Elio
I step into the small alcove just off the main room where one of the secondary terminals mirrors the feeds from the secured main rooms and rest my hand on the keyboard before I let myself think too hard about what I am doing.
The screen washes my skin in cold blue light. My fingers move with muscle memory. A few keystrokes is all it takes to disable the cameras inside Isabella’s room.
On the monitor, the room freezes for half a second on an image of Isabella standing near the wall with her arms folded, then it drops completely, replaced by a signal interruption icon that will look like a routine technical failure rather than sabotage.
I stare at the darkened square for a long moment. In hindsight, I already know what this will become the second Alessio notices. A problem. One question will soon multiply into ten.
Why disable the feed?
What are you hiding?
Why create privacy for a woman I keep insisting may be tied to Bianchi?
What conversation do you not want me to know about?
My brother will keep at it until whatever answer I give him finally satisfies him, or until he decides no answer exists that he trusts. Alessio not trusting me will not be some small inconvenience I’ll have to deal with for the time being.
He has lived his whole life waiting for the slightest proof that love makes men weak and weakness makes them disposable. If he smells either one on me where Isabella is concerned, he will not just question my judgment.
He will rid me of what he finds a distraction altogether.
Yet no matter how much of a pain in the ass that will be to deal with, it still doesn’t convince me to turn the feed back on.
I need privacy when I talk to her. I need her to speak without feeling the weight of a room full of eyes on me, especially my brother’s.
I exhale slowly and glance over around the wall and into the back room.
Through the doorway I can see Alessio half-turned away from me, one hand braced on the table while he listens to one of our men reading off the latest route reconstruction from Davide’s movements.
Bianchi currently has his full attention right now. That, at least, is the only silver lining I have at the moment.
That leaves me to take care of wringing as much information as I can from her before the room full of wolves decides their patience has expired.
I should be grateful for the opening but instead I feel something closer to dread. Now it will just be me walking into that room without witnesses, facing off against the woman who once could undo me with nothing more than the curve of her smile.
I flex my hands once over the keyboard before forcing myself to step back. The hall feels quieter on the way back.
Men still murmur in the other room, but all of it recedes as I approach her door.
My senses narrow until there are only the reinforced steel and a lock separating us both.
Whatever happens next will belong only to us.
I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I let out one slow breath through my nose and straighten my shoulders, forcing everything in me back into alignment.
Underboss.
A Conti.
Blade.
I pull those titles back over me the way one puts on a jacket, wrapping myself up until no one can see the storm brewing underneath.
The keys jingle inside my pocket when I fish them out.
The noise is small, almost ridiculous in how domestic it sounds, like I’m unlocking a home office instead of a secured room holding a hostage.
The key slides easily into the lock and the mechanism turns with a soft click on the other side, quiet enough that most people would miss it.
I don’t bother looking through the window to see her. I already know the sound of the door unlocking will be enough to rouse her from whatever it is she’s been doing. I swing it open and step inside, shoving the keys back into my pocket.
The air shifts the moment I cross the threshold.
Isabella is on her feet instantly. One second she is near the bed, the next she has moved, putting distance between herself and the door with the instinct of someone who has never once forgotten how quickly a room can turn deadly. Her gaze cuts to me in one sharp sweep.
There is no shock in them.
Only fury.
“Get out,” she snaps.
I close the door behind me and stay by it. My body leans back against the metal surface, and I roll my shoulders once, then again, trying to ease some of the tension locked through them before it turns visible in ways I cannot hide from her.
The movement is mostly useless because the tension stays right where it has been since I stepped foot inside her little blue house, coiled under my skin and too deep in my bones to shake loose with anything that simple.
There is no possible way she will get through me to escape, even with the door unlocked. Not physically, but she could try.
Hell, part of me expects her to.
But she knows it too. I can see the quick calculation in her face when she stares at me, the instant assessment of how much force it will take to remove the obstacle in her way.
She measures me the same way she had the rest of the room when she first arrived. When it’s obvious she’s decided the path in front of her is closed, the fury in her expression deepens further.
Good.
Anger is easier to deal with in this situation, anyway.
“I have questions you need to answer,” I finally say.
She laughs bitterly, but there is fire beneath it, the same fire that once drew me in like a moth to flame. Now it turns on me in full. “Are you kidding me? You kidnap me and my son, force us apart and take him to God knows where, and expect me to answer your fucking questions? Get bent, Conti.”
Her words land like punches, deserved in every sense. I can hear what she thinks of me in every syllable that comes rolling off her tongue.
Some part of me wants to cross this room and grab her and shake the anger out of her, while another part knows I have earned every bit of her hostility.
I keep my face still. “He is safe.”
Her eyes flash. “Do not lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
She takes a step toward me then. Her hair has fallen loose around her face, chestnut strands wild from fighting and the hours since we dragged her in here.
One sleeve of her sweater is torn near the wrist, exposing a strip of pale skin that should not still be capable of pulling my attention toward it. There is a fading mark on her cheek from where one of my men forced her to the floor to restrain her.
The bruise looks wrong on her. It sits on her skin like a signature I never wanted attached to her, let alone by my hand, even if indirectly. She looks every bit dragged through violence and coming out meaner on the other side of it.
Fear has not softened a thing about her. It has only burned away what little room was left for restraint and possibly negotiations.
There is something almost feral in the set of her mouth now along with the rigid lift of her shoulders.
Her eyes lock onto mine with such bright, vicious disbelief that for one second, I almost look away.
“Safe?” she spits. “You expect me to believe that?”
“What reason would we have to harm him?” I counter.
In my world, that is never a comforting sentence. All it really means is that I have not yet decided how I will use him against her.
How much pressure I need to break her, how much pain it will take to get what I want. How far I am willing to go before she gives me what I need.
She knows that better than anyone.
She was raised in the same blood-soaked cathedral I was. Different pew, perhaps, but under the same religion.
Her father perfected that tactic long before mine ever taught it to us. Amos Russo could pin a man to the proverbial cross with nothing but the threat of what might happen to the people he loved.
He didn’t need to speak violence aloud to get them to bend to his will.
Her expression shifts from raw, blazing maternal fury and pulls back by a few degrees.
Each inhale she drags in reels her farther from the edge until she gathers herself piece by jagged piece.
I can practically see her burying the instinct to lunge for my throat, fear for her son focusing her.
The woman standing in front of me now is no longer only a mother in panic. She is Amos Russo’s daughter, and Christ, she wears it beautifully.
“I want to see him,” she says.
For one reckless second, I almost give in.
I almost tell her I’ll take her to him now so she can touch him, hear him breathe, calm the terror I have no doubt is ripping through the both of them the longer they are forced to be apart.
Mercy almost wins. Or guilt. Whatever it is that remains inside me that still remembers how to feel something other than the comfortable numbness I’ve grown used to over the years when I look at her.
“You will after you answer my questions,” I tell her.
She holds my stare for a long, long time. There is nothing in her gaze now except contempt.
She looks at me like she can see every rotten layer beneath my clothing, under my title and the orders I give without hesitation, all the way down to the man who once agreed to impossible promises and just as quickly broke them.
There is hate in her eyes the longer that I hold her gaze with my own. But hatred from Isabella does not feel distant like it does with all of my other enemies. It feels deeply personal.
She is not looking at the underboss of the Conti syndