Chapter 8 Elena #2
My father never let it out of his sight.
It was always within arm’s reach or tucked beneath his arm whenever he left the house or locked in his desk drawer at night when my mother would finally coax him to bed.
He carried it with him even when he traveled, treating it with a reverence that bordered on obsession.
It isn’t a ledger by any industry standard.
There are no neat accounting columns meant to satisfy auditors or bankers if ever needed to prove our family business’s legitimacy.
Instead, it reads like a hybrid between a journal and a cipher, a place where my father recorded what mattered to him.
Names scrawled in shorthand only he understood, numbers that don’t add up unless you know how to read between them.
As a child, I always thought it was just my father being eccentric, maybe even a little bit paranoid.
He had always been careful and thinking several steps ahead with whatever was thrown his way.
I’d chalked his obsessive protection of this book up to habit more than necessity, assuming it was the burden of being a man who lived among powerful people and this was how it manifested.
Now, standing here with it in my hands, a cold realization settles over me. If this book mattered so much back then… why would he leave it behind?
The thought sends a chill down my spine.
The lock on the side is easy to break open.
The first twenty pages are dense with coded transactions.
Columns of numbers fill the paper in tight, precise lines.
Dates, offshore account numbers, shell corporations layered on top of one another in a way that makes my head ache, money moved through channels designed to look mundane—consulting retainers, foreign investments, secret payments routed through innocuous fronts.
There are names that appear between the figures, written in my father’s careful shorthand. Names of politicians, businessmen, and financiers I vaguely recognize from the periphery of our world.
The longer I stare at it, the more I recognize the system, though.
I’d spent years glancing over his shoulder while he worked, absorbing the patterns without quite understanding their significance.
Back then, it had all blurred together into adult things I wasn’t meant to question. Now I can see it for what it is.
The entries that follow shift in tone.
Journal notes replace raw data and switch to exclusively kept records of meetings with Don Cesare Cosenza, Dante’s father.
The margins are crowded with personal observations tucked between formal meeting summaries.
Anecdotes about dinners and negotiations sit beside biting commentary that barely disguise my father’s growing disapproval.
It was never a secret that the two men clashed, but what shocks me is the undercurrent running through these pages.
It’s obvious that my father had been desperately trying to maintain peace by appeasing Cesare, talking him down and preventing fractures growing within the other Sicilian syndicates before they became outright declarations of war.
Then I turn the page and the content shifts yet again.
The next set of data points befuddles me at first.
There are names that fill the page in careful script, all of them members of the Cosenza inner circle. Lines connect them in strange patterns, some bold and heavy while others are marked with faint, tentative lines.
At first glance, it looks almost harmless. An oddly notated family tree, maybe, or a visual shorthand for alliances that only my father understood at the time of his involvement with the Cosenzas.
Some names are connected directly to Don Cesare while others bypass him entirely, looping instead toward his consigliere.
A few lines are broken, scratched out, rewritten darker and heavier, as if my father changed his mind or discovered something new that forced him to rearrange the truth yet again.
Certain names sit on the outskirts of the map, while others form a dense, central knot that pulls everything inward.
My hands tremble as I flip to the second to last page. The handwriting changes drastically from the neat, disciplined script I’m used to and into slanted, hurried marks. On this page, the ink is pressed into the page hard enough that it bleeds through to the other side.
Matteo knows. It’s the first sentence that grabs my attention.
I freeze, my eyes scanning the rest of the short paragraph.
“He’s going to confront Don Carlo. If he speaks, they’ll kill him. I know they will. They’ve killed others before. Must warn Elena and get her out before she gets tangled in this mess. Must disappear before it comes back to us.”
What?
I read it again and again, each time growing more confused than the last.
Don Carlo.
Why would he be involved in any of this? He was never more than a familiar acquaintance to the Cosenzas. A man who lingered at the edges of their alliance and was only ever tolerated rather than trusted. A booker turned broker turned Don of a small, barely influential syndicate.
Ambitious, yes. Opportunistic, certainly. But dangerous enough to be at the center of this? Not likely… and what, exactly, did Matteo find out?
At the top of the next page is a date burned so deeply into my memory, it feels carved into my very bones. It was the last day my life was ever normal.
The day Matteo died.
My vision blurs as I stare at it. There is only one short paragraph on the page, scrawled so hard, the pen has nearly torn through the paper.
“They used my accounts to fund the hit. Matteo was never meant to die. I tried to warn him, but it was too late. They are planning on framing him as a mole. Dante is next.”
My mouth drops open. I can’t breathe. The truth crashes over me in waves, undeniable now.
Matteo wasn’t caught up in another’s path and at the wrong place and the wrong time like we all thought. He was acting as a direct threat, a man who knew too much and planned to confront the wrong people when he should’ve never put himself in their crosshairs to begin with.
I swallow hard and flip back to the page before it, back to the chart.
The longer I stare at it, the tighter my chest becomes because the picture finally becomes crystal clear. This isn’t simply a map of kinship. It’s a map of influence. Of loyalty and power quietly flowing in directions it was never meant to.
Suddenly, memories begin to surface in my mind.
Late nights where secrets were whispered against my skin, during moments when Dante’s guard slipped. In the aftermath of our stolen nights and when the weight of his family pressed too heavily on his shoulders and he needed someone to listen, he’d tell me things I was never meant to know.
He used to talk about them all like chess pieces.
Who answered to whom within the circle, who smiled in public and undermined in private.
I remember the bitterness in his voice when he spoke about his father’s closest men, those who shook hands with each other while sharpening knives behind their backs.
“Blood doesn’t mean loyalty in my family,” he once told me quietly. “It never has. That’s why Matteo and I have to stick together.”
I trace one of the lines now, my fingertip hovering just above the ink where Cesare’s consigliere’s name lies.
This chart confirms my father hadn’t been cataloging relationships out of paranoia.
He had been documenting a slow-moving coup, a quiet restructuring of the Cosenza empire that began long before Matteo’s death.
Long before Cesare hung himself and Dante was forced to step into power.
This chart isn’t historical, it’s predictive. It shows who would survive a purge of that scale. Who would benefit and who would thrive if all three of the Cosenza line were removed from the board.
It was all a calculated dismantling of power engineered from within by men patient enough to wait decades for the right moment to strike. All of it was a conspiracy. Not against the Cosenzas, but from within them.
The ledger slips from my fingers as the room suddenly spins.
My father didn’t kill Matteo like Dante always thought he did.
He tried to save him.