through the fragile quiet that’s descended over the room.

Matteo flinches so hard beside me that his tablet nearly slips from his hands.

I turn and grab him, pulling him into my lap to shield him with my arms. His small hands clutch at my blouse, fingers twisting in the fabric as his head buries into my chest.

I feel his breath stutter against me, and something primal tears open inside me.

Davide pushes to his feet instantly.

All trace of the man who had been sitting across from me discussing strategy disappears.

The tiredness leaves his face. The faint softness he had allowed just moments before has vanished. What remains is a syndicate boss.

The three enforcers stop just inside the study, their bodies tense, one of them still breathing too hard from whatever sprint brought them here.

That alone sends a chill racing down my spine.

These enforcers have likely seen men beg, bleed, and die without their faces so much as twitching in response. Right now, they look shaken.

Davide’s gaze cuts across them. “What is it?”

One of them steps forward. He is younger than the others, though not young enough to be excused for the way his throat works before he speaks. “There’s been a situation at the front gates.”

My heart squeezes hard enough to hurt, eyes darting to Davide, looking for confirmation that I am not the only one feeling the shift in the air as if the entire room seems to suddenly brace itself for the impact of whatever information is about to be spilled.

I find his expression tightening further.

“What kind of situation?” he asks.

The first enforcer hesitates.

It lasts less than a second, but in that moment, my mind becomes a horribly efficient machine.

It churns out one horrific situation after another, all of them ending with Matteo and me being ripped away from the Bianchi estate as Davide bleeds out on the floor at someone else’s feet.

A second enforcer steps in to speak. “Elio Conti is here… He is asking to be let in.”

For a moment, I forget how to breathe.

My fingers dig tighter into Matteo’s back, not hard enough to hurt him but hard enough that I have to force myself to loosen my hold. My heart gives one violent thump, then another, each beat tightening the knot in my stomach.

Why the hell would he be here?

How did he find us?

How does he know we are with Davide?

Did someone follow us?

Did Davide have a leak in his ranks?

Did Elio trace the stolen car somehow? Did he have eyes on me? On the road from the beginning?

The questions come too quickly, each one worse than the last. I suddenly feel exposed, every choice I have made since leaving our old life laid bare beneath a spotlight I cannot escape.

I thought Davide’s estate meant walls and safety, a little time to breathe before the past found another way to come back.

Somehow, Elio has found us in under twenty-four hours.

Davide curses under his breath. “How many men did he arrive with?”

The first guard speaks this time. “He’s alone.”

For a moment, even Davide looks caught off balance. I have spent the entire day remembering how to read powerful men like him, and Davide’s surprise flashes like a knife in candlelight before he locks it back down.

Alone. That sounds absurd even with how intense this room has grown. Elio Conti does not walk into enemy territory alone unless he is either desperate, arrogant, or has something more lethal than his men protecting his back.

Davide’s eyes narrow. “Alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No vehicle behind him? No second car waiting down the road to watch him be let in?”

“Not that we’ve seen,” the enforcer says. “We checked the cameras and swept the outer feeds. It’s just him.”

Why?

That question bursts into my mind like a valve finally giving way under intense pressure.

Why would he do something so reckless?

Why put himself at Davide’s mercy when his father is already pushing into Bianchi territory, creating a hostile takeover?

Why come to the house of a man he has every reason to consider an enemy with no visible backup, no show of force, no protection except for his name?

Davide’s gaze flicks to me for a brief moment before returning to his enforcers. “Did he say why he came?”

This time, the second enforcer hesitates.

Davide’s voice drops to a growl. “Speak.”

“He said he is here for Isabella.”

What?

I have no idea how to grapple with that. I hate being studied right now. I hate the way everyone in the room seems to be waiting for me to provide a reason, an explanation, some neat little confession that will turn Elio’s arrival into something that makes sense.

I do not know why, and that chokes me more than certainty could have. If he had come to threaten me, I could meet that with force of my own.

Davide would have no problem providing me with the necessary tools to wage war against someone threatening the one person he has in his corner willing to help him try and dismantle the Conti regime.

If Elio had come as Vittorio’s mouthpiece offering to negotiate terms before things got to the point of no return, then that would be understandable.

I could find the agenda underneath the calculated move, revealing what the true motive is behind passive words.

But this… this is not at all what I could have possibly expected.

“Isabella, did you know he would come?” Davide asks me quietly.

I shake my head. “I had no idea he even knew where we were. I had no idea anyone knew. We lost any tail long before I came here.”

He absorbs that without flinching, though his eyes harden slightly.

A leak, then.

Or Elio is better at finding ghosts than any of us wanted to admit.

Neither option comforts me.

Davide gestures toward the enforcers. “Restrain him and wand him before letting him past the gates. Bring him down to the interrogation room once you can confirm he isn’t bugged.”

“Yes, sir,” they echo back at him.

20

ISABELLA

He is brought down and locked inside a starkly lit interrogation room in the basement of the safehouse.

The concrete walls are painted in a lifeless gray, a drain in the center of the floor with one light overhead. There are two chairs bolted to the floor, separated by a steel table with a metal loop in the center and a short chain attached to a set of handcuffs.

Elio is sat down in the chair, his arms extended in front of him as both of his wrists are trapped inside the cuffs.

The cuffs look wrong on him. That is my first thought, and I hate myself for it. Not because I pity him, I don’t, nor can I afford to in this kind of aggressive climate.

Pity for a man like that is a luxury I have no business entertaining, anyway. But still, the sight of Elio chained up does something strange to me.

Usually, he is the only one in the room with keys.

I stand behind a two-way mirror with my arms wrapped around myself so tightly, my fingers dig into my ribs.

The glass reflects me faintly over his body, a ghostly projection layered over a prisoner. My hair is still damp from the shower I barely remember taking before coming down here.

Davide’s head housekeeper gave me a soft black sweater and loose pants after my shower, both too fine for someone like me wearing them.

The reflection of my image in the glass makes me look cleaner than I feel. The dried blood is gone from my hands, but I can still feel it beneath my nails invisibly.

It has only been a few days since I last saw Elio, but it feels like a lifetime ago.

Seeing him here trapped with no way out of that room feels strange in a way I cannot fully name. I never thought I’d see the day when Elio Conti would be the one interrogated, not the other way around.

Part of me wants to be satisfied, wants to press my palm against the glass and laugh at the poetic irony of it.

Let him feel a fraction of what he made me feel and sit beneath someone else’s clemency with his choices reduced to whatever mercy the one in front of him decides to offer.

Davide enters the room and pulls the door shut behind him.

My eyes track him through the two-way mirror as he slowly makes his way to the other chair and lowers himself into it. He draws his hands together in front of him, lacing his fingers.

“While I am curious how you found this place, I suppose it doesn’t really matter at this point.”

Elio’s voice carries clearly through the small speakers on either side of the glass. “I need to speak to Isabella.”

Davide laughs coldly. “You think you’re in a position to make demands, Conti?”

“I’m not here to negotiate with you,” Elio replies.

His eyes move over Davide’s shoulder, locking on the mirror as if he can see straight through it to me.

A shiver races up my spine.

He can’t see me. The rational part of my mind knows that. He sees only himself, the table, Davide, and the harsh light above him. He cannot possibly know where I stand and yet his gaze finds mine with the same impossible accuracy it always has.

For a moment, the interrogation room disappears and I am back in his apartment with city lights burning behind us.

I am back in the Conti safehouse with his body too close and my hatred failing to protect me from reacting to his touch like it should.

“You aren’t in a position to be negotiating with anyone,” Davide says.

Elio’s attention shifts back to him. “Five minutes. That’s all I want. I’ll give you what you want after that.”

“What I want?” Davide asks.

“Reprieve from my family overtaking your territory. I’ll help you push them back.”

Davide goes still for a fraction of a second.

Enough for Elio to catch, judging by the faint tightening around his eyes as he stares at the man sitting in front of him. Davide is quiet for a while before slowly rising to his feet.

Elio watches him carefully, though I see the exhaustion beneath the mask keeping his expression locked tight now that I let myself look closer.

His eyes are bloodshot with a faint dark bruising beneath as if sleep has become something he no longer remembers how to do.

I hate myself for the little stab of tenderness that follows.

Davide crosses the room at the same time I move in the observation space, my body acting before I’m fully conscious of it. He opens the door and steps out into the hallway.

I meet him there, the door shutting behind him with a muted click. There are two Bianchi guards stationed near the stairs and one at the end of the corridor, all of them pretending not to watch too closely.

I feel a cold wave of anxiety washing over me.

“What do you think he wants?” Davide asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine he’d come all this way to ask me how I escaped or why. His motivations for doing this with no backup are anyone’s guess.”

Davide nods slowly, his features tugging into a thoughtful look. “Yes. I’m a bit baffled too.”

I look back toward the interrogation room door.

I hate how affected by him I still am. I want him gone, yet at the same time, I want answers from him.

I want to stop feeling this gravitational pull from him across every room we’re separated between. At this point, it’s become some kind of sickness with no cure.

Davide lowers his voice. “Isabella, you do not owe him five minutes.”

I sigh and look back at him. “I know.”

I know the danger. I feel it radiating off Elio even from behind the locked door. But something deeper whispers that I need to hear what he has to say.

The same part of me that once trusted him more than anyone still lives inside me, however broken it is now.

Davide finally relents with obvious reluctance. “Five minutes. If he tries anything, I put a bullet in his head.”

I nod in agreement.

The moment I step into the interrogation room and the door closes behind me, the air shifts.

Elio’s dark eyes lock onto me immediately. He leans forward as much as the bindings keeping him in that chair allow, dark gaze burning into me.

