3. Elio #2
When he speaks again, his voice is even flatter than before. “He was found dead outside his compound. Two shots in the back of the head. No one has answers right now.”
Two shots in the back of the head. An execution. Not the kind of death men like Amos meet by chance.
That is without a doubt a message, though to whom remains unclear. Whoever did it wanted certainty that the head of the Russo family would have no chance at survival.
Whatever disruption of the status quo they hoped for is exactly what they will be getting.
My brother’s tone alone is enough to tug uncomfortably at my gut. My brother is not a man to give in to dramatics. If anything, he’s spent half his life sounding bored by disaster.
So when his voice hardens on the next sentence, it surprises me.
“People are looking at his daughter being behind it.”
My heart gives a hard, brutal tug.
The reaction is so immediate, it feels like a fist closing around the actual organ beating inside my chest.
My head snaps toward the same hallway I’d just come from, so fast, the movement almost hurts.
The dark line of it stares back at me, the shut bedroom door at the end suddenly transforming into more than just the place where Isabella is sleeping blissfully unaware of what’s befallen her father.
Why in the world would Isabella be a suspect?
It makes no sense.
I stare out at the city again and see none of it.
My mind is already somewhere else entirely, circling the same ugly question and finding no answer that does not stink of opportunism.
Yes, powerful men’s daughters are easy targets for speculation, that much is obvious.
Girls like Isabella are born under expectations where they are watched, weighed, and discussed as though they are only assets and not people.
Every glance gets interpreted, every absence becomes suspicious and the target of gossip and speculation.
Every flash of temper or disobedience gets stored away for later use by people happy to weaponize it.
Family gossip latches onto women like her because it is easy. Daughters are expected to be beautiful, obedient, and useful, and the second they stop fitting neatly into any one of those categories is when the whispers start.
But murder?
Patricide?
To leap there this fast means someone is either desperate for an explanation because higher authorities are already breathing down their necks, demanding names before Amos’s blood is even dry on the pavement, or someone is far too eager to offer up a theory that serves them personally.
In my world, people do not rush toward the most dramatic conclusion unless that buys them something, be it protection, influence, or time.
Accusing a dead man’s daughter buys a great many people all three.
I force myself to breathe again. “Why is that the first conclusion?”
Alessio is quiet for a beat.
Long enough for me to picture him standing somewhere in our family home with tension unnaturally tightening his features.
The whole estate is probably awake by now and moving like an anthill suddenly exposed to a predator.
“It isn’t. But no one can find her currently. So, as you might suspect, emotions are running high.”
A habit, an old one. A sign of annoyance so controlled, most people never notice it when it happens. Right now, it is the only outward tell I allow myself as my thoughts harden.
I grunt softly into the receiver.
Of course they can’t find her. She is in an apartment no one on Earth knows about.
In my bed, wrapped in my sheets with the marks of my mouth still on her skin and no idea her father is even dead while her name is already being dragged through the first circles of hell because she had the misfortune of vanishing from public view for a few hours.
Speculation has already done what speculation always does.
It has taken an innocent absence and twisted it into a conspiracy.
In our circles, missing is never innocent.
Not when power is about to shift. Every gap in a timeline becomes a breeding ground for suspicion.
If no one can account for Isabella’s whereabouts, then those around her will fill the silence with the version of events most useful to their appetites.
And right now, the most useful version is the ugliest, most damning one.
Though, if I am being honest… there is a silver lining, if I am willing to call it that. No one knows Isabella has been with me all night. At least not yet.
From what it sounds like, no witness has come forward saying they saw me follow her away from the banquet. There has been no link connecting my absence and hers together, which means what has happened between us will remain between only us.
That secrecy is the only reason I do not immediately feel the walls closing in around me at the moment. But that is a fragile comfort.
If her family were to find out I whisked her away tonight, all hell would break loose.
Not only because I touched her, but because I took something men like her father consider one of the only assets worth guarding in a daughter born into power, her body, her purity.
Her market value wrapped in obedience and all the suffocating Old-World rot our circles still dress up as tradition.
They would not see what happened between us as passion or the inevitable collision of two people who have been circling each other with too much hunger filling their veins.
They would see theft.
In a way, they would not be wrong. If they ever learned exactly what happened here and exactly how eagerly she came to me and the plans she proposed to me afterward, the fallout would be immediate and intense.
Men like Amos Russo do not believe in romance where their daughters are concerned.
They only believe in leverage and in the value of an untouched body and carefully managed appearances. They count worth in terms of contracts and alliances and bloodlines, never matters of the heart.
Ironically, in our circles, Isabella is far more valuable than I am. I am the underboss of the Conti family, a son raised for command and sent to end problems when diplomacy proves to be not enough.
My name carries weight, sure, fear and influence. But Isabella moves within another economy entirely.
She is beautiful, intelligent, well-bred, untouched enough to still be presented as a rare find.
A daughter of a powerful family with the pedigree to bind herself to another and create future deals and a bridge to whatever resources her family is after.
One day, they will use her to further some kind of gain for the Russo family.
Maybe territory, protection, access to the political circuit or ports or the supply lines of another syndicate that can offer better than we can.
Whatever form it takes, it will be dressed up as duty and prestige and what is best for the family, and she will have no choice but to comply.
Well, until now.
With Amos dead, everything is up in flames at this point.
Whatever feelings she has for her father, whatever frustrations or fears or quiet resentments that may exist beneath that encouraged her to propose running away with her to me, I do not believe it’s out of maliciousness or to cover up her own tracks.
This certainty I feel isn’t because I am developing feelings for her but because I know what it takes for someone to be capable of violence and that kind of execution.
I know how murder changes people no matter what form it comes in, whether that be from hands that get personally stained or through a proxy’s.
Tonight, when she was next to Amos, I saw many things reflected in those honey-gold eyes of hers. Weariness, calculation, restraint, but no intent to kill.
I wouldn’t have missed something like that.
“Elio.” My brother’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “Did you hear me? You need to come back home. Now. Father is already convening in the war room.”
I breathe out slowly, forcing my shoulders to relax. “I’ll be there in twenty.”