4. Elio
ELIO
I drive from my apartment to my family’s estate with the taste of Isabella still on my tongue and the echo of Alessio’s words ringing in my skull like a death knell.
The city is half-dead at this hour. Streetlights cast long, jaundiced streaks across the windshield as I cut through empty intersections and sleeping neighborhoods.
Usually I find comfort during the stretch of night when the city sleeps, but now it merely serves as a catalyst of what I know will be coming.
My hands tighten on the steering wheel until the leather creaks under my grip.
Thirty-three years of conditioning scream at me to compartmentalize, to lock the memory of her body beneath mine into a steel box and throw away the key because there are more important things to worry about right now.
Bury the distraction before it can be used against me.
This is the exact situation I was molded for. To manage the crisis and turn it into strategy, force the chaos into something more manageable to deal with.
I know how to be that man.
I have spent my whole life becoming him.
Yet every mile I put between Isabella and me feels like another fracture in the foundations I spent all these years building and reinforcing.
I hate that some part of me keeps tracking backward, imagining her waking to an empty bed, to my missing warmth and a silence she will not understand until she reaches for her phone and finds whatever hell will be waiting for her to answer on the other line.
I picture her face when she learns what happened with perfect clarity, disbelief at first, then the careful composure she wears like a second skin smoothing out her features.
And beneath that, the hurt she will hide because women like Isabella learned young that grief in our circles is safest when disguised as poise.
Hours ago, I had been ready to abandon all of this for her.
I had looked straight at the life that had been built for me and seen, for the first time, an exit.
I had imagined leaving, walking away from the syndicate, my father’s plans, the title that has sat on my shoulders since the day I turned twenty-one.
Yet the second my brother’s call summoned me back home, I’m hesitating. The fact that I am going back at all, leaving Isabella alone back at my apartment while the machine that built me starts turning once more, feels wrong.
I can already feel the gravity of her trying to pull me backward. All the weak points she exposed in me tonight are now bleeding and festering.
Underbosses are not supposed to hesitate like this.
They are not supposed to ache for a woman accused of murder, no matter how ridiculous the theory may be or how transparently convenient the accusation already sounds even to an outsider.
My laugh, when it comes, is short and humorless.
This is what weakness feels like, then.
How horrific.
The Conti family estate looms ahead as soon as my car cuts down the long, private road.
Its floodlights carve crisp white beams through the pre-dawn dark, bleaching the drive and the high iron gates in a cold, surgical glow.
The whole property looks less like a home and more like a fortress built expecting enemies to siege the front steps at every hour.
I have seen this place in every season, in every mood, under summer heats and winter frosts, yet tonight, it looks more somber than it ever has.
The guards at the gate nod once as I pass through, armed silhouettes standing rigid beneath the lights.
Their faces give away nothing.
Their eyes avert almost immediately as my car pulls through. They know better than to question the underboss returning before dawn from somewhere unknown.
In this house, curiosity is a vice people lose fingers for if indulged too openly.
Men who work for my family have all learned quickly that silence is often more valuable than openly unchecked curiosity.
Still, I feel their awareness on the car as I drive by.
The long drive curves toward the main house. The estate rises in front of me, every window lit from within.
The structure of this place has always been meant to impress and intimidate in equal measure.
My grandfather designed it that way, or so I was told.
Every security camera tucked into shadowed corners, every reinforced entry point hidden beneath Old-World looking luxury, is meant to remind guests that while they may be welcomed in, they will never truly be safe here.
I kill the engine as soon as I reach the front car park, my body sagging back into the seat for a few seconds as silence falls over me.
Allowing myself a few moments of reprieve before stepping into the chaos I know is waiting for me inside those doors is staving off the inevitable.
However long I sit here and dwell will not save me from having to soon deal with both my father and brother’s questions.
I let out a slow exhale through my nose before popping the driver’s side door open.
Before I can even step fully out of the car, two of my family’s attendants emerge from the side entrance with polished efficiency.
