Chapter 23 #2
Romeo always thought he was invisible. Thought charm was armor. Thought if he smiled wide enough, nobody would look at his hands.
Giovanni always saw everything. That was the problem.
I swallow and force the next line out.
“You are my son. My blood. My heir in charm, if not in discipline. You were meant to be my diplomat, not my executioner.”
Heat crawls up my spine.
Heir in charm, not discipline. Of course, he wrote that. Like my brother was in a miscast role in his private theater.
“But if you cross me,” I read, “if you continue feeding information to our enemies for your own little games, you will be the death of this family. You will be the one who kills his King.”
The words smear at the edges.
I blink hard, but the page still goes soft around the ink.
Pia steps closer, her shoulder brushing mine, quiet and solid. She doesn’t tell me to breathe. She just stands there like a pillar I can lean against if I’m stupid enough to admit I need one.
I drag in a breath that tastes like dust and old rage.
“You carry my secrets without understanding the cost of them,” I read. “If you keep working behind my back, the blood spilled next will be mine, and it will be on your hands.”
I stop.
Not because the letter’s over.
Because the room suddenly feels smaller, like the walls leaned in to hear the verdict.
You will be the one who kills his King.
Romeo’s face flashes through my head — laughing at the bar, rolling his eyes in the confessional, shoving me out of the way once when Giovanni threw a bottle and misjudged the angle. Bloody knuckles, crooked grin, stupid loyalty.
My stomach turns.
“There’s more,” Pia says quietly. Her fingers curl around my wrist, light but steady. “If you stop now, he wins.”
I huff out something that might almost be a laugh if it didn’t scrape on the way out. “You realize you sound like him.”
“Yeah, well,” she mutters. “I plan to be the upgrade.”
I keep reading.
“I write this not to absolve you, but to warn you. The Vescari are not your friends. They are using you. They know you crave freedom from my shadow. They see your weakness.”
The page trembles just slightly in my grip.
Of course it’s the Vescari. There’s always a viper coiled just offstage, waiting for the bloodline to crack.
“If I die,” I continue, “Santino will judge you. He will be the only one strong enough. And if he is smart, he will end you before you end us all.”
Silence falls over the room like a sheet over a body.
No signature.
Just a date.
Three days before Giovanni died.
Three days before the bullet. Before the church. Before the blood on the marble and Zina’s scream and my hands in my father’s shirt trying to hold in pieces that didn’t want to stay.
My fingers go numb around the paper.
Of course, he wrote it like this. Not as a father. Not as a man afraid. As a king securing his legacy. Giovanni Rivas, playing God right to the edge — naming one son traitor and the other executioner in a single paragraph.
Pia’s thumb strokes once along the inside of my wrist. I didn’t realize I was shaking until she tried to steady me.
“This doesn’t say he killed him,” she says softly.
I stare at the ink.
“No,” I say.
My voice sounds flat. Hollowed out.
“It doesn’t say he killed him.”
I fold the letter once, carefully, like it’s a relic instead of a bomb.
“But it says he could have.”
The truth lodges behind my ribs — jagged, heavy, impossible to spit out or swallow.
Giovanni saw Romeo’s weakness. The Vescari saw his hunger. And I’m standing in the wreckage of a kingdom, holding proof my brother didn’t just flirt with betrayal.
He fucking danced with it.
And my father expected me — planned for me — to decide whether Romeo walks away from that dance alive.
Pia’s eyes search mine. “What are you thinking?” she asks.
I let out a breath that shakes once before I cage it. “I’m thinking he never stopped using us as weapons,” I say. “Not even now.”
I slide the letter back into the envelope with slow, deliberate care and look toward the safe.
“And if he left this for Romeo…” My gaze drops to the flash drive, small and ugly against the dark lining.
“…then whatever’s on that is worse.”
The dread that settles in my gut isn’t vague. It’s sharp. Focused.
Because letters accuse.
Footage convicts.
And if Giovanni took the time to write to his charming son about treason, then somewhere in this room there might be a record of the night the King actually fell —
and exactly how deep my brother’s fingerprints run in his blood.
Security Footage and the Accident in the Shadows
I slide the letter back into the envelope and shove it into my jacket like a live grenade I don’t trust on the table.
The flash drive waits in the safe. Small. Plain. Harmless in the way a bullet looks harmless before it’s chambered.
I take it.
The plastic is cold against my fingers, edges biting into skin. Giovanni didn’t keep anything useless. If this stayed here, buried in his private tomb, it’s because he wanted someone like him to find it.
Or the son he trained to replace him.
