Chapter 12 Dante
DANTE
The villa doesn’t sleep the rest of the night.
The halls are alive with motion long after the gunfire has faded.
Guards rotate in tight, disciplined shifts patrolling every corridor, every stairwell and blind corner as orders are barked back and forth over their radios.
Outside, floodlights burn against the dark night sky, washing the grounds in stark white as my enforcers sweep the entire property inch by inch.
I make sure every last intruder is found dead with a bullet in their head.
Alive is not an option.
By the time dawn threatens the horizon, all the bodies are taken and brought to a safehouse off the property to be identified and disposed of.
Blood is scrubbed from the floors, windows are boarded up and reinforced, surveillance is doubled then tripled.
Anyone who breathes inside this house is accounted for one by one.
As much of a nightmare as this has all been, my well-oiled machine runs as efficiently as always. The only silver lining I can possibly see.
I keep Elena and Luca in the master bedroom.
Additional cameras are installed before the hour is up, and more men are posted outside the door and down the hallway than has ever been warranted before.
I don’t particularly care if it’s overkill at this point.
If the Bellantis want to try a second time, they’ll have to walk through hell itself to get to them again.
Now, Elena sits on the bed with Luca curled against her as she murmurs soft nonsense meant to coax him back into sleep.
Her voice is smooth, but her hands tremble every time they brush through his hair despite her best efforts to steady them.
Luca’s sobs have quieted since moving them from the room down the hallway to this one, but his body still jerks every so often when noise from outside filters in from the crack underneath the door.
Guilt overwhelms me so completely, it feels suffocating.
I stay where I am, pressed flat against the closed door with both arms crossed tight over my chest, using the pressure to try and physically hold myself together. No matter what I do, I can’t stop seeing her shielding him with her own body without a second of hesitation.
I’ve seen bravery before, have watched men twice her age charge headlong into gunfire with their teeth clenched and eyes blazing, knowing full well that death was inevitable and choosing to stand and hold the line anyway.
Yet none of it comes close to watching Elena protect our son. That image has burned itself permanently into the back of my mind. Every time I blink, I see it.
Watching her be dragged toward that window nearly broke something inside my chest when I finally reached their room, her arms reaching for Luca, his screams ripping through the air, the sheer helplessness of almost arriving seconds too late and knowing that if I hadn’t, if I’d been delayed even a heartbeat longer, I would have lost them both.
I’ve known dread before.
I’ve known it very intimately.
I’ve felt the cool barrel of a gun pressed to my own temple held by my own hand the night following my brother’s funeral, when the weight of the world and my failures pressed down so hard on my shoulders, I couldn’t see another way forward.
I’ve known true, unfiltered loss holding Matteo in my arms, feeling his blood soak into my clothes as I begged him to stay with me even though I knew it was useless to do so.
Those moments carved me into what I am.
But that… seeing Elena and Luca almost taken like that had been so different.
The fear I feel now isn’t singular. It’s all-consuming. When I imagine the Bellantis succeeding with ripping Elena and Luca from this house and dragging them onto that awaiting helicopter to take them to God knows where, my chest tightens until breathing feels like a punishment.
Rage comes flooding in behind it soon after. It isn’t the cold, detached fury of a Don protecting his territory from usurpers. It is something far more dangerous, feral enough that I could be convinced to burn entire cities to ash if it meant keeping them both here with me, alive and untouched.
I’ve always believed fear was a weakness.
That sentiment had been beaten into me since I was a young child.
Tonight, though, I realize it is also a warning, a flare shot into the sky telling me exactly where the danger lies and how close it had come to taking what is mine.
Ignoring it now would be the greatest weakness of all.
When Luca finally falls asleep, the tension slowly draining from his small body until his weight settles fully into Elena’s arms, she lifts her head slowly.
Her eyes find mine across the room. They’re glassy with exhaustion, rimmed red from crying.
There’s something else there too, stripped bare by the terror from earlier and the love she has for our son.
It hurts to look at.