I slowly sit down in the chair Davide had been occupying only moments ago. The leather is still faintly warm beneath me. My hands lace together in front of me on the table, fingers interlocking so tightly, my knuckles threaten to pale.

Underneath the table, my knees press together, my spine straight, my chin lifted. My face is composed the way my father trained into me.

On the outside, I am sure I look every bit the polished strategist Amos Russo molded me into. The last member of a dead empire and the only remaining Russo still connected to my father’s blood.

It’s all a mask to ensure no one sees what’s really hiding underneath. My heart is pounding so violently, I can feel each beat against my sternum. The sound of it fills my ears, drowning out the quiet hum of the light above us and the murmur of movement beyond the door.

Elio and I being at odds is nothing new. Perhaps it has been inevitable from the beginning. A Russo and a Conti were never meant to sit on the same side of anything.

Our families have made entire legacies out of smiling across tables while sharpening blades aimed at each other beneath them. Finding ourselves on opposite sides of the same table should not shock me, and yet for some reason, this does.

Because tonight, the balance is wrong.

The wolf is caged and I am the one holding the key.

That is the last thing I expected when I fled from the safehouse. I never imagined Elio would walk himself into a rival’s house and for all the power to be arranged, at least for this brief moment, on my side of the table.

Elio’s lips part.

Before he can speak, I cut him off. “My uncle. Is he…?”

I cannot finish the sentence. I hate that after everything, there is still some small, stupid piece of me that cannot force the word alive out of my mouth.

Surprise flickers across his face. He does not insult me by denying my uncle was there, nor does not pretend not to know what I am asking.

He only exhales softly, then he shakes his head.

My heart sinks so fast, it feels like falling through ice.

I already knew. Of course I did.

The moment I heard that gunshot, some part of me understood without question that the man who had put so much on the line for me to help me disappear was no longer in this world. I felt it in my bones before now, even if I refused to accept it.

I just… thought perhaps there was a chance I could be wrong.

That maybe what I heard had been something else—a warning shot, a miss. I thought maybe, just maybe, the world might allow me to misremember one terrible thing. Unfortunately, the world has never been that kind to me.

I lower my gaze to my hands before Elio can see too much, but I already know he does. He has always been able to see everything. That has always been one of the more dangerous things about him.

My fingers tighten together in front of me. The pressure hurts but I welcome it. Pain gives me something to hold onto that is not grief.

My uncle.

My father’s only sibling.

A man who had once carried me on his shoulders through my family’s gardens while my mother scolded him for letting me get mud on my clean clothes.

A man who smelled of cigars and citrus soap no matter what he wore and who used to slip me candied almonds from his pocket before dinner. A man who was too loyal to survive the collapse of a family like ours and died because of it.

For a moment, I cannot breathe through the anger. Out of the corner of my eye, Elio watches me gather myself. He does not reach for me, thankfully, or offer some placated apology.

He knows better than that. If he tried to comfort me, I think I might hate him enough to forget there are guards outside to stop me from hitting him until he was unrecognizable.

When I finally lift my eyes again, the burn behind them has not vanished, but I have forced it down and replaced it with something colder. “Why are you here?”

Elio’s mouth pulls down into a faint frown. “I traveled back to Italy a few days ago.”

My brows furrow.

I have spent years avoiding even thinking about that place too deeply, as if the country itself could send its ghosts to collect me even from hundreds of miles of ocean separating us. Sometimes, the nostalgia for that time in my life hits me in waves, pieces of my life before all of it crumbled flashing through my mind without warning.

My family’s estate glowing gold in the afternoon, the cypress trees outside. My mother’s perfume hovering faintly in every hallway, the sound of the sea in the distance. Home before it became a crime scene.

Elio continues. “Your uncle told me about a ledger your father had been writing in at the time of his death. I wanted to go back to your family’s estate to see it for myself.”

I blink.

For a second, surprise cuts through every other emotion.

It is not the first time I have heard of it, nor have I been unaware of my father’s habits. Amos Russo recorded everything. He believed memory was only as useful as the records it derived from.

Every deal and promise ever made with a handshake, every lie disguised as respect was written and recorded in neat, disciplined script and stored like weapons.

As a child, I thought the ledgers were boring. Thick books with leather covers, locked away in cabinets I was not supposed to open.

I used to watch my father write in them late at night, his cigar burning low in the ashtray, his face half-lit by the lamp on his desk.

Sometimes, he would notice me standing in the doorway and sigh as if I were a nuisance, but he never sent me away.

Come here, Stellina. If you insist on haunting doorways, at least learn something useful, is what he would always say to me.

I would sit beside him, my legs dangling above the floor, while he explained things no girl my age should have understood.

I should have thought of those ledgers after his death. I should have searched his study and taken whatever pieces of him I could. But back then, I was not thinking like my father’s daughter.

I was nineteen and hollowed out by shock. I was grieving, terrified and unknowingly pregnant, betrayed by the man I loved so thoroughly that my own life felt unsafe in the only country I knew.

Before I left Italy for the States, I did not think about going through my father’s belongings and finding evidence of some hidden truth.

I thought only of survival, and then, once Matteo began growing inside me, I thought only of him.

My voice comes quietly. “What was in it?”

Elio inhales slowly. “Amos wrote about everything leading up to his assassination. Alessio…” He stops, eyes falling again. The complicated look that tightens his expression is almost painful to witness. Love, loyalty, disgust, grief, all of it braided together into something harsh and ugly. “My brother approached him months before, offered your father a private deal to consolidate Russo territory with ours.”

My entire body goes cold at the words.

“When your father refused,” Elio continues, voice lower now, a little rougher, “Alessio threatened to kill him.”

My eyes widen. “What?”

Elio’s expression does not change much, but something in his eyes flinches. “I’m sure… you can connect the dots from there.”

My stomach twists.

I remember those late nights with my father leading up to his death, him teaching me how to read people, to see the moves three steps ahead, drilling it into me over and over until it felt almost desperate. I remember the night of the gala when he was parading me around to the others in attendance under the guise of presenting me to find a husband. All the while, he had been whispering tests in my ear to see if I could read the room around us in the way he’d taught me.

At the time, I had been annoyed and thought he was preparing me for marriage in the only way someone like him knew how.

As if a husband were another rival to negotiate with, another threat to assess across a table. Maybe in a way, he was.

But now I see something else.

Desperation.

He must have known he was walking into a trap. That at some point, he would no longer be around to protect me.

That night, he had not been showing me off. He had been testing whether I could survive without him or not.

Elio continues, his voice growing a little more gravelly. “The final entry was dated the night he died. Alessio called and gave him one last chance to choose sides. Your father chose you and your family, and Alessio had him killed for it.”

I stare at him for a long time. “Why?”

Elio is quiet for a while. When he lifts his eyes, they look sad. “For a monopoly of power. He has spent the last eight years convincing all of us that it was someone else’s doing. He wanted to take what your father would never have willingly given him.”

For eight years I have carried my father’s death as a wound of abandonment even though I know that is unfair. Grief is rarely reasonable. It makes children out of all of us. Some deeply traumatized part of me has always been angry with him for dying. That he left me with enemies, questions, with a legacy that could never decide whether it wanted to crown me or bury me.

But now another truth pushes through. He tried. He tried to prepare me, and I had no idea I was being loved in the language of war.

I swallow hard, forcing my voice steady. “And you expect me to believe you discovered all of this and suddenly had a change of heart?”

Elio’s jaw tightens, shame flickering across his face for the briefest moment. “I was blind, Isabella. I chose the syndicate over you because I believed it was the only way to protect you from the chaos. I convinced myself that distance would keep you safe. I was wrong. Everything I sacrificed was built on lies.”

A bitter laugh presses at my throat, but it dies before reaching my mouth.

He shifts in the chair. The cuffs bite at his wrists but he doesn’t seem to care. His eyes are still focused entirely on me. “I can’t ignore the truth anymore. I won’t watch Alessio come for you or Matteo again. I came here alone because I am offering myself to you, and to Davide, as leverage. Use me however you want, just… let me stay here so I can help end this war before it swallows what’s left of both our lives.”

For a moment, I can only stare at him.

This is not the controlled underboss who walked away without a goodbye eight years ago or the man who’s kept me at arm’s length since ripping me away from my new life.

This is the man who once held me in that room inside the safehouse and kissed me like he meant it, like every brutal thing in him had gone quiet for one impossible moment because I had given him a reason to believe there might be more to life than duty and obedience.

This is the man who once whispered about nurseries and rings, about a future without our families’ names written in blood on opposite sides of the same grave.

Nearly a decade ago, he said those things to me with his hands in my hair and his forehead pressed to mine. He spoke so softly, I could almost pretend the world outside that room did not exist. All that mattered was the foolish, golden possibility of us.

I push up from the chair and slowly move around to the other side of the table.

His eyes track my movement, his hands still visible, posture tense but accepting, as if he has already decided that whatever I intend to do to him, he has earned it.

I move slowly around the table, each step feeling like a mistake I am choosing with full knowledge of the damage it will inevitably cause. His gaze never leaves me.

Not once.

It follows me with a kind of aching caution that makes my throat tighten.

When I stop in front of him, I can see the bruises more clearly. Faint traces of his fight with Alessio. Evidence that blood has already turned against blood, that the Conti family is no longer the disciplined machine they want the world to fear.

I lift my hand and Elio goes utterly still. For half a second, I think I might slap him. I imagine it vividly, the crack of my palm against his face.

The satisfaction of watching his head turn from the force of everything I never got to say. Eight years of grief and silence, of raising his son while he remained a ghost with a living pulse.

I should slap him.

Part of me desperately wants to.

Instead, my fingers touch his jaw lightly.

The shock of it moves through both of us.

His breath catches as I cup his face gently, my thumb brushing just beneath the line of bruising. His skin is warmer than I’m expecting. For years, Elio has existed inside me as memory, a figure preserved in the cold amber of betrayal.