Back at the broken desk, I yank one drawer the rest of the way out. Something knocks against the back with a dull clack. I reach in and drag out a thin, dusty laptop, casing cracked, one corner dented like someone threw it once and then decided not to finish the job.
“Of course,” I mutter. “Couldn’t just leave a simple, clean trail, could you, old man?”
Pia crouches beside me, knees drawn up, coat shifting around her like armor. “The battery's probably dead,” she says.
“Yeah.” I flip the lid open. Nothing. Black screen. “But he was paranoid, not stupid. If it gets a pulse, it’ll talk.”
The outlet on the wall looks like it might catch fire if I breathe on it wrong, but the plug slides in. I wiggle the cord until a tiny, sickly power light flickers on.
The fan coughs once, then starts its low, grinding whine.
Pia wraps her arms around her legs, watching the boot screen crawl to life. “This feels… invasive,” she says quietly. “Like we’re eavesdropping on the dead.”
“We are.” I don’t look at her. “He did it to everyone else. He can live with it.”
She huffs out a humorless sound. “He’s dead, Santino.”
“Yeah.” I watch the loading bar inch forward. “And he’s still fucking up my life.”
The antique operating system drags itself upright, icons popping into place like ghosts reclaiming their spots. My reflection stares back from the cracked glass—tired eyes, blood on my collar, a bruise blooming along my jaw.
I plug in the flash drive.
For a second, nothing.
Then the icon appears. I click it open.
Folders blink onto the screen.
SECURITY.EXPORT.ROUTES.AUDIO.
My stomach drops.
Of course. Every way he could keep control—movement, words, patterns. The King never trusted memory when surveillance would do.
Pia leans closer, shoulder brushing mine. “Security first,” she says. “If there’s proof… it’ll be there.”
My hand hesitates over the trackpad.
Not because I don’t want to know.
Because once I see it, there’s no unseeing. Once I know, I can’t pretend otherwise when I look at Romeo’s face.
I open the SECURITY folder.
File names. Dates. Times.
And then—staring back at me like it’s been waiting.
ANNEX_HALL_A_CAM03_—time stamped the night Giovanni died.
My chest tightens.
I double-click.
Grainy footage fills the screen, black-and-white and jittery. A hallway in the church annex. Narrow. Familiar. The cheap camera warps the edges, so the world looks like it’s bowing inward.
Giovanni walks into frame first, coat collar up, shoulders squared, moving like a man who expects everyone to move or bleed.
He’s not alone.
Someone else stands at the edge of the frame, mostly in shadow. The camera catches only fragments—an arm, a hand clawing through hair, the twitch of a restless body.
The audio kicks in a beat later. Clean. Too clean.
“You told them where I’d be?” Giovanni’s voice slams through the speakers, raw and incandescent with fury.
Pia flinches beside me.
The second voice answers, familiar enough to make my grip tighten on the laptop.
“I thought they were bluffing, Dad—I thought if I gave them the fake route, they’d—”
Romeo.
Young. Shaking. No swagger. Just panic.
“Fake route?” Giovanni snarls. He turns, and for a heartbeat his face is fully visible—eyes blazing, lip curled. “You moved my security, you idiot—”
Romeo stumbles fully into frame like he’s been dragged there by his own bad decisions. His eyes are red, like he hasn’t slept, like he’s already been crying. His hands are up in that half-pleading, half-defensive stance he uses on cops and bouncers and furious women whose names he never remembered.
“They said they’d go after Dante,” he chokes. “After Guido. I was trying to protect them—”
Giovanni fists a hand in his shirt.
Even from this shitty angle, I see the force of it. See Romeo’s body jerk forward. See the way his head tips back, throat bared, like a kid who just realized the monster under the bed has been standing in the doorway the whole time.
“You just painted a target on my back instead,” Giovanni hisses.
Somewhere offscreen, a door slams hard enough to shake the camera. The frame judders—
And the file cuts.
Just like that.
No gunshot.No impact.No blood.
Static. Then an error message.
“Fuck,” I breathe.
My hand is trembling over the keys.
I tap the space bar. Nothing. I scrub the timeline. It jumps, stutters, and still dies in the same place—right after Giovanni’s last accusation.
I close my eyes for half a second, but the images burn behind them anyway—Romeo’s wild eyes, Giovanni’s hand in his shirt, the invisible pressure of the Vescari pressing in from the dark.
“He didn’t mean to,” Pia whispers.
I open my eyes.
She’s watching the frozen frame—Romeo half-turned, mouth parted, terror etched into every line of his face. Her expression is a knot of anger, pity, and recognition.
“No,” I say.
My voice comes out low and rough.
“He didn’t mean to. But he did it.”