17. Alessio #2
"It was Turi," I repeat. "He’s been feeding us intelligence for fifteen years. He stayed close enough to the Bellantis to hear their plans and close enough to us to keep us from walking into them."
Dominic’s hand doesn't waver. "It doesn't change what he did. It doesn't bring back the dead."
"No," Turi says, finally standing. He doesn't look like a victim. He looks like a man who has finished his work. "It doesn't. I don't ask for forgiveness, Dominic. I never have. I only asked for time. Time to see you all grown. Time to make sure you were strong enough to survive without me."
"You don't get to say that!" Matteo screams, his voice breaking. "You sold my father! You left him in an alley like trash!"
"I loved Carlo," Turi says softly. "But Riza… Riza was the sin I never stopped committing."
The silence is absolute. The world stops spinning. The gunfire in the distance is a muffled hum to the sound of a twenty-year-old secret finally cracking open.
Riza. My mother.
"What did you say?" I ask, voice barely a whisper.
Turi looks at me, and I see the truth in his eyes—a jagged, painful thing. "I loved her, Alessio. Long before she was Carlo’s wife. I loved her, and I was weak. Lorenzo Bellanti knew. He used that love, and he used my debts, and he gave me a choice, and I took the coward's one."
"You chose your debt and called it saving her," I say, the words feeling like lead in my mouth.
"I tried to save her," Turi says, a single tear tracking through the blood on his face.
"I thought if I gave them the routes, they would leave her alive. I thought I could buy her life with Igor and Carlo’s routes.
I was a fool playing with monsters, and I lost everything.
All I had left were their children. All I had left was the chance to make sure you didn't follow them into the ground. "
Only when the courtyard line holds does Dominic step forward, the muzzle of his gun inches from Turi’s forehead. "You’re done talking, old man."
"Dominic, stop," I say.
"He’s a traitor, Alessio!" Dominic roars. "He’s the reason we’re orphans! He’s the reason the Bellantis knew where to find them!"
"I know!" I yell back, stepping into Dominic’s space.
I don't care about the gun. "I’ve been hunting this ghost for eleven years!
But look at us, Dom! Look at this family!
We are the Costas. And if we kill him now, in the middle of a battle, without a trial...
then we let the Bellantis decide what we became. "
Dominic’s chest is heaving. I see the battle behind his eyes—the Don versus the brother.
"He dies," Dominic says, but the iron is gone from his voice.
"He’ll answer," I say, looking at Turi. "But not as a rat in a hole. We convene the tribunal. At dawn. In the courtyard. We hear the full confession. We record the names of everyone involved. And then, we decide the fate of the man who saved us and destroyed us."
The silence stretches, heavy with the scent of ozone and blood.
Dominic slowly lowers his gun. He looks at Turi with pure loathing. "Fine. Dawn. Lock him back in the sub-level holding room. If he speaks to anyone before then, he speaks with me in the room."
Santi and Dante step forward, grabbing Turi by the arms. Matteo's hand twitches toward him and stops, caught between the father Turi sold and the boy Turi just saved. He goes limp, head hanging low as they lead him away. As they pass me, Turi stops. I hear his voice, a faint, rasping sound.
"Thank you, Alessio."
I don't answer. I just watch them disappear into the shadows.
The brothers disperse to finish the fight.
Nico's team drives the last shooters back through the breach; Enzo collapses the garden approach with a second charge.
The Bellantis are retreating, their attack failing as the sun begins to peek over the horizon.
The compound is still standing. We are still here. But the foundation is gone.
I feel a hand on my shoulder. I turn, and for a moment, the world is right again.
Amara.
The panic-room door must have released when the inner perimeter cleared, because she’s here, covered in soot, eyes red-rimmed and tired, but whole.
She’s alive. I pull her in hard enough to prove she’s real, then make myself loosen my grip.
I bury my face in her neck, breathing in smoke and sweat and her.
"You’re okay," I growl, hands roaming over her back and shoulders. "Tell me you’re not hit."
"I'm fine, Alessio," she says, fingers digging into my tactical vest. "The attack—Fabio—"
"Alive. He’ll stay that way." I pull back to look at her. She’s the only anchor I have left in this wreckage, and I owe her the last piece of the truth she paid for tonight. I show her the screen without letting go of the evidence.
"What is this?"
"Fifteen years of warnings. Every anonymous tip. Every convoy that turned around in time. The Guardian that Vincenzo hunted through the wires—the hand that kept this family alive while I hunted the man who bled it."
Her eyes move over the screen, and I watch her do the terrible arithmetic in three seconds flat. Both columns. One hand.
"The knife and the shield," she whispers.
I look toward the basement door.
"It was always Turi. The wound and the bandage."