I hadn’t realized how rigidly I’d been standing against the door until my shoulders begin to ache. I roll them back a few times before peeling myself away from it to move closer.
“Is he…?” I murmur.
“He finally fell asleep,” she whispers back.
I stop beside the bed, my gaze dropping to Luca without conscious thought. I check him the way I’ve checked wounded men on battlefields and in back alleys plenty of times before this, my eyes trailing over every visible part of him while I methodically collect the data.
Breathing: steady.
Color: good.
Shaking: none.
Pain: none.
I breathe out slowly, the information easing me somewhat. Only then do my eyes lift to meet hers.
“How are you?” I ask.
The question feels absurd the moment it leaves my mouth.
Almost insulting, given what she’s just endured, but I ask anyway.
I need to hear her answer and hear proof that this isn’t some cruel trick of my mind, that I didn’t arrive too late and am now inventing this moment out of sheer desperation to remain sane because they really were taken before I could get to them.
She gives a small, tired shake of her head. “Alright. Just… shaken.”
The understatement nearly pulls a laugh out of me. I swallow it down instead, nodding once in response. If I let myself react honestly to the fear and the rage still trying to claw their way out of my chest, I’m not sure I’ll be able to contain them.
She shifts slightly on the bed, careful not to disturb Luca as she adjusts her hold of him so his head rests more comfortably in her lap. Even exhausted like this, she’s still completely aware of how to nurture him.
“What happened?” she asks quietly. “Do you know who did this?”
I hesitate.
My tongue runs along the back of my teeth as I weigh the familiar urge to omit the truth out of habit.
It isn’t that I don’t trust Elena, at least not in this aspect when it comes to protecting Luca, but telling her everything would mean admitting that she and our son have now become targets to men who would gladly trade their lives for the chance to use that as leverage against me.
Unnecessarily frightening her feels… cruel.
These aren’t burdens she should ever have to carry. Despite being Giovanni Vitale’s daughter, she didn’t choose this life. She never swore loyalty to my family’s syndicate or accepted this as the cost of marrying into it. All of this was never supposed to touch her so directly.
Bringing her into this world was never meant to be an option. Even when she was set to marry Matteo, my brother had been careful, protective in his own way. He kept the details vague, the dangers abstract. He respected her too much to stain her with the truth of how dangerous our business could be.
I’d done the same.
When Elena and I had crossed lines we never should have and her curiosity had turned relentless, I’d finally given in.
Even then, I’d only given her fragments of what was happening at the time, enough to satisfy her questions but never enough to truly endanger her.
If she wanted to know more, she was free to interrogate her father.
Then again, now that choice has already been stolen from her altogether.
Tonight has made that painfully clear. Whether I like it or not, she is involved now and she and Luca are standing squarely in the line of fire.
Keeping her in the dark won’t protect her.
It will only leave her unprepared the next time something like this happens.
And there will be a next time. The Bellantis have never been the type to back down easily when met with resistance.
Tonight has changed everything.
I exhale slowly, my gaze drifting briefly to Luca before returning to her.
“There’s a… syndicate I’ve been dealing with recently,” I say carefully.
I don’t want to lie, but I won’t be reckless either.
“The Bellantis. They operate out of Palermo. So far, it’s been mostly posturing…
disrupted shipments, missed deliveries, pressure tactics.
Annoyances that I’ve been handling. They’ve never crossed a line like this before. ”
Her brow furrows, but she doesn’t interrupt me. She watches me instead the way she always has. I’ve never been able to hide much from her for long. Not my anger or fear. Not even the moments when something inside me starts to crack and I’m left feeling more vulnerable than ever.
Whatever she sees now makes her expression sharpen with quiet understanding. “In my father’s ledger… he mentioned Don Carlo Toselli’s syndicate. They’re based in Palermo too. Right?”
“Yes.”
She studies me for another long moment, her grip on Luca tightening just slightly. “You think the mole is connected to both the Bellantis and the Tosellis. You think they’re working together?”
I hesitate. Then I nod.