Chapter 16
DANTE
Peace never lasts long in my world.
I’ve learned that lesson the hard way again and again until it feels less like misfortune and more like inevitability. Every time I allow myself to believe the storm has finally passed, something darker gathers on the horizon.
Still… waking up this morning with Elena tucked against me nearly unraveled me.
For a few disorienting seconds, I didn’t remember where I was. The weight I carry every waking hour—my family, their betrayal, the blood that seems permanently etched into my hands—hadn’t found me yet. There were only warmth and the steady rise and fall of her breathing against my side to focus on.
My arm had been draped loosely around her waist, my hand resting at the curve of her hip from muscle memory. Even after everything, my body still remembered her without hesitation.
Sunlight filtered through the windows in pale ribbons, catching in the dark strands of her hair spilling across my chest. She smelled faintly of lavender soap and something softer beneath it that was simply Elena. Familiar enough to make my chest ache.
For one dangerous moment, I allowed myself to pretend we were just two ordinary people waking up beside each other after a night tangled together. Not two souls bound by grief and betrayal, bracing for a war already gathering strength beyond these walls.
The illusion was fragile, almost laughably so. But it was intoxicating.
Taking her to my bed last night had been reckless. Letting the distance between us collapse entirely had been even worse. Weeks of restraint and circling each other like adversaries pretending to practice indifference had finally shattered what little restraint I had left in me.
The hunger wasn’t just a physical thing. It never has been with Elena. It has always been much stronger than reason, deeper than any logic I could try to use to justify my actions. It’s an almost primal urge that recognizes her as mine in ways I have spent years trying to discipline out of myself.
And last night, I stopped fighting it.
I allowed the part of me that has always wanted her closer than I have any right to want her to step forward without restraint. The man beneath the Don, the person under all of this armor had allowed, for one selfish and greedy moment, to finally allow for one moment of weakness.
But that in turn is exactly the kind of weakness my enemies would pray to use against me. Love is the most dangerous vulnerability a man in my position can possess. Anyone seeking to destroy me would only need to look at her to know precisely where to strike to take me down.
I am aware of this. Painfully so.
Which is why I know, with cold certainty, that this is something I may eventually regret.
And yet…
Lying there with her leg thrown carelessly over mine and her breath warm against my chest… regret felt impossibly far away.
Even thinking back on it now, hours later, it still makes my chest grow tight.
Bianchi’s call is what pulls me out of that deluded fantasy.
The phone vibrates against the nightstand, slicing cleanly through the fragile quiet I’d been clinging to. I don’t bother looking at the screen before sitting up. There isn’t a point to. No one calls me at this hour unless something has already gone catastrophically wrong or is about to.
For a split second, I consider letting it ring. Pretending, just for a little while longer, that this moment can remain untouched is entirely too tempting. Unfortunately, denial has never kept anyone alive.
I know better than to believe peace like this will last.
I ease myself out of bed carefully, determined not to pull Elena from her sleep prematurely.
The mattress barely shifts beneath me, but she feels the absence anyway.
Her fingers twitch where I’d just been lying, searching in that instinctive, unconscious way for warmth.
They curl loosely around the rumpled sheets instead, a small frown tugging at her brows.
I pause there, watching her for one last beat. Her breathing stays slow and even and her lashes continue resting against her cheeks.
It nearly makes me sigh.
I turn away before I can talk myself into climbing into bed again and retrieve the phone off my nightstand.
Pushing the feelings away, I cross the room, slipping a robe on as I go.
The door closes quietly behind me, sealing her safely inside and me back into the version of myself that has steadily become a harder box to force myself back into.
My thumb swipes over the phone’s screen.
“Talk.” The word is flat, stripped of anything that might be mistaken for patience. I don’t waste time easing into conversations like this. Whatever waits on the other end has already been determined that it deserves my full attention.
I know something’s wrong the second I hear his voice.
“We have a problem.”
Bianchi isn’t a man prone to dramatics. In all the years I’ve known him, he has never wasted breath on theatrics or exaggeration.