Touching him now is a brutal reminder that he is real. That the man who ruined me beyond repair is sitting beneath my hand, tired and aching and looking at me like I am the last thing left standing in a city burned flat to the ground.

“Why should I trust you?” My voice comes out softer than I expect. “You disappeared from my life the night I needed you most. What makes this time any different?”

His eyes close just for a second. The words hit him harder than any slap could have. I see it in the way his expression tightens, in the way his throat works as if he has suddenly swallowed glass.

Alessio bruised his face, but I have found the tender spot beneath the bone. When he opens his eyes again, they are softer than I am expecting.

That terrifies me. Cruelty would be easier. Arrogance would give me something to hate without complication.

If he sneered, lied, if he wrapped himself in that familiar Conti pride and demanded my deferment, I could reconcile with that.

But this?

This quiet remorse of a broken man pressing his face almost imperceptibly into my palm like he has been starving for this tenderness he has no right to ask for?

This is far more dangerous.

“I know I’ve hurt you…” Elio closes his eyes again, and this time, he does not hide from what he wants. He nuzzles against my palm with such quiet, devastating surrender that my heart fractures straight down the middle. “I am sorry, Isabella. For everything. I truly am. You have every reason to hate me.”

For one unbearable second, we are not enemies. We are not a Russo and a Conti fighting on opposite sides of the table. We are not the abandoned woman and the man who left. We are only two people standing in the wreckage of what we might have been if our families had not gotten in the way before we found happiness.

“You don’t have to forgive me.” His eyes open. The eyes still know how to undo me. The grief in them is ugly and human, wretched enough to feel real. “But please… let me help you end this.”

My heart pounds so hard, I feel sick with it.

I want to believe him. That is the worst part. After everything… some ruined little piece of me still wants to let his apology mean something.

I rip my hand away before I can forgive him and take every word of vitriol I’ve hurled his way back. I turn away from him quickly, pressing one hand to my mouth as my fingers tremble against my lips.

I will not cry in front of him. I will not let him see that the apology has touched a raw part inside my chest. I will not give him the satisfaction of knowing there is still a part of me stupid enough to ache for him.

I head for the door without another word. My hands are slick with sweat when I reach for the handle. For one horrible second, I fumble with it like a frightened girl instead of the strategist I am trying so desperately to be.

The metal slips beneath my fingers, forcing me to tighten my grip and pull it open.

Cooler air spills in from the hallway.

Davide is already waiting outside. He stands a few feet away with two guards posted behind him, his expression unreadable but his eyes sharp. He does not ask what happened. He simply waits while I step through and pull the door shut behind me.

The soft click of it closing feels far too final.

I sag back against it, giving myself just this one moment of weakness before I gather myself. I drag in one breath, then another, each one ragged enough to scrape my throat. When I finally speak, my voice sounds steadier than I feel.

“I think he’ll be useful.”

Davide’s face does not change, but his expression tightens.

I force myself upright, peeling my body from the door as if I can peel away the moment that just happened too from my soul.

“As long as we keep him isolated, we can use him against his family.”

Davide’s expression grows grim. “You’re playing a dangerous game.”

A humorless laugh almost escapes me. As if danger has not already moved into my life, eaten from my table, slept under my roof, and learned my son’s name.

“I know.” I turn to face him fully. “Having the Conti underboss under our roof is the best insurance we have right now. He knows their structure and their weaknesses. He knows how his father and brother think, who they trust, who they own. If we can use this opportunity to our advantage, we can crush the Contis before they make another move against you.”

The strategist within me rises to the surface once more, dragged out of deep water and forced to breathe in fresh oxygen. My heart is still a mess inside my chest and my palm still tingles from the feel of Elio’s face resting in it, but none of that matters now.

“We can use that to our advantage as long as he’s kept secured,” I continue. “No phones. No unsupervised conversations. If he is truly here to help, he will tolerate it. If he isn’t, we find out quickly if this is some kind of distraction and will deal with him accordingly.”

Davide studies me for a long moment, then he nods slowly. “Understood.” He turns slightly toward one of the guards. “Elio Conti is to remain under watch twenty-four, seven. No communication devices. No personal effects until cleared. He is not to leave whatever room we assign him without four men present. If he asks for Isabella, the request comes to me first.”

I cut in. “To me.”

Davide looks back at me.

“If he asks for me, I’ll decide whether he gets an answer,” I say.

He nods after another brief moment. “To Isabella first.”

The guard dips his head. “Yes, sir.”

“Search his car again,” Davide adds. “Bring me the ledger. If there is anything else in that vehicle, I want it on my desk.”

After the guards leave, the hallway settles into a quiet so tense, I can hear my own pulse pounding in my ears again.

Davide turns back to me. “You trust the ledger?”

“I trust my father,” I say.

“And Elio?”

My throat tightens at the question.

Do I trust him?

No.

Do I believe he came here with a truth that might help us?

Yes.

Do I believe he wants Alessio stopped?

Perhaps.

Do I believe he is actually remorseful?

I do not have an answer for that. Not even deep inside my own head. Whatever Elio’s true motivations are for doing all of this is anyone’s guess, most of all, mine. Until I can figure out if he’s indeed being as truthful as he says he is, I have to treat him accordingly.

Eventually, I shrug. “I trust that he hates his brother right now. That kind of hatred can be useful.”

“I believe your father would have made the same assessment.”

I blow out a slow breath and start walking past him.

Davide falls into step beside me for a few paces, though he does not crowd me. “Where are you going?”

“To check on Matteo.”

He does not try to stop me.

The hallway stretches ahead, quiet and dimly lit. As I walk back upstairs, my mind is already spinning.

If Elio is telling the truth, then Alessio’s entire legitimacy may be able to be dismantled. If that ledger proves what my father suspected of him, then perhaps the Conti family will crumble, after all. But only time will truly tell.

I just pray I haven’t invited a wolf into the house only to watch it tear us apart from the inside out.

21

ISABELLA

Three days have passed since Elio walked through the gates of Davide’s safehouse with his hands raised in surrender. He is kept under constant guard in a secure guest wing with two armed men rotating shifts outside his door and cameras monitoring the hallway leading to his room.

Davide insisted on restraints at first. For the first twenty-four hours, Elio was allowed out of his room only with his wrists cuffed in front of him and two guns following every step, which he bore without complaint.

I overruled it after the first day. As suspicious as we all find it, he is here by choice. Binding him like an animal only feeds the tension already crackling between all of us.

Though I do avoid him as much as possible, throwing myself into planning sessions with whatever information Davide is able to extract about the Contis’ movement.

Every answer Elio gives us adds another line to the map spread across Davide’s war room table, helping me to create the structures for the trap that will inevitably be set for Alessio when the time comes.

Matteo stays close to me most of the time. At first, he is barely out of arm’s reach, following me from the bedroom to bathroom to the sitting room without question. He sits under the war room table while Davide and I speak in careful phrases, drawing foxes and soccer balls on paper the staff bring him.

But every so often, I find him near the east hallway, standing at the far end of it while staring. Matteo never tries to sneak past the guards.

He never asks them to open the door.

He only stands there in that too-quiet way of his, staring toward the place where Elio is kept as if the hallway itself might eventually tell him what the adults around him refuse to say.

I don’t know how I’m going to tell him the truth. How do I explain that the man down that hallway is not only an underboss for a family trying to actively hunt us down, and whose family broke our lives apart before Matteo was ever born, but he’s also his father?

The darkness in his hair, the angle of his stubborn little chin, the way his silence can fill a room before his voice ever does, all came from a man I loved long before I ever thought it could break me.

Soon, those facts will undeniably link Matteo to his father. It’s only a matter of time before someone figures it out.

I am terrified that the moment I say it out loud, something irreversible will happen.

That Elio will stop being simply a man under guard and become something much more dangerous.

It’s not just Matteo’s pull toward him that scares me, though, even if that alone unsettles me enough.

It’s mine too.

Every accidental glance reignites an old fire. Eight years of abandonment should have smothered it. His betrayal should have buried it.

The sight of Matteo trembling in that Conti safehouse should have turned every remaining ember into nothing but ash. But with only one look, one breath whispered in my direction, one brush of proximity, and suddenly, the whole world inside me is burning again.

Tonight, after Matteo is finally asleep under the watchful eye of a trusted guard, I slip outside.

The terrace sits off the second floor, half hidden behind tall glass doors and heavy curtains the color of old wine. Davide’s house is full of such places, beautiful little exits that overlook the narrow gardens in the back.

The night air is cool, carrying the distant scents of pine and damp earth. It slides over my skin and settles me in a way I haven’t felt for weeks.

Below, the fortified grounds stretch beneath the moonlight. Floodlights are positioned discreetly among the trees, men patrolling in slow, watchful routes, their dark silhouettes cutting across the silvered grass.

Beyond them, the world is nothing but forest.

I lean against the stone railing, fingers curling over the cold edge. I don’t hear him approach until he is already behind me.

“Couldn’t sleep either?”

I stiffen but don’t turn. “You shouldn’t be out here without an escort.”

“I told Bianchi’s guard I needed air. He knows better than to argue with me this late at night.” There’s a hint of dark humor in his tone, but it fades quickly. “Isabella.”

My name.

Always my damn name.

I close my eyes for one second, then I turn slowly. Elio stands a few feet away, dressed in a simple black shirt and pants provided by Davide.

Nothing about the clothes is remarkable, but on him the simplicity looks almost obscene.

The bruise along his jaw has faded to a dull shadow. Stubble darkens his cheek. His eyes look too alert, haunted as if sleep no longer comes to him.

For a moment, neither of us speaks. The terrace is too small with him on it.

The guards below are suddenly too far away, though I know one shout would bring half the house running.

The stone railing digs into my back as I unconsciously step away from him, but there is nowhere to go that does not look like I’m retreating out of fear.

He stops where he is, hands loose at his sides. “I didn’t mean to corner you.”

A bitter laugh leaves me. “That would be a first.”

“I deserve that,” he says quietly.

“You deserve a lot of things.”

“I know.”

When his face tightens, my heart clenches with a dull pain. I am tired of hurting him, which only infuriates me more. I want him to argue. I want the old, arrogant underboss who could turn anything into a command used to inflict pain.

That man is easier to hate. This one, the one standing beneath moonlight with tired eyes, is dangerous in an entirely different way than I’m used to.

I fold my arms across my chest protectively. “Why are you really out here?”

His gaze shifts briefly past me, toward the dark grounds below. “I… wanted to ask you something.”

The hesitation is what sets my nerves on fire. Elio Conti is not one to hesitate. Or at least, he never has, from what I’ve seen.

He has always commanded, demanded, decided even when he was wrong.

He has always worn certainty like a weapon polished to a shine. Now his voice catches on the edge of whatever he has come out here to say, and some traitorous part of me braces for the blow to come.

“What?”

His eyes close briefly. Pain flashes across his face as if he already knows the question will hurt both of us but still cannot stop himself from asking, anyway. “Is he mine?”

For one suspended second, there is no terrace or guards patrolling the grounds below us. No Davide or Alessio poised on opposite sides of the battlefield. There is only that one, singular question.

My throat tightens. “Don’t.”

Of course he finally asks when the house is quiet and there is no strategy left between us to hide behind. When Elio’s eyes open, they lock on mine with a devastation so naked, I almost look away.

“Tell me,” he murmurs, stepping closer to me. “I need to hear it from your mouth.”

The stone railing is cold against my back, my whole body going rigid when it digs into my spine. I hadn’t realized I retreated until there was nowhere left to go.

He stops when he notices, but the space between us has already narrowed until we’re barely a few inches apart.

“You need?” I echo. The bitterness in my voice surprises even me. “That is an interesting choice of words.”

His jaw flexes. “Please, Isabella.”

“If he is, what then?” I say, voice shaking despite how hard I fight it to remain steady.

Elio’s dark eyes lock on mine, fierce and unyielding. For one heartbeat, I see the possessive flash I’ve come to know so well. The old Conti instinct that claims whatever it touches.

It is there and gone so quickly, I almost convince myself I imagined it. But I know men like him. I know the way possession crawls through their bones before morality can put a hand over its mouth.

I know what his world does to children, especially sons.

“If you think I will let you use him as your family’s heir, you are mistaken. I will cut both our throats and let us bleed out on the floor before I ever let your family touch him,” I say.

A complicated expression crosses his face. He steps closer, slowly enough that I can stop him. When I don’t, his voice lowers to just above a whisper. “Every instinct I was raised with tells me that if he is mine, then he belongs with me. Under my protection. Under my name and behind walls no one can breach.”

I glare at him.

Elio’s expression flinches with disgust, but he does not look away from me. “That is the first thought that crosses through my mind. The one my father put in me before I was old enough to know better. But it isn’t the only one I have. It isn’t the one I am choosing.”

My fingers dig into my arms as I continue to stare at him.

His fingers lift, hovering near my cheek but not quite touching it. The hesitation tears through me more violently than if he simply reached for me. Once, long ago, Elio Conti would have touched me because he wanted to.

Because desire, like power, was something men in his world learned to take before anyone thought to deny them.

Now he waits, stops himself with barely an inch between his skin and mine, and that restraint is its own kind of brutality.

It gives me the choice to pull away if I want to.

“I am not asking you to forgive me, Isabella. I’m not even asking you to love me. I’m… I’m asking you to use me to protect our boy. Let me prove to you that I am not the man you think I am. Not anymore,” he says, his voice low, rough around the edges.

My eyes begin to burn. “You don’t know what you’re asking me to give you.”

I want to sound cold, have that Russo steel reflect on my tongue. I want to stand here as my father’s daughter and make him bleed because he deserves to feel the hurt more than I do, not have this ragged grief pouring out of me like a wound reopening without warning.

Except, right now, I am not only my father’s daughter. I am only the girl Elio left behind, the woman who carried his child with no hand at her back.

The mother who learned to protect at all cost because love had made me vulnerable in ways violence never could.

A shuddered breath leaves me. “I woke up alone, Elio… I found out my father was dead and you weren’t there. I found out I was carrying your child alone.” His face pinches with pain. I keep going because if I stop now, the words will crawl back into me and poison whatever is left of my soul. “I had already seen exactly what your love was worth when duty came calling. There was no point trying to tell you when I already knew what would happen.”

His throat works. What surprises me most is how he does not defend himself, nor does he try to tell me I don’t understand what it cost him to stay with his family when I left.

The pads of his fingers glide over my skin, catching the tears I am furious to realize have spilled over.

His touch is careful, reverent in a way that feels unfair after everything his hands have done to me. All that they failed to protect.

“I never should have let you go,” he whispers. “I was a coward. A fool. You deserved better, and I am sorry.”

I used to imagine those words in the early months when Matteo was no bigger than a small melon in my belly. I imagined Elio coming back, pretended he would be standing in a doorway when I woke up with his face drawn with regret, telling me he had made a mistake.

I imagined slapping him, kissing him, screaming at him until my voice gave out. In those fantasies, I could refuse him with dignity I never actually possessed outside of those dreams.

Then time passed and Matteo was born.

The fantasies died right alongside my love for him because survival had left very little room for ghosts that do not help or hold a fussy baby at three in the morning.

Now that Elio is here, touching my face and saying the words I thought were too late, I am finding that the girl who waited for them all this time is not dead, after all. She has only been buried under motherhood and rage, but she is still alive enough to weep at hearing them.

Trusting him could be the worst mistake of my life. However, this is no longer just about me anymore.

If it were, perhaps I could run forever. I could take the old hurt and wear it like armor as I always have and keep it from shattering my heart again and again. I could tell Elio Conti he is too late, that regret has no currency here and that love which fails at the first sign of struggle does not get to return for a second chance.

But Matteo exists between us.

My son with Elio’s dark hair and my eyes, who watches the east hallway with questions building with no answers to follow. My bright baby boy who deserves truth and also safety, and who may someday ask why I kept him from a father who wanted to try.

What answer will I give him then?

That I was afraid?

That I was right to be?

That both things can be true and still leave a child aching with hurt?

I don’t know anymore.

“I want to stop wanting you,” I whisper.

I look away first, furious with myself for admitting it, and stare past the terrace toward the patrolling guards below. One of them pauses near the far wall, turns, then continues his route with his rifle angled across his chest. The world below remains controlled. Inside me, nothing is.

“It is destroying me too,” Elio admits quietly.

The words pull my gaze back despite myself.

More tears spill down my cheeks before I can stop them. “He is yours, Elio. He has always been.”

For a long moment he doesn’t speak, remaining completely frozen in place while his eyes move between mine. His eyes close briefly as he pulls in a slow breath, and when they open again, they shine with a devastation that has nothing to do with anger.

His voice shakes, just slightly. “In the back of my mind, I had hoped… I think I knew before my mind allowed me to understand.”

Elio pulls me closer, wrapping me in his arms as if he can shield me from the eight years we lost. His body is warm around mine, solid and familiar in a way that makes pain flash inside my chest. My forehead presses against his chest before I can stop myself, and I hate the sob that tries to claw up my throat.

“I knew,” he whispers against my hair. “Christ, Isabella. I knew. But hearing you say it…”

I wrap my arms around him tightly.

He continues, his voice wrecked. “I never touched another woman after you left. No one could compare. No one ever came close. I thought distance would cure me of you, but it didn’t. It only turned wanting you into another form of punishment.”

I close my eyes against him. The words satisfy some wounded, jealous part of me even if it’s useless to feel that way. Fidelity after abandonment is not a gift that gives back the years we’ve lost. It does not place Elio beside me in the hospital room, or at birthdays and other major life events he’s missed since. It does not undo mornings when I looked at our son and wondered whether the man who made him would have loved him or not.

But it softens the hurt I’ve been holding onto all this time.

He cups my face again, drawing me back just enough to look at me.

His thumbs brush the tears from my cheeks with a gentleness so at odds with the violence I know he’s capable of that my breath catches in my throat.

“I’m so sorry for walking away and leaving you to raise our son alone, for every second you carried that fear by yourself. I will spend the rest of my life making it right if you let me.”

I pull back just enough to see there is war waging inside him—the parts of him still shackled to the family that raised him and the oaths he has been molded to honor, clashing with the selfish wants and desires he is choosing to cultivate with me.

It’s within that blood-soaked education that he has always been taught that love is weakness and seen firsthand what happens when empires discover it.

His hesitation lasts only a breath, but it is enough for me to see exactly where he still stands.

Elio has everything to lose now and yet he’s choosing this, anyway.

I don’t know who moves first.

Maybe both of us.

One moment, we are standing inches apart and the next, his mouth is on mine.

He kisses me like he has spent the last eight years starving for the taste of me, pushing every apology, regret, and unsaid prayer into this one point of contact.

His lips are fierce against mine, but his hands remain careful at my face, trembling slightly with the effort not to take more than I offer.

That restraint is what makes me lose whatever battle I thought I was still fighting within my own body.

I pull him closer, my hands fisting in his shirt, yanking him against me, dragging a low sound from his chest that vibrates through me.

His arms band around my waist and then he lifts me off my feet and turns us.

My back meets the stone wall of the terrace, the impact stealing a breath from my lungs. His body follows, caging mine, shielding me from the wind and the guards below.

“Elio,” I breathe against his mouth.

He shudders at the sound of his name on my tongue. His forehead presses to mine, both of us breathing too hard, our bodies locked together. His hand cups the side of my face, thumb trembling along my cheekbone.

“Tell me to stop,” he says roughly, barely controlled.

My eyes sting with fresh tears. I stare at him—at the man who has been both a weapon held to my throat and the only salve I’ve ever known for the wound he left behind.

The father of my son. The enemy standing close enough to become shelter… if I’m foolish enough to lean.

My fingers tighten in his shirt. “Don’t stop.”

Something feral flashes in his dark eyes.

He kisses me again, slower this time, though no less devastating. His lips move over mine with aching focus, tenderness threaded through the haze in a way that feels almost unbearable.

His hands slide down my sides, gripping my hips with possessive strength as he lifts me higher against the wall.

My legs wrap around his waist instinctively and I feel the hard, thick length of him pressing against my core through our clothes.

A broken moan escapes me and Elio swallows it greedily, grinding slowly against me as if he can’t help himself.

The friction sends sparks racing through my body, heat pooling low in my belly.

“God, Isabella,” he rasps against my lips when he moves to trail kisses down my neck. “I need to be inside you so fucking bad.”

Tears slip down my cheeks. I don’t know if they’re from pleasure, pain, or the terrifying hope blooming in my chest that this is what I’ve wanted for so long. All I know is that I can’t let go.

My hands shove at his shirt to push it up his body, desperate to feel the heat of him.

I keep my hands pressed to his chest, revealing the broad, scarred skin I once traced with reverent fingers.

His hand moves under my sweater, shoving the fabric up to my chest, the other tearing my leggings apart at the inner seams. Cool night air kisses my bare thighs before his palm slides between us, cupping me possessively over my lace panties.

“So wet already,” he groans.

Two thick fingers push the lace aside and slide through my folds, circling my clit before sinking deep inside me.

I cry out softly, head falling back against the stone as he curls them perfectly, stroking that spot that makes stars burst behind my eyelids.

His mouth latches onto my neck and sucks on the skin hard enough to leave a mark as he fucks me with his fingers.

I come hard and fast, clenching around his fingers with a broken cry that sounds like his name.

He doesn’t stop, drawing it out until I’m trembling and gasping against him. Then his fingers are gone. I pant as I hear the sound of his zipper, and my heart stutters with anticipation and raw need.

He frees himself, thick and heavy and leaking at the tip. In one brutal thrust, he buries himself all the way inside me.

“Fuck,” we both groan at the same time.

I feel every inch of him, filling me so completely there’s no room for anything else. For a moment we stay locked together, breathing each other in.

Then he starts to move.

Every powerful thrust rocks me against the stone wall, his hips snapping forward as he claims me with the pent-up hunger I know he’s been fighting since the night he took me just as brutally in that safehouse room.

His hand grips my hip hard enough to bruise, holding me upright for him while the other cups under my thigh. The wet sound of our bodies meeting fills the night air, mingling with my broken moans and his low, guttural growls.

“I love you,” he rasps against my ear. “I’ve always loved you, Isabella.”

I gasp, my nails digging into his shoulders as pleasure coils tighter and tighter. “Fuck, Elio… I… I love you too.”

He fucks me harder, grinding against my clit with every deep stroke until I shatter again, crying out as my walls pulse and flutter around his cock.

He follows me over the edge with a savage groan, burying himself as deep as possible and spilling inside me, pulse after pulse of heat that marks me from the inside out.

His arms wrap around me protectively, like he’s afraid I’ll push him away if he lets go. When he finally pulls back enough to look at me, his dark eyes are raw with emotion.

“Tell me again,” he murmurs, his voice hoarse.

I cup his face with both hands, heart pounding with both terror and relief. “I love you, Elio Conti.”

22

ELIO

Nearly a week has passed inside Davide Bianchi’s fortified estate. Every hour has felt like walking a razor’s edge between salvation and damnation.

I have given them everything I know, from codes to the safehouse and the routes taken for supply drop-offs to names of men who will always remain loyal to my brother and father.

Davide takes it all in, never fully trusting me, but he uses the information, anyway. Isabella stays close during the planning sessions, her brilliant mind dissecting every detail I offer, her honey-gold gaze flicking to me only when she thinks I won’t notice.

The tension between us is a living thing, thick and electric, made worse by the memory of her body pressed against the terrace wall and the confession that still burns on my tongue.

She loves me and Matteo is mine.

That knowledge does not come with pride as much as I would have expected it to. Instead, it comes with grief from seven years of missed mornings, scraped knees, school lunches, bedtime stories, birthdays, fevers.

Seven years of a boy growing into my face without knowing mine ever existed. Isabella spent years surviving alone because I gave her no reason to believe I would choose anything other than duty when it mattered.

It wouldn’t be fair of me to hate her for keeping him from me. She did not do so out of cruelty. I understand why she chose to run and hide him from the Conti name.

Matteo is never far from her side. My son watches me with quiet curiosity, asking careful questions that cut deeper than any interrogation I’ve ever faced before.

I answer what I can, trying to earn the trust I don’t deserve yet. Every small smile he gives me feels like both a gift and a punishment.

One that I readily accept without question.

However, tonight, that fragile balance breaks when my phone vibrates on the nightstand, waking me.

At first, I think it is part of a dream. Some distant buzzing beneath the surface of sleep, low and insistent like a fly trapped behind glass. My body resists it because for the first time in days, maybe years, I have managed to drift into something close to rest.

Isabella is warm against me, her back tucked to my chest, her hair spilling across my arm. For a few stolen hours, the war outside Davide’s walls has felt like a beast pacing somewhere beyond the property line instead of breathing down my neck.

Her hand rests over mine where it lies against her stomach. Even in sleep, she holds me there as if part of her body has forgotten all the reasons she should push me away.

The phone vibrates again.

Isabella stirs faintly, her fingers tightening over mine before relaxing. I go still, waiting to see if she wakes. Her breathing remains slow, her body curled into the mattress with exhaustion heavy in every line of her.

I should let it go to voicemail. I know that before I move. There are only so many people who still have this number, and none of them come with clean hands.

Over the past few days, I have earned enough of Davide’s trust to allow me use of my phone again, something I have been steadfast in not taking advantage of.

I know what trust costs in houses like this. I know how quickly it can become a collar around my neck if handled wrong.

I pull away from Isabella carefully. She makes a soft sound in her sleep, turning slightly toward the warmth I leave behind. The sight of it twists something deep inside me.

For years I dreamed of having her beside me again. I never imagined I would have to leave the bed like a thief because someone is calling me.

I roll to grab the phone. The number flashing across the screen freezes the blood in my veins.

My father.

I stare at his name until the letters stop looking correct. I could ignore it. I should ignore it.

Nothing good has ever come from answering when my father calls, least of all now when I’ve been MIA for several days after my flight returned from Italy.

My thumb slides across the screen almost unconsciously.

I press the phone briefly to my chest as I stand, letting the silence on the line listen to my heartbeat before I step away from the bed. The floor is cold beneath my bare feet.

I cross the room without turning on the light and slip out onto the private balcony overlooking Davide’s grounds.

“Elio.” My father’s voice cuts through the other end of the line, edged with command and, surprisingly, exhaustion.

Vittorio Conti is not a man who ever sounds tired. He drains the life from his enemies and delights in the satisfaction of watching those he deems weaker crumble.

Strangely, though, tonight, there is something worn beneath his anger, frayed enough to let me hear the age in him.

“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you. Isabella and the boy are gone. Alessio is tearing the city apart looking for them. I know your flight landed days ago. Come home immediately,” he demands.

I lean against the iron banister and stare out at the armed patrols. “No.”

A stunned silence follows. “What did you just say?”

My hand grips the banister until my knuckles go white.

Once, those words would have moved my body before my mind had time to object. Now they strike something that has long since grown cold.

“No.”

A stunned silence follows. It is almost satisfying. “What did you just say?”

“I said no.”

“Elio.”

He used to use my name like a hand around the back of my neck when I was a boy, shaking whatever defiance I had in me out of my system until all that was left was blind obedience.

One word used to carry that weight of ownership, silently telling me, You are my son, my blood, my weapon. You do not refuse me.

I close my eyes briefly.

All I see is Amos Russo’s handwriting.

Alessio Conti approached me privately.

Threatened to remove me as an obstacle.

Elio is blind to it.

My eyes open. “Did you know Alessio met with Amos Russo privately weeks before the assassination? That he offered a deal to merge territories and threatened to remove Amos if he refused?”

The line goes so quiet, I can hear my own breathing. Then my father growls, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m asking you a question.”

“And I am telling you to get home. Now.”

The old instinct kicks once inside me, a phantom chain tightening around my throat that has slowly begun to slip from it. I cut him off before it can pull any harder. “I saw Amos’s private journal and the dated entries from that time period. He recorded everything.”

His voice grows hard. “Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters very much if you have placed yourself in the path of a war you do not understand.”

A laugh almost leaves me.

A dead ally… even now, he’s trying to save face despite the ghosts of his past coming back to haunt him and point the finger of judgment in his direction.

Has he always seen me as a fool? Or have I just been so complacent all my life that he’s never had to convince me to believe him?

“He wasn’t your ally at the end, though,” I say. “Was he?”

“Elio.”

“Did you know,” I bite back, “or did you not?”

“You’re letting that Russo woman poison you again.”

As if the only explanation for my sudden disobedience is her influence and not the fact that what I found in Italy is proof our family’s deception runs far deeper than I ever expected.

It is insulting that he believes my conscience is too weak to wake without a woman whispering treason in my ear.

That I am somehow still the boy he molded, incapable of seeing the rot hidden underneath unless someone else has poisoned me into seeing it.

“Come home. We will fix this together as a family. That is an order,” he says.

Family.

The word turns my stomach now.

For most of my life, family meant both the altar and execution block I would lay myself at the mercy of. I worshiped it, bled for it, sacrificed everything I loved because that is what was asked of me over and over.

My father spoke of family as if it were a sacred thing meant to be preserved, but he built it like a prison none of us were ever allowed to escape from.

“Did you know?” I snap.

My father says nothing, long enough for the last stupid, loyal piece of me to hope.

Maybe he didn’t.

Maybe Alessio lied to him too.

Maybe my father profited from the death unknowingly without ordering it and only found out after the fact when it was far too late to do anything. Perhaps he believed looking too closely at the fact would put not only his syndicate in jeopardy, but his son’s life as well. Maybe he could not bear the consequences that would come from putting my brother on trial.

However, when he finally answers, it is what I have always known and refused to believe until now. “Amos was getting in the way. He needed to be eliminated.”

For a moment, I cannot move.

All I see is Amos Russo’s faded blood staining the marble steps and Giovano slumped in that chair, bleeding out from the wound in his chest while refusing to give us anything of value to use against the only person who helped the last remaining piece of Amos escape.

The phone remains against my ear.

My father continues, his voice colder now. “Do not make this into something sentimental. Amos was shifting toward Bianchi long before his death. He would have fractured our routes and exposed half our infrastructure in the process were I to allow it to continue. Alessio acted rashly, yes, but the outcome was necessary.”

My grip on the phone tightens until the casing creaks.

“You let me believe she was involved.”

“You needed distance from her,” he argues. “She was a distraction. She had too much influence over you at the worst possible time. Alessio may have been wrong in some details, but he was right about one thing. She has always weakened you.”

I look through the glass doors. Inside, through the darkness of the room, I can make out the shape of Isabella in bed, still curled on her side, one hand resting near the space I left behind while she sleeps.

She weakened you.

No, it has only ever been the opposite. She has been the only thing in my life that has made me question whether strength built on obedience is something I truly wanted or something I should have broken away from long ago when she asked me to run away together.

“You realize what you’ve done, then?” I ask. “What this means? I can’t stand by you. I won’t.”

“Then you are a traitor,” he replies.

I lower the phone without answering and end the call.

Guilt and exhaustion crash over me in waves. The family I was raised to die for, the brother I once looked up to, the father who tried to build me into the perfect, obedient weapon… all of it has been built on lies I can no longer ignore.

I turn to go back inside.

Isabella sits up when I approach the bed, her chestnut hair falling over one shoulder, honey-gold eyes watching me with that fierce intensity that has always stripped me bare even while she’s still half-asleep. She reaches for me without question, beckoning me back into bed.

I set my phone down on the nightstand and slip in beside her, pulling her close to bury my face in her hair. I breathe her scent in deeply, letting it wash over me and stifle the waves of grief.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

The question is quiet, but it carries the weight of everything we have lost over the near decade we’ve been apart. I look at her, at the woman I walked away from and have regretted doing so ever since, at the only person who has ever made me want to be more than the weapon forged by my father’s hand.

“I am with you.” I cup her face with both hands. “I give you my word. I choose you. From this moment forward, my loyalty belongs to the family we created together. No one else.”

She searches my eyes for any sign of hesitation. Finding none, she leans forward and presses her forehead to mine. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

For the first time since I walked away eight years ago, the weight on my chest feels lighter. I am no longer the underboss who sacrificed everything for the Conti name. I am the man who will burn it all down to protect what truly matters.

And I will never walk away from it again.

23

ELIO

Three days is all it takes for my family to come to the Bianchi stronghold.

I know before the first alarm finishes screaming that it is them. The sound cuts through the grounds with an ear-shattering screech, tearing everyone out of the tense, sleepless quiet Davide’s house has been holding onto for seventy-two hours.

Men start shouting in the hallway while boots thunder over polished floors. Radios crackle with commands half-drowned out by the chaos.

“North gate. Two vehicles—no, four. Movement near the eastern perimeter. Shots fired!”

The Bianchi stronghold sits on old land fortified over generations, but no house is perfect. Every syndicate has its flaws, every fortress has a seam.

The north gate is not the weakest point in the obvious sense, but the road leading from it bends through dense trees before opening into sight of the cameras.

It creates a blind pocket just long enough for a strike team to get close enough before the system fully catches them.

I know because I would have chosen to exploit it too.

The alarm screams again, then comes the first deep thud, though not from gunfire, from an explosion. The walls tremble from the shockwave hard enough to cause the monitors on the security desk to flicker.

Somewhere nearby, a window shatters, the sound loud as glass rains onto the marble floor. One of Davide’s men curses under his breath nearby while another tightens the grip on his rifle, eyes trained on the feeds in front of him.

I close my eyes for a brief second.

I know the way my family begins a breach. It’s never with chaos, not in a true sense.

That is what they want their enemies to see. Beneath it, there is order, cold and calculated.

They have brought charges, not enough to flatten the grounds entirely—not unless my father has lost his mind completely—but enough to cripple one section and force Davide’s men to redirect soldiers there.

When I open my eyes again, I look toward the security feeds. Next to me, Davide stands at the central console, one hand planted on the table while the other grips a radio so tightly, his knuckles have gone pale, though his face gives nothing away.

I see the tension beneath his stillness, the calculation working behind his eyes as his men move across the screens in tight formations as they shift toward the front of the estate. He is a good commander, better than most.

That might be the only reason this house is still standing.

Next to him, Isabella remains tight-lipped and focused on the tablet in front of her.

Her hair is pulled back from her face. A few strands of it have slipped loose around her temples.

Her mouth is set in a hard line. Her eyes move from the tablet to the monitors and back again, focused as a headset is pressed to one ear and a radio in her other hand. Her finger hovers over the button, ready to redirect forces where necessary.

In any other situation, the sight would fill my chest with pride.

She should not be here, standing in the heart of a besieged Mafia estate and commanding soldiers through a breach my family has brought to her doorstep once again.

She should not have to think three moves ahead while the walls tremble around her, doing everything she can to protect everyone behind these walls.

Especially our son.

My eyes flick toward the lower corner monitor, the one showing the basement corridor outside the panic room. Two of Bianchi’s men stand guard outside, rifles ready to light up anyone who dares to wander down there.

Another camera inside the outer vestibule shows nothing but reinforced steel and the faint glow of a keypad.

Matteo is behind that door.

Safe, for now.

Isabella had not hesitated. The moment the first warning shrieked through the house, she had taken him down there and locked him safely behind that door.

I cannot imagine the strength it took to watch that door close, knowing there was a strong possibility that could be the last time ever laying eyes on him again if things did not go according to plan.

Isabella’s voice breaks through the quiet. “Alessio spotted.”

My eyes snap to the tablet in front of her. I step closer before anyone can stop me.

One of Davide’s guards shifts, rifle rising a fraction in my direction, but Davide lifts two fingers without looking at him.

I barely notice.

Isabella angles the tablet slightly so we can see, but I am already looking over her shoulder.

The feed is grainy, washed in the cold green-gray of night vision.

He’s moving east toward the lower courtyard. Smoke drifts across the image in broken veils, blurring the lines of other soldiers moving between stone columns and clipped hedges.

As soon as I spot him, every part of me goes still. He wears a dark coat with the collar turned up against the night air. His gun is held low in one hand. Two men flank him from behind while another three move ahead.

I recognize them instantly—his personal guards, his preferred killers.

They are men he trusts because he has frightened them enough or dirtied them so thoroughly, they cannot run without sealing their own fates.

My hands curl into fists at my sides. For several seconds, I do not recognize the feeling moving through me.

It is not fear. That would be easier to name and push aside in favor of training and instinct to take over as the cold arithmetic of survival coaxes me forward. I know fear.

I was raised in a house where fear was fed to me until it either sharpened me into something useful or destroyed me until there was nothing left.

This is different.

This is rage with grief buried under it.

“I’ll go.”

The security room seems to contract around the statement as the words leave my mouth, both Isabella and Davide’s attention suddenly pulling toward my direction.

Isabella’s face changes first. It isn’t in a dramatic sense.

She would never give that much away in a room like this with lives on the line, but I see the shift because I have spent too many years haunted by her not to notice the smallest cracks in her expression.

Her mouth parts slightly in protest, her hand tightening around the tablet. The strategist in her is pushed aside temporarily while the woman who loves me is brought to the surface.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

I nod. “He is my responsibility.” My gaze moves back to the screen, to Alessio’s dark figure cutting through smoke. “I’ll end this the way I should have a long time ago.”

Before he murdered Amos Russo.

Before Isabella ran and Matteo was born into secrecy.

Before my father chose to build our family’s future on betrayal.

I should have seen it sooner.

Instead, I called it ambition rather than what it truly was, because by doing so, it would have forced me to choose a different path from the one laid out for me since birth.

Alessio’s cruelty was never hidden from me. In reality, it had been polished and justified, dressed in family loyalty and wrapped in the familiar language of necessity because that is how the Conti line has always functioned.

And now look where it has led us all.

“Your father…” Davide begins.

I shake my head before he can finish. “He won’t be here.”

I know Vittorio Conti well enough to answer that without hesitation. Even now after hearing him condemn himself and justify it all in the same breath, I understand him as well as I always have.

“If he’s sent Alessio, that means he is still at the safehouse. He would never leave our family without a head if one of us were to fall in battle,” I finish.

Especially not now. Not when I have turned against him and Alessio has risked himself by stepping onto Bianchi ground.

My father is too disciplined to put both heirs in the same line of fire along with himself.

He will stay where he can command and can preserve the myth of control, where he can make the next move, no matter which son comes home breathing.