Their hands are already reaching for the car keys by the time I finally shut the door behind me, a silent understanding passing between us that they will pull the vehicle around to the secured garage and make sure it is ready again the moment I need it.
I pass by them with little acknowledgment other than to hand my keys over.
The main doors are open when I reach them and step through them. The shift in atmosphere hits me instantly the second I cross the threshold.
Inside, the estate is buzzing with tension.
The marble foyer gleams beneath the chandeliers, polished and immaculate as always, but the quiet luxury that is usually draped over this place has been ripped away and replaced with stress that feels suffocating.
Staff move briskly through the corridors with trays of coffee, fresh glasses, food, and whatever else has been requested from those above them.
Lita, one of my favorite housekeepers, passes by me without acknowledgement.
Her hair is half pinned up in a messy style, pieces of it falling around her face as though she had barely any time to make herself look presentable before someone barked for her downstairs.
Junior housekeepers follow after her in a tight cluster, all of their eyes pinned to the floor until reaching me.
Their heads turn subtly in my direction for a few seconds, a few eyes widening in my direction.
This house runs on control, on ritual, on the illusion that every piece of it moves according to design without flaw—outside or otherwise.
The underboss returning at this hour means whatever rumor had been spread to drag everyone out of bed has now been made real. It means the problem is no longer contained within the sealed walls of our war room.
Now that the heads of the family are involved this outrightly, the danger for our futures can no longer be denied.
I shrug off my coat as I walk and hand it to the first attendant quick enough to materialize at my side.
“Where is he?” I ask.
I do not need to specify exactly whom I’m referring to. In this house, when the situation is this ugly, there is only ever one man everyone turns to for direction.
“My lord is in the west study, sir,” the attendant says immediately. “With your brother.”
Not the war room, then.
That’s unusual.
The west study is where my father conducts the business he does not want overheard in the formal room downstairs.
It is a place designed for pressure rather than strategic moving, for men to walk in believing they have options and soon find themselves quickly in over their heads.
Hearing that Alessio is already with him sends a fresh pulse of tension running through me.
While I doubt my brother has any idea where I’ve been since the banquet, it also doesn't escape me that there is a very real possibility that his speculations surrounding my absence have already been brought to my father’s attention.
Or discussed in length.
I give one short nod and keep moving.
The corridor toward the west wing seems endless tonight. The portraits lining the walls of stern dead men in gilt frames watch with their usual painted severity as I pass.
Generations of Contis, all men who bled and schemed and murdered their way into permanence on our family tree.
The version of me this house expects, the one perfectly in line with the men whose portraits I now pass, has already begun settling over my skin again without thought.
It is easy to push away the memory of Isabella asleep in my bed now that this house is in full crisis mode.
As I near the west study, two armed guards stand outside the door. They aren’t the younger ones pulled hastily from rotations and scattered throughout the property but older men, trusted.
Ones my father has always placed at the threshold of his door whenever whatever is being discussed on the other side has the power to change the entire landscape of the city.
They step aside the second they see me, one of them opening the door without a word.
The light from inside spills across the hall, bleeding over my shoes in a long amber strip.
I pause only for the span of a single breath before stepping through it.
The west study always feels smaller when there is blood in the air. Not physically.
The room itself is vast by any reasonable standard with its coffered ceilings, dark walnut paneling, shelves lined in old tomes far exceeding my lifespan with even older secrets.
However, tonight, the space feels compressed by grief forced into motion as one singular death has changed the course of many things.
Maps are spread across the long mahogany table in the center of the room. Detailed territory layouts are marked with shipping routes, warehouses, safehouses, political districts, and known syndicates not allied with our own.
Red pins mark Russo territory, black pins mark ours. The colors look contradictory scattered across neighborhoods and docks, none of them intersecting.
I do not miss the fresh spaces already marked among the red. Nor the fact that more pins than usual have already been shifted on our side.