4. Elio #3
As the only two sons from our father’s line, Alessio and I have always been unusual in one respect—neither of us has ever been interested in turning succession into sport.
The future of the syndicate has always sat between us like a practical problem waiting for the right time to be solved, not a crown to be torn from the other’s head.
Eventually, once our father passes, we will sit down and discuss the details, I have no doubt of that.
But even then, I have never believed any real rivalry would occur between us.
We were not raised to fracture like lesser bloodlines fighting over smaller scraps.
We were raised to function like a well-oiled machine. Alessio thinks, I strike. Simple.
Feeling any kind of anger toward him is unheard of. Even now, it feels unnatural despite the emotion raging through me.
I do not know what unsettles me more, that he is implying Isabella is behind any of this or that I am one breath away from stepping around this table and reminding my brother, quite physically, that there are boundaries even he does not get to test.
I school my face into an indifferent mask before I can betray anything.
“There’s no reason she would be involved in this. It isn’t like she’d gain anything. She’s a woman,” I say flatly.
The words taste like ash in my mouth. I hate saying them. I hate even more hiding behind the same patriarchal logic that has caged Isabella her whole life. But in this room, at this moment, it is useful. Men like my father and brother do not see women as capable unless they are forced to.
If I can shove Isabella back beneath the category of ornamental irrelevance in their minds to turn their scrutiny elsewhere, I will do it.
Alessio’s smile is thin. He knows exactly what I am doing. “Displeased daughters become weapons all the time, Brother. Especially when there are promises made from a third party.”
My eyebrow ticks. He is pushing my buttons now. “Promises such as…?”
He lifts one shoulder in an almost lazy shrug. “Freedom, perhaps? Something else equally desirable? Whatever could be promised to convince a daughter to plot against her own father wouldn’t be something simple.”
My hands flex at my sides.
Freedom hits too close to the conversations Isabella and I had mere hours ago back at my apartment, to the future she told me we could build if we walked away from all of this and never looked back.
Standing here in my father’s office, that offer follows me like a ghost.
For the first time in my life, the path laid out for me since birth feels less like destiny and more like a cage. In her arms I saw a different life, one without war rooms and replaced by quiet mornings spent learning how to take care of something fragile instead of breaking it.
In that moment, lying there with her tucked against my side, I truly believed I would give all of this up.
The syndicate.
The power.
The name.
I believed it with a clarity that still frightens me now.
If I had never known Isabella, I could have gone on as I always have. I know the terrain of my family’s business better than I know my own reflection. It is ugly, but it is fluent to me.
I know how to become the version of myself this world demands from me without hesitation, and it reminds me how easy it would be to stay.
I can protect Isabella better from inside the machine than by abandoning it. But is that enough to justify the cage trapping me by calling it necessary?
It is easy to convince myself that walking away can wait until this crisis passes, until the next threat is buried, until the next war cools, until the next excuse arrives dressed up as responsibility I can’t afford to refuse.
Until later becomes a whole life spent serving something that never intended to let me go in the first place.
So what is the alternative now that I have had a taste of what I never knew I wanted?
Because tasting it has changed everything.
Now I know what peace felt like for a few stolen hours and to want not just a woman’s body, but her mornings, her trust, her future, her hand over my heart while I confessed the most dangerously vulnerable things to her I have ever said out loud.
Can I go back to living my life as Elio, the Conti family’s underboss now that I know there is another life somewhere beyond the walls of this one?
I do not know.
Maybe I have been tainted by something far more dangerous than weakness…
Maybe it is by the slow, unbearable awareness that life might have held more for me than blood and blind obedience if I had only been born elsewhere to softer people under a kinder name.
My father’s voice breaks through my thoughts. “We will need to locate Isabella as soon as possible.
She needs to be questioned before any more of this gets out to the other syndicates.”
I pull in a slow breath. “I’ll look for her.”
I don’t miss the look my brother eyes me with.
Making me hesitate where once I would have acted without blinking. If that is what Isabella Russo has done to me, then it is the most exquisite ruin I have ever known.
And maybe the real truth is that I’m not sure I want to be cured of it.