Chapter 8 Elena
ELENA
For weeks, I exist in a strangely fragile and unspoken truce with Dante.
We orbit each other like ghosts haunting the same house, never quite colliding with each other in the same temporal space but always aware of the other’s presence passing by.
There is no kindness between us, no tenderness to soften the harsh marks we’ve inflicted on each other.
But there is no cruelty, either. Now it is just distance and a careful silence that neither of us has been willing to break just yet.
He avoids me when he can, and when he can’t and we’re forced into the same space by circumstance or necessity, his gaze never quite meets mine. It passes over my face as if lingering might fracture whatever emotions he’s barely holding back.
I do the same.
Or… at least, I try to, anyway.
I keep my eyes down and busy myself with Luca and remind myself constantly that looking for Dante only dredges up things I can’t afford to feel. It’s easier to push it down until the hurt slowly ices over into numbness.
When we are forced to speak, it’s only when we have to, and it’s never about the night he grabbed my arm and threatened to take my son away from me because I refused to give him what he wanted.
Sometimes, though… I catch him watching Luca when he thinks no one notices.
His expression is always unreadable, a strange heaviness flickering in his eyes before he schools his features back to stone.
I don’t know if this truce is meant to last forever or if it’s only the calm before the next inevitable storm. I don’t know if Dante is waiting for the right excuse to do whatever it is he plans on doing to Luca and me.
All I know is that I’m suspended in this limbo until that happens.
When Dante leaves Sicily for a meeting on the mainland, the shift in the villa is immediate.
The air feels lighter, and while the guards remain vigilant as always, the tension surrounding them dispels just enough to allow me to think.
To plan.
It doesn’t take my mind long to come up with something and soon, I find myself persuading one of the house butlers—an older man named Milo with tired eyes and a fondness for Luca—to drive me into town.
I tell him I want to retrieve a few family heirlooms from my father’s abandoned villa and some things of my mother’s, sentimental pieces I don’t want lost to time or looters whenever the city decides to eventually put the place up for auction.
He hesitates only briefly before agreeing to give me an hour.
I leave Luca with one of the maids and head out with him.
The drive is quiet as Sicily rolls past the window, sun-bleached stone hills and winding roads, achingly familiar and impossibly distant all at once. When we finally pull up to my family’s villa, my chest tightens so hard, it almost hurts to breathe.
I leave Milo idling in the car and head up the familiar walkway to the front doors. To my surprise, they open without a key.
Inside, the house is an absolute mess.
In just four years since I’ve been gone, dust coats every surface in a fine, suffocating layer.
Curtains hang half-broken over dirty windows, their once fine fabric sliced through and sagging from the aftermath of the night my father and I fled Italy.
The air smells of mildew and neglect, but beneath it is a faint scent that breaks my heart instantly.
The ghost of my mother’s perfume, a scent that once meant safety.
My footsteps echo far too loudly in the empty halls, oddly reminding me that I don’t belong here anymore.
Whatever this place once was, it has long since stopped being a home.
I move slowly, my hand brushing along the faded wallpaper, grounding myself in the physical reality of it before the memories of my past can swallow me whole.
Every corner holds one.
My childhood laughter, bright and careless, bouncing off these walls as I raced through the halls with bare feet and skinned knees.
My father’s voice calling me down for dinner, pretending to be stern but never quite hiding the warmth beneath his words.
My mother sitting at the edge of my bed at night, brushing my hair with slow, patient strokes while she hummed softly under her breath, an old Sicilian lullaby I haven’t heard since then.
The ache that follows is physically painful. Not only because I miss what used to be but because Luca will never know this place the way I did.
He will never run through these halls or hide behind these doors playing hide-and-seek with the staff.
He will never sit at the long dining table arguing over dessert or fall asleep to my mother’s humming.
He will never know half of his family history, never feel rooted in something that existed before all of the violence and fear and blood debts tore everything apart.
All because of circumstances entirely beyond his control.
My father never meant for any of this to happen.
I know that with a certainty that settles deep in my bones.
He was never a reckless man. He was always careful, loyal to a fault.
Our family had stood beside the Cosenzas for generations, alliances forged long before my birth and dating back nearly two centuries, loyalty and business intertwined so deeply, they were inseparable.
When I was younger and years before my mother’s passing, I would sometimes sneak out of bed and wander the halls only to find my parents tucked away in my father’s office late at night.
Papers were spread across his desk, maps pinned on the walls behind it, documents I couldn’t begin to understand at the time spread out before them.
They would always be talking in hushed voices, spilling over details to keep our families’ businesses running smoothly.
I had never been privy to my father’s dealings or invited into the rooms where decisions were made, but I always knew without a shred of doubt that my father would never jeopardize an alliance like that.
My father and Dante’s uncle had been close friends for years, brothers in everything but blood.
That bond didn’t begin to fray until the middle Cosenza brother, Dante’s father, rose to the head of the family instead.
His rule was harsher. More ruthless. Where his predecessors valued loyalty, he valued dominance and submission, even from his own.
Still, even during those years when tensions ran high, strained relations never gave way to deception.
Disagreement was not betrayal. Political optics were never supposed to be personal.
That distinction had always mattered to my father even when it cost him influence and when it meant swallowing his pride more often during those meetings than not.
He believed in the long game, in loyalty that endured beyond individual men and shifting power structures every few years. Our family had survived centuries precisely because of that restraint.
My father would never have chosen greed over power, or power over family.
He understood better than most that power gained through treachery was fragile and easily overturned, destined to rot from the inside out.
No matter how deeply he disagreed with Dante’s father and how often he criticized his methods of brutality and his willingness to rule through fear, he would never have wished him dead.
Let alone Matteo.
Matteo was everything Dante’s father was not.
He was gentle and earnest, open-hearted to a fault.
He treated allyship as something sacred rather than transactional.
My father admired that in him. Respected it.
Matteo had always been kind to me, even when our engagement was more political than romantic.
He never raised his voice or treated me like a pawn.
He deserved none of what happened to him.
And in that same vein, my father would never have allowed Matteo to be caught in the crossfire of whatever happened to unravel both of our families, and certainly not in the horrifically brutal way his life was taken and used as a message against the Cosenzas.
The thought twists painfully in my chest as I move deeper into the villa.
Dust motes swirl in the shafts of light that cut through the skewed drapes.
Whatever happened between all of them—between my father, Dante’s father, Matteo, and the Cosenza family at large—it wasn’t as simple as Dante believes.
It can’t be.
The version Dante paints of my father as a traitor, a thief, a man willing to burn everything down for his own gain, doesn’t exist in my memories. I refuse to believe he suddenly became someone unrecognizable without reason.
There are pieces missing. Lies layered over truth. Motives buried beneath deception. If I’m right, if there is more to this than simply power grabs and greed, then uncovering it may be the only thing that saves Luca from one day inheriting a legacy built on a lie.
In my father’s old study, time seems to have stalled mid-collapse.
The safe is the first thing I notice when I enter the room.
Its heavy steel door hangs crookedly open, the hinges cracked and pried apart with brutal force.
Whatever had been taken was done in a hurry.
When I get closer, I spot deposit boxes pulled apart and the papers that were once inside them scattered.
The careful order my father always prized has been reduced to chaos.
At first glance, it looks like a clean sweep—that whatever documents were important enough to pry open a fireproof safe for were taken and the rest discarded like trash. Except when I bend and sift through the ones in the very back corner, I find something strange.
A leather-bound ledger is wedged beneath one of the broken deposit boxes, half-hidden as if deliberately overlooked or hastily shoved aside for something far more valuable. My breath catches as I pull it free, the worn cover familiar beneath my fingers.
I recognize this book instantly.