That is who he is—a man who thinks mourning is best done after succession is secured.

Davide’s expression grows grim. “We will need to deal with him later, then.”

I nod, though I do not respond.

Later, if the estate still stands and Isabella survives. If Matteo remains sealed behind that panic room door, untouched by the hands of men who would turn his blood into leverage, and I am the one who comes back from facing my brother.

Whatever happens tonight will determine how my father responds in the aftermath. If I fall and Alessio survives, Vittorio will continue pushing until the Bianchi syndicate is swallowed completely. He will call me a traitor, convince himself I deserved the end I got in order to bury whatever grief my death leaves behind.

He will use my betrayal as proof that mercy creates weakness and that love can corrupt even his own son. It will give him enough ammunition that the family must become harder, crueler, and more unified beneath his hand.

But if Alessio falls first…

I do not know.

That uncertainty is almost worse. Alessio is his chosen heir, the son who has always stayed obedient. While unprompted, he had been the one willing to murder Amos Russo in order to expand the foundation of our empire.

That is the son my father has decided is worth protecting even at the cost of everything else.

If Alessio dies here, I do not know if my father will retreat, rage, or break completely.

Only time will tell.

I do not make it two steps before Isabella grabs my arm. Her fingers close around me with enough force to stop me dead in my tracks.

My lips part to speak—to tell her I know what I am doing, to offer some brittle assurance neither of us would believe—but she cuts me off before a single word can leave my mouth.

She hauls me down into a kiss.

In that moment, I forget the war and the monitors, the armed guards, the alarms, the sound of my family trying to tear the Bianchi stronghold apart from the outside in.

I forget the weapon waiting to be placed in my hand and the brother moving through smoke, the father commanding from a safehouse like God with dirt under his nails.

There is only Isabella.

Her mouth is fierce against mine, desperate and furious and shaking with everything she refuses to say in front of these men.

Her hand grips my arm while the other presses against my chest, right over the place where my heart is trying to break through to reach her warmth.

At first, I am too afraid that if I lift my hand and press it over hers, she will remember she hates me.

Then she makes a small sound against my mouth and it destroys whatever restraint I thought I still possessed.

I cup the back of her head and kiss her back. Her body presses close as my fingers slip through her hair.

I remember my apartment back in Italy, the way she looked at me when I whispered about a future I did not have the courage to protect filled with rings and nurseries, a house without soldiers at the gate.

A life away from the Contis and Russos.

Our life.

When she pulls back, it is not far. Her forehead rests against mine, her breath trembles against my mouth while her eyes jump between mine.

We stand there with our faces close enough to share air, surrounded by men who wisely pretend not to comment as the world fractures between us.

Then she whispers, “Be safe. And come back to us.”

My heart squeezes so violently, I almost cannot breathe.

Us.

To her and Matteo.

For the first time in eight years, Isabella gives me something that is worth destroying the family that made me in order to come back to the one she is offering up for me to claim.

“I will,” I say.

That is a promise I intend to keep.

She turns to Davide, her voice steady again. “Give him a weapon.”

Davide studies her for one long beat, then he nods. Every eye in the room follows him as he moves to a weapons locker built into the wall. I feel the tension rise as metal clicks and a drawer slides open. He removes a pistol and checks it with practiced hands.

He crosses to me, then carefully settles it into my hand.

“Good luck.”

24

ELIO

I move through the grounds like the weapon I was trained to be, cutting down three enforcers trying to breach the inner perimeter.

Through the smoke and gunfire, I finally see Alessio moving through the ruined outer hall.

His confidence radiates like armor, but beneath it thrums a manic edge born from desperation. He has come to end this personally, to remove the last obstacle standing between him and uncontested power.

Me.

Our eyes lock across the wreckage.

A chandelier hangs above us at an angle, several of its crystal strands shattered and scattered across the floor like frozen rain droplets. Smoke curls along the ceiling, turning the old portraits on the walls into blurred, judgmental ghosts.

Somewhere behind me, deeper inside the estate, another alarm wails.

Gunfire cracks in the distance, muffled now by stone and doors and the thickening pulse inside my own skull.

But here, for one breath, the war narrows.

Not to Conti and Bianchi forces.

To brothers.

Alessio’s smile is thin and vicious. His voice carries easily, echoing slightly off the blood spattered walls around us. “So, this is what it’s come to.”

A thin streak of blood marks one side of his temple, though I do not know if it is his or someone else’s.

Knowing Alessio, it is likely both. His gun hangs loose in his hand, the barrel dipped toward the floor as if this stand-off is so natural to him, he no longer needs a weapon.

I step forward, my hand tightening around the gun. The metal is warm now, fitted to my palm like an old companion that still remembers the shape of me. “This is the path you have chosen. If you didn’t orchestrate Amos Russo’s death, perhaps neither of us would be standing here now.”

Alessio does not flinch in the way I’m expecting him to. That is the part that guts me. There is no flash of surprise or panic to deny his involvement. His expression only hardens, his smile fading and leaving something colder beneath it.

I have seen him this way before only once, and never toward me. It is the face he wore when Giovano spat in his face, refusing to give him anything even if it was to save his own skin.

Now I see it for what it truly is. Not strength, but empty pride wearing a false crown.

“I see what Father was talking about,” Alessio says. “He mentioned you went to Italy to find Amos’s ledger.”

My heart gives one hard, bitter thud.

So Father told him.

That shouldn’t surprise me. In a way, it doesn’t. Whatever delusion I had left of being his son before his pawn dies instantly.

There is no coming back from this, even if a small part of me hoped we could lay down our weapons and figure things out a different way. Family has always meant hierarchy and in the eyes of my father and brother, I am no longer a part of it.

Alessio lifts both hands, his gun waving loosely in the air with the motion, a grotesque parody of surrender.

His smile returns, tighter now. “You of all people should understand simple economics, Elio. Profit over sentiment.”

The words settle between us with a cold finality.

Profit over sentiment, as if Amos was a bad investment our family wasted time cultivating.

Alessio continues. “The Russos were never true allies. They were competition wearing a friendly face. Amos was too stubborn and Old-World to understand where the city was going. He never wanted to change.” His eyes gleam through the smoke at me. “I did what needed to be done for our family to survive.”

There is no remorse in his eyes, only pride for toppling a decades-long alliance for personal gain and murdering a man who once sat at our table, shook our hands, and trusted the promise of old agreements enough not to see the knife coming for him.

My grip tightens around the gun until my knuckles ache. “You’ve destroyed everything, Alessio.”

His mouth curves. “I removed an obstacle.”

“You killed a patriarch and destroyed an entire family.”

Alessio laughs softly. “Look at you… Still panting after her after all these years. I wondered if that was the weakness Father heard in your voice when you left for Italy.”

“Do not speak about her.”

His smile widens. “I have to admit, it surprised me to find she’d survived after all this time. I thought poverty would have swallowed her long before now. A privileged little dove like her could barely function in the real world.”

My gun rises just enough to train right at his chest

His eyes glitter in amusement. “Then again, she was always clever, wasn’t she? Amos made sure of that. Dragged her around places she had no business in, teaching her how to read situations she had no business sticking her nose into. I used to think it was her father showing off his pretty little heir.” He tilts his head. “Now I wonder if he knew…”

“If he knew what?” I ask, my hand flexing around the grip.

“That someone would have to inherit his sad little syndicate once he was gone. Too bad she ran off before that could happen.” Then he adds, almost as an afterthought, “With your baby.”

I flinch at that.

We were raised under the same hand, the same cold father. We learned from the same empire what it meant to be a Conti, knelt before the same expectations until they were carved into our bones.

We were taught that love is a liability, mercy a disease, softness a door enemies will kick in regardless of their previous loyalties, and yet somewhere, somehow, we came to vastly different ends.

I wish I knew where it happened. Where my sentiments and his began to drift in opposing directions.

Was it Isabella?

Was it before her?

Was there always something in Alessio that saw opportunity while I, even at my worst, still saw the body, the person, the truth beneath it? Or is that a lie I am telling myself now because I need to believe I was never as close to becoming him as I fear?

Alessio studies me, amusement rapidly thinning into impatience. “Is this your final answer, Elio? Choosing their side over ours?”

My finger hovers over the trigger. “Yes.”

He darts to the left before the bullet from my gun can even leave the chamber and crashes into me. We topple to the floor in a heap, moving with identical practice even if we are driven by opposite purposes.

Every strike carries history, and whatever resentment buried since childhood has now finally festered to the surface.

The pressure of expectation, our father’s quiet favoritism, the decades I spent chasing Alessio’s approval even as it poisoned me, it spills into each blow I land on my brother. He counters with his own that make stars burst behind my eyes.

We are evenly matched, but his movements quickly grow erratic, fueled by whatever desperation led him to step onto the battlefield in the first place.

Mine become direct, heightened by the need to protect what is mine and the promise I made to Isabella right before I left.

I pin him down on the floor and sit on him, my fists raining down blow after blow.

He laughs through bloodied teeth, manic even now. “You were always a disappointment in his eyes. I hope you know that.”

Rage surges through me then and I grab him by the throat and slam him back down to the ground. My knee pins his chest as blood coats my knuckles.

When his face is ruined and he is left gasping for air, it is only then that I climb off him and retrieve my fallen gun.

I feel no triumph, only devastation, as my finger finds the trigger once again and aims it right at his chest. “Goodbye, Alessio.”

He draws in one more ragged breath before saying, “Fuck you, Elio… Rot in hell.”

The bullet exiting the chamber is deafening and with it, I sever the last tie that once bound me to the Conti legacy.

I stand over his fallen body with my chest heaving, knuckles split and bleeding as his blood pools on the stone beneath him.

For a long moment, I cannot move.

