Chapter 9 Dante
DANTE
By the time Elena returns to the villa, the sun has long since disappeared behind the hills, dragging the last of its warmth with it.
I wait for her in my study.
The room is lit low, the lamps casting long shadows across the bookshelves lining the walls.
The decanter on my desk is half empty, the amber liquid catching the light from the fire across the way, trapping it behind glass.
The crystal tumbler in my hand remains untouched, though, my grip around it tight enough that I can feel the faint give of it beneath my fingers.
Anger simmers low beneath my skin the longer I sit here and wait. It takes everything in me to not throw this glass at the wall like the last one.
She was never supposed to leave this place.
Not without my knowledge or without my permission.
The moment I returned to the villa and was informed she’d been taken into town without clearance, something snapped inside me.
I don’t tolerate disobedience. I don’t tolerate weakness in my chain of command.
Those who work for me understand that orders exist for a reason and that improvisation is not a privilege granted lightly.
And I absolutely do not tolerate anyone taking liberties where my wife and son are concerned.
That is not a mistake. That is a death wish, signed and notarized.
Whoever signed off on that decision and thought themselves clever enough to bend my rules will answer for it. The consequences will be memorable enough that no one else will ever consider repeating the error twice.
But first I need to deal with her.
I lean back in the chair, jaw tightening. The only reason I didn’t send out a goddamn cavalry unit to tear through the entire countryside looking for her is because she left Luca behind.
A calculated move I recognized immediately upon seeing him playing in the gardens with one of the maids.
Elena doesn’t do anything without reason.
Leaving our son here wasn’t trust, it was meant to be a message, a silent assurance that she would come back and that she wasn’t running from me this time around.
The thought doesn’t soothe me as much as it should have, though.
If anything, it sharpens the edge of my fury.
Whatever she went looking for and whatever she thought was worth crossing me for had better be monumental.
Something that justifies the risk she took and the line she decided to bend to her convenience.
Footsteps shuffle faintly in the hallway outside the study. Then there’s a knock at the door, hesitant enough to make my jaw tighten again. I lift my gaze from the glass in my hand, every muscle in my body going taut.
“Enter.”
The door swings inward.
She steps inside slowly, closing it behind her quietly.
Her cheeks are flushed, either from the cool night air or something else entirely.
Her eyes stay fixed on the floor for several seconds too long, lashes casting shadows against her skin.
I wait for her to look at me, my breath held without realizing it, irritation and another emotion I refuse to name coiling tightly in my chest.
When she finally raises her head, it’s not defiance I see. It’s resolve. That catches me off guard immediately.
“Where did you go?” I ask, my voice low.
She doesn’t answer right away. The silence stretches between us until she finally speaks, and not with the answer I want. Instead, she answers with her own question.
“How is Luca?”
I lift the glass to my mouth and drain it in one go. The liquor burns all the way down, sharp and punishing, but the pain grounds me, pulls me back from the edge I’ve been teetering on since the moment I was told she was gone.
When I rise slowly from the couch, her shoulders tense immediately.
It should satisfy me to see how easily I can still affect her, how instinctive her reaction is to my movement. A more egotistical man might take pleasure in that kind of power. Instead, a hollow pit opens up in my stomach.
“Alive,” I say flatly.
Her brows knit together. “What the hell does that mean?”
I set the empty glass down on the edge of my desk hard enough that the sound cracks through the room. She flinches but she doesn’t look away. Brave, I’ll give her that. She always has been.
I lift a shoulder before lifting a leg and settling back onto my desk. “It means exactly what it sounds like. That’s all you’re getting. Perhaps you should have thought more carefully before directly defying my orders by leaving this estate. Something I explicitly told you not to do.”
Her frown deepens, lips pressing into a thin line. “I went to my family’s villa.”
That pauses my anger mid-surge, rearranging itself to be sharper and more focused. My gaze searches her face, looking for a lie or a crack in whatever facade she’s trying to pull off, anything that suggests this is another half-truth meant to placate me while she does something else behind my back.
“Why would you do that?” I ask slowly.
