2. Elio #3
The contact is warm, more intimate than anything else we have done tonight. “You do know, Elio.”
My jaw tightens again.
The simple certainty in her voice hits harder than if she had demanded an answer outright.
She is not guessing with this. She is telling me she knows the truth with the quiet confidence of someone who has already seen it written all over my face.
I should take it back, pretend I only meant the obvious hunger between us that is the physical want, the easier vice.
But I cannot seem to force the lie out.
Not with her hand still resting over my heart and her eyes silently daring me to confess what is already on the tip of my tongue.
I lift a hand, brushing my fingers along the side of her face.
My knuckles skim her cheek, my thumb drifting down to her lower lip, still swollen from my kisses, still carrying some visible evidence of my lack of restraint.
The sight of that mouth should drag me back toward hunger. Instead, it drags something deeper out of me.
“A future where I’m not just an underboss,” I say quietly, swallowing thickly. The words feel heavy the moment they leave me, each one a stone dropping into dark water, disappearing quickly beneath the rippling surface. “But… a husband. A father.”
The confession hangs between us for one terrifying moment.
No gun has ever made me feel this exposed before. This is the most honest I have ever been in my whole life.
Not just with her but with myself, too.
I have thought about pieces of it before this, passing fantasies I crushed under the heel of reason the second they appeared.
The image of a woman beside me at a table that belongs only to us and a child asleep in her arms, my name spoken not in fear but with love, have all been nothing more than impossible desires that I have always dismissed for what they were, weakness dressed up as longing.
Except hearing it out loud, stripped of all excuses, I realize it has never been that.
It has been grief in advance for a life I assumed I would never be allowed to have.
She smiles then, the expression so soft, it almost hurts to look at.
She rises from where she has been resting against me and leans over, her hair brushing over my chest, her mouth finding mine in a kiss that is nothing like the desperate hunger from earlier.
This one is slower and more tender. When she pulls back, her forehead lingers on mine.
Her voice is barely above a murmur when she says, “Then take it, Elio. We could build a future together without all of this. We don’t have to be stuck being tied to what our families want forever.”
I stare at her.
For a second, I do not speak because I… can’t.
Nothing has ever hit me the way these few simple words do. Not because they are naive.
Isabella is far from that.
She knows the cost of what she is asking for—our bloodlines, our syndicates, our fathers who have planned our futures well before either of us were ever born.
She knows what would happen if either of our families understood the depth of what has taken root between us tonight.
And still… she says it anyway.
For the first time in my life, I actually believe it may be possible.
Suddenly, I cannot remember why I ever thought the path before me was the only one that existed.
My older brother has always been my father’s heir, not me.
And now I can see with terrifying clarity that walking away from the syndicate and letting my father’s empire continue without me would only lead to a minor fallout.
I could see myself giving up everything for her and taking her somewhere the names Conti and Russo mean nothing except for what we choose to make of them.
I could do it if it meant keeping her in my arms like this.
That thought should fill me with shame and reflexive contempt that I have always reserved for men who lose empires over women.
Instead, it fills me with something quieter and far more dangerous.
Hope.
I look at her, really look at the steadiness in her eyes and the confident certainty she is offering me as what I can only perceive as a lifeline.
In this very moment, I would burn down every expectation placed on my shoulders if that was the price of keeping her.
“Walk away with me,” she whispers.
I have inherited expectations so heavy, they might as well have been shackles forged into my bones.
I have been told since boyhood what belongs to me, what I am owed, what I am meant to protect, expand, and eventually pass on.
None of it has ever touched me like this.
None of it has ever made me look at the woman in my bed and feel my entire body revolt at the idea of stepping away from her warmth.
Here, in the dark, she is only Isabella.
Not Amos Russo’s daughter, not a bargaining chip wrapped in cream silk and family expectations or the dangerous temptation I should have crushed the moment I understood what she could become to me.
Just Isabella.
Mine, some savage part of me whispers.
My hand slides to the back of her neck, holding her there gently. “Okay.”
For the first time, I can see an edge beyond the empire.
And on the other side of it, I see only her.