But there’s a tightness threaded through his voice now that doesn’t belong there.
Not panic, he is far too disciplined for that, but something sharper, every word clipped down to its bare bones before it reaches me.
That alone makes it concerning.
There are only so many things capable of rattling a man like him.
“About?” I ask, even though my gut is already filling in the blanks with things I don’t want to think about, let alone deal with.
“Rumors are spreading among the other syndicates in the area. About Elena and her son.”
Something inside me stills.
It isn’t fear. That is reserved for men who don’t know how to respond when shit goes sideways. What settles over me instead is a brutal clarity. Every irrelevant thought falls away, even those that I had been holding onto not so long ago. That fragile peace I allowed myself is now gone.
Only threat remains.
He continues. “There’s a price on the kid. Half a million, apparently. They… know he’s yours.”
For a moment, the hallway seems to narrow around me.
Half a million.
That isn’t rumor-mill nonsense tossed around for sport.
That is incentive. Real, tangible motivation, and enough of it to make desperate men reckless and stupid ones ambitious.
It is also the declaration of someone willing to gamble that my response won’t be swift, or brutal enough, to make an example out of them.
“Who the fuck talked?” I snap. And who the hell had been stupid enough to believe this wouldn’t get back to me?
Both questions rattle around inside my head.
Information like that doesn’t just drift into the wrong ears by accident.
It is sold and traded, whispered with purpose until finding the right hands to fall into.
Which means somewhere inside my territory, someone has decided my son is worth enough to use as a bargaining chip.
“There’s no way to pinpoint the leak,” Bianchi says. “And at this point, it’s irrelevant.”
My hand fists at my side.
Irrelevant, I nearly bite back at him.
Coming from anyone else, I would hear that word as an excuse. A failure. A slight against me. From Bianchi, it’s something else entirely.
It’s his practicality cutting straight through the noise.
The reminder that knowing who talked matters far less than knowing exactly what they’ve set in motion.
The damage is already done. The bounty exists, men have heard it, and some are now weighing whether the risk of potentially starting a war is in any way comparable to the reward.
The leak, as I know Leo would inevitably tell me, can be dealt with later.
“Also,” he adds after a moment, his tone shifting just enough to tell me this is worse, “Enzo has gone MIA. No one can find him.”
I close my eyes and lift my hand to pinch the bridge of my nose, breathing in slowly through my teeth.
What a goddamn mess.
It’s bad enough that I’m finding out my child’s life now carries a price tag.
Worse still that someone, somewhere, thinks my family can be used against me for monetary gain.
Now I don’t even have a clean direction for this anger to travel toward.
No throat to wrap my hands around. No face attached to the betrayal to slowly watch the life drain from.
Enzo disappearing is a problem all on its own.
He isn’t just another soldier who failed to check in. He’s the only remaining thread tying together Matteo’s death and the money transferred into Giovanni’s account to fund the hit. Now he’s gone, which means the answers may have gone with him.
The timing is another concern.
Just yesterday, Leo confirmed what Elena had already suspected. Her father had been innocent all along. None of his fingerprints were anywhere near the money that paid for Matteo’s death. The paper trail all but pointed to Enzo directly.
For him to vanish now right after that confirmation and right as a bounty surfaces on my son’s head isn’t coincidence. It can’t be. With him, everything is a strategy.
I lower my hand slowly, my jaw tightening as the pieces all begin to align into an ugly picture.
I haven’t had direct contact with my father’s inner circle in quite some time.
Not since before I brought Elena and Luca back from New York.
Distance at that time had been intentional, necessary, as I’d brought the woman I’d been in love with for close to two decades back into my life and with her, a son I never knew existed.
At the time, I hadn’t wanted their input. I already knew what would be said the moment any of them, especially Enzo, found out Elena was back in my life.
Since that time, we’ve spoken in brief conversations over the past few weeks. Routine check-ins, updates on negotiations, and a few contacts angling to renegotiate contracts. None of those conversations were anything that had raised alarms in my head.
Nothing that should have, at least.
But now I’m re-evaluating everything.