Whatever she found there, whatever compelled her to risk my wrath has already changed her if that look in her eyes is anything to go by. And I have the sinking feeling I’m about to learn exactly how.
She pulls in a long, steady breath. After a beat, she shrugs out of the jacket draped over her shoulders and sets it aside, her movements careful, almost ritualistic in a way. Then she reaches into the inside pocket and pulls something free.
A book. Leather-bound, old, worn around the edges.
Her steps toward me are slow, hesitant in a way that has my spine straightening. When she gets close enough for me to see it clearly, my attention snaps to it. The lock on the side hangs open. Broken, I realize as she draws nearer.
Her eyes never leave the journal in her hands. Her fingers tighten around it until her knuckles bleach white.
My brow lifts. “You went there to bring back… a journal?”
There’s no effort to hide the displeasure in my voice.
Of all the reckless, idiotic things she could have done—risked being seen, followed, taken by any one of my family’s enemies—it was for this? Not jewelry, not documents or leverage to help her escape me. Not even something sentimental from her childhood.
A book.
When she opens it, the pages fan outward, revealing neat rows and columns of numbers, dates, accounts… A goddamn ledger.
I inhale slowly through my nose.
Of course, Elena has never been simple. Only she would risk her life and my patience to retrieve a battered ledger tied to her father’s shadowy business.
I nearly sigh. “You can’t be serious.”
Her eyes snap up from the page. “At least let me explain before you start dismissing me like I’m an idiot.”
There it is. That fire and stubborn refusal to back down that once drew me to her and now threatens to ignite something far more dangerous between us. I push off the edge of my desk and stand, towering over her without effort.
“I’m uninterested in your father’s past dealings,” I say flatly. “Unless that book gives me coordinates to his current location, I don’t care.”
She doesn’t shrink back. Instead, she tightens her grip on the journal, fingers curling around the worn leather until her nails leave marks from biting into the soft material. “I need you to read some of this.”
“For what reason? To rub it in my face that he plotted to kill my brother from the very beginning? Forgive me for remaining uninterested, Tesoro,” I bite out.
“He didn’t kill Matteo.”
I stop moving entirely.
The sound of my own breathing is suddenly too loud in my ears. His name is like a blade slid between my ribs to where my beating heart is, twisted without mercy until I’m left almost gasping in agony. Hearing her say it out loud for the first time causes the mask I hide behind to start cracking.
“Don’t you dare speak his name to me,” I warn, my voice dropping to a growl.
She’s past the fear now, past any caution that would have saved her from the boiling rage currently threatening to spill over inside me. Instead of retreating back like she should from the wild animal she’s suddenly cornered, she advances forward like a fool.
“He wasn’t killed because of my father. Your own men set him up. They used my father’s accounts to fund the hit. It’s all right here.”
Rage surges instinctively inside me, burning white-hot. “That’s a lie.”
She presses the ledger against my chest. “Read it for yourself.”
The impact isn’t hard, but it’s enough to jar me. Enough to make my hand curl reflexively around her wrist and the other around the spine of the book before I shove both back at her.
“No,” I growl. “I’m not indulging this. You’re foolish for even leaving this estate the way you did without any guards with you.”
She lets out a frustrated sound and begins to flip through the pages. Paper rustles violently as she rips through the ledger until she lands near the back. She thrusts it toward me again, this time opened to a page dense with ink.
“Elena—”
“Read the damn notes, Dante,” she snaps at me.
I don’t want to. Everything in me resists with violent certainty. This is nonsense, grief dressed up as desperation, lies woven carefully enough to sound convincing. There is no sense in entertaining it. There has never been.
The truth of Matteo’s death has always been simple.
Brutal… but simple.
Everyone in Sicily knows who killed my brother. The streets whispered it before the blood coating my hands had even dried. There is no man behind the curtain, no hidden architect pulling strings from the shadows. No convenient revelation waiting years later to absolve guilt and rewrite history.
I know who ended my brother’s life because my father told me.
He had no reason to lie, no justification for pointing the finger at the wrong culprit before taking his own life after being shattered by grief over losing his favorite son. Cesare Cosenza did not die a coward like many said after I pulled him down from the mezzanine. He died a broken man.