I stare down at the man who shaped so much of my life and feel my eyes burn.

The brother I once admired, the man whose approval I chased even as it hollowed me out, is gone.

Eight years ago, he talked me into walking away from the woman I loved because I believed him when he told me sacrifice was required of me, that loyalty demanded the destruction of everything that softened me and strength meant surrendering what made me human.

To him, duty meant choosing power over any kind of happiness.

But standing over Alessio now, I finally see the true cost of that belief.

My brother built his life by tearing apart alliances and murdering those who stood in his way.

He sacrificed bonds, trust, family, love, all because he believed it could make him vulnerable. In doing so, he fractured the very empire he claimed to want to preserve.

I realize with an ache so deep it nearly brings me to my knees that I had once been on the same path.

If I had stayed under Alessio’s shadow and continued to let the Conti name dictate the limits of my heart, I might have become exactly like him, convinced that power justified breaking everything else.

But Isabella changed me.

She forced me to see that true strength is not measured by what a man can destroy, but by what he refuses to lose.

And now with Alessio gone, I understand something I couldn’t grasp eight years ago.

Legacy is not built on sacrifice. It is built on the love I once tried to abandon and the family I nearly lost because of it.

I will not make that same mistake again.

I reach down and close my brother’s eyes with blood-stained fingers. “Be free, Brother.”

I rise slowly and leave to find the woman who made me whole.

For the first time in my life, I know exactly what victory looks like.

It is Isabella’s hand in mine, Matteo safe between us, and a future we will build together from the ashes of everything we almost lost.

25

ISABELLA

I stand beside Elio in the grand war room that once belonged to my father, my hand resting lightly on the heavy oak table in the center of it.

The wood is darker than I remember.

Perhaps age has deepened the shade or grief has changed the way I see everything now.

The last time I stood in this room, I was a girl with my father’s voice at my shoulder and his cigar smoke curling lazily toward the coffered ceiling while men twice my age pretended not to notice how carefully I listened.

Now this room belongs to my and my family’s future.

The Conti empire collapsed weeks after it stormed the Bianchi safehouse, or at least what was left of it after Alessio’s death. Vittorio sits under guard now within Davide’s stronghold, stripped of the empire he believed would outlive the son he chose to sacrifice it for.

His loyalists have scattered, surrendered, or have been swallowed by the very alliances they once tried to devour.

And now I am back in Italy, trying to rebuild the syndicate my father once held with such pride.

Elio stands close enough that I can feel the warmth of him beside me, though neither of us touches beyond the faint brush of his fingers against mine.

He has learned these past few months that closeness is not something he can take from me with force. It has to be earned. He is patient with that, more than I expected a Conti man to be.

But then again, he is no longer a Conti as I once knew him to be.

Rebuilding an old empire in the wake of another’s toppling is stranger than I imagined.

Actually, strange is too delicate a word.

In reality, these months have been a funeral procession of stepping over bodies in the aftermath of the war.

Of Elio coming back from that ruined hall alive with blood on his shirt that was not all his and eyes hollow with the knowledge that he had put his brother in the ground and saved our son in the same breath.

I remember the look on his face when he saw me again and the relief that flooded through me the moment I touched him and realized he had survived.

That had been the beginning of this strange new life.

There are nights I wake and find him standing at the window, shirtless beneath the pale wash of moonlight with one hand pressed against the glass and the other touching the scars along his chest where Alessio’s last blows still mark him.

He stares out into the dark like he is searching for a version of himself that died in that hall too.

I never ask him what he sees. I know enough from my own grief to allow him the peace to come to terms with it on his own.

My hand still rests on the table when Elio speaks.

“You’re quiet.”

I glance at him.

He looks different in my father’s war room. Not out of place, exactly. Elio Conti has never looked out of place among power.

He was born beneath its chandeliers, raised in its shadows, and fed its language before he had the sense to question whether hunger and compliance were the same thing.

But here, surrounded by Russo history, he looks settled in the way I feel.

“I keep expecting him to walk in,” I admit.

Elio’s gaze softens.

My throat tightens.

For years my father’s memory was a locked room inside me and kept dark because pulling it into the light only made the blood-soaked grief show.

Now I stand in the room where he built and defended an empire, and I do not know whether I want to weep, scream, or apologize to every ghost watching from the other side.

The portraits remain where they always were lining the room.

Russo men in dark suits, Russo women in pearls and black silk, all of them painted with the same watchful eyes as if death has not relieved them of their judgment.

My father’s portrait has not yet been returned.

It was taken down after the estate was seized, stored somewhere by men who thought removing his face meant removing his claim before abandoning the property altogether.

Tomorrow, it will be rehung.

Perhaps mine will eventually join it.

Elio follows my gaze to the empty space above the fireplace before focusing back on me. “Once we get this place cleaned up, you will have to introduce Matteo to all of his relatives.”

The words settle inside me strangely.

Relatives… such an ordinary word for a family like mine. Relatives are supposed to bring casseroles for Sunday dinners and send birthday cards with money tucked inside the flap.

Argue over recipes and inherit ugly furniture and show children embarrassing photographs from before they were born.

In our world, relatives come with armed drivers, sealed alliances, old grudges, and names whispered carefully behind closed doors because the wrong alliance can still carry a death sentence.

And yet for Matteo, I’m determined to not allow his life to be anything like that.

Eventually, there will be stories from people who knew my mother’s laugh and my father’s better moments.

Distant cousins and great-aunts who will fuss over his cheeks and pretend not to count the Conti angles in his face.

Old Russo loyalists who will look at him and now see him as leverage, inheritance, or a claim as the next heir.

Every single piece of what we build next will be proof that we were not entirely erased as the Contis once thought we were.

A small smile tugs at my lips. “Yes, I’m sure he will ask me about them until I do.”

For so many years, I gave my son a life made of careful omissions because I wanted to protect him.

Now he will finally be able to understand the truth without repercussions.

There will be no old allies turned enemies knocking at our doorstep, none who demand loyalty without first earning it.

Elio’s hand finds my back.

The touch is gentle, almost tentative at first.

He only rests his palm there, warm through the fabric of my dress, waiting for me to decide whether closeness is something I can bear.

My breath catches for the smallest second, then I let myself lean.

With a gentle hand, he guides me closer until I am pressed to his side. My arms come up around his waist before I can think too much about it. My cheek moves to rest against his chest, and the steady beat of his heart finds my ear.

He is alive.

For months, that has been what I return to when everything else around me feels unsteady. Elio’s hand moves slowly over my back in a soothing stroke that makes my eyes sting.

“Do you think he’ll like it here?” he asks.

The question is not really about the estate, we both know that. It is about this life and the family that will need to be stitched back together with bloodied hands and imperfect apologies. It is about whether Matteo can belong to a world I once prayed would never know his name.

“I think he’ll be overwhelmed at first,” I say honestly.

He hums softly in response.

I breathe quietly against his chest. “But… he is incredibly curious. And probably furious that I didn’t tell him sooner about you.”

He squeezes me gently. “We will make up for lost time once he is settled here.”

I lift my head enough to look at him.

Elio looks down at me. The softness in his eyes is no longer something he tries to hide.

That used to frighten me.

Sometimes, it still does, only because I’m afraid one day, I may lose it again. No love story should have this much blood under its fingernails. Yet despite that, his hand remains on my back and my arms remain wrapped tight around him.

The space between us, once a battlefield, has become something easier to swallow.

We are not healed, far from it, but we are slowly easing the pain of our pasts by changing our futures together and molding them into one we both control.

That is what these months have taught me.

Some wounds do not vanish. They grow around themselves and make space for other things. Trust, a stubborn and fickle thing, will always bloom when a promise without demand is given.

Elio’s mouth curves faintly. “I am excited for our future, Isabella.”

My chest squeezes. “Really? Even if it is going to take a long time to rebuild?”

He cups my face, his thumb gentle as it traces my jaw to my cheek. “As long as you allow me to remain by your side, I will be happy.”

I rise onto my toes and press a kiss to his lips. “Always.”

His eyes close at the small touch, a soft sigh leaving him. Sometimes, he still reacts as though this is an absolution he does not believe he deserves.

I hope one day, I can prove to him that he does.

I nuzzle back into Elio’s embrace and let myself relax there for another stolen moment. Outside, dawn begins to lighten the windows.

Pale gold slips over the estate grounds, touching the house that has finally stopped feeling haunted.

For years, I thought freedom meant disappearing and pushing away every piece of my history that made me a Russo.

Now with Elio’s heart beating beneath my cheek and my son safe, I know freedom can also mean staying.

There will always be danger in a life like ours, but this time when the world comes for us, I know without question that Elio will be by my side. Matteo will have a family that does not demand blind obedience in exchange for love or grow up believing loyalty gives anyone the right to chain him to their sins.

He will learn the truth slowly, with care, in pieces his heart is ready to hold onto.

He will know Amos Russo was powerful and flawed, loving and ruthless, a grandfather who would have adored him and a man whose choices cast shadows long after his death.

He will know the weight the Conti name once carried and how his father chose differently when it mattered.

And he will know his mother stopped running because the ground finally felt steady enough to do so.

I will give Matteo a name he does not have to run from. A history that does not devour him whole. A family that can bend without breaking, bleed without becoming cruel, and love without turning that love into a cage.

That is my promise to him.

For the first time in years, I do not look toward the exits.

I stay right where I’m meant to be.

Do you want to read the next book in the Mafia Lords of Sin series? Of course you do!

I was sold to the most feared Bratva Pakhan in New York.

Marry him.

Submit to him.

Give him an heir.

Save my family.

That was the deal.

Konstantin Belyaev is twice my age.

Cold.

Violent.

A man who takes what he wants—and keeps it.

And now… he wants me.

Get Bound Bride here.