My eyes betray me as they drop to the page, and everything I’ve ever believed factures within seconds.
Names leap out at me immediately, unmistakable even in the hurried, desperate script. I recognize them without effort. My father’s consigliere and two of his captains.
Men who stood shoulder to shoulder with me at Matteo’s funeral with their hands gripping mine to anchor me while my entire world fell apart.
Men who murmured vows of loyalty while I tried and failed to keep the tears burning behind my eyes from falling.
Men who swore fealty to me when my father’s crown was shoved onto my head, heavy with expectation and the burden of our family’s fallen legacy that I was never supposed to inherit.
My stomach turns violently.
My hand closes around the ledger without conscious thought, wrenching it fully from Elena’s grasp. I flip the page, then another. My eyes move quickly over the words, the Don in me dissecting patterns even as the brother in me screams denial so loudly, it feels like my skull might split open.
This isn’t madness or the rambling guilt of a man trying to justify his own guilt and betrayal. The notes are meticulous, obsessively so. The dots are already connected, laid out plainly for anyone willing to see. And worst of all, it makes sense the longer I read.
I feel something inside me splinter, a fault line tearing straight through years of certainty and rage that have shaped me into an unrecognizable version of myself.
Elena’s voice is soft when she replies. “It’s all true, Dante… It all makes sense. My father would never betray your family. He loved you all.”
Loved.
I nearly laugh, hysteria burning inside my chest.
If this is true… then everything I’ve done, every man I’ve killed, every alliance I’ve burned, every piece of myself I’ve carved away in the name of vengeance has been in service toward the wrong enemy.
The thought is poison, slithering into my mind uninvited, and I recoil from it instinctively. I shake my head hard, as if the physical motion might dislodge it before it can root itself somewhere permanent.
“No.” The word comes out rough, but absolute.
She reaches for me then, her fingers brushing my arm, tentative and desperate all at once. “Dante—”
“No.” My voice rises sharply.
I don’t want her touch or the sweetness of her voice to lull me into another false sense of reality. I don’t want any of this.
With a sudden, violent motion, I hurl the ledger across the room. It slams into the far wall with a dull sound, the old binding splitting on impact. Pages tear free and flutter down onto the floor like wounded birds.
Elena’s gasp is immediate. “Don’t!”
She moves to go around me to retrieve it and save the evidence before I can destroy it completely, but I don’t let her. My hand snaps out, latching around her arm, and I drag her back toward the door with more force than I mean to.
The anger surging through me is wild now, unfocused, fueled by fear masquerading as rage.
“Leave,” I command. “Now.”
She struggles against my grip, panic and fury flaring in her eyes. “Dante, stop!”
I don’t argue back at her. I can’t. If I open my mouth again, something raw and vulnerable will come spilling out—feelings I’ve long since buried and abandoned.
I wrench the door open and shove her into the hallway, releasing her only long enough to slam it shut in her face. The impact reverberates through the study, the lock sliding home with a final, damning click.
She doesn’t give up.
Her fists pound against the door almost immediately, frantic and relentless. She calls my name over and over, her voice muffled by the thick wood but no less piercing. Each hit lands like a blow against my own body.
I don’t move. I don’t go back to my desk or pour myself another drink to chase away this horrifically raw wound tearing open inside my chest. Instead, I press my back against the door and only when the pounding finally stops, when her voice fades into silence, do my legs finally give out.
I slide down slowly, my back dragging against the wood until I’m sitting on the floor with my head tipped back and my eyes squeezed shut.
If the past four years have all been built on a lie, then everything I thought I understood about my life goes down with it.
Every decision I’ve made in Matteo’s name, every order given, every alliance severed, every man I’ve condemned to die because I believed justice demanded it has allowed me to build an empire on grief and certainty. On the belief that I was avenging my brother and honoring my father’s final truth.
If the past four years were false, then so is the man I’ve become.
And worst of all, if it was all a lie, then Elena was never truly my enemy to begin with.
She was just the collateral damage I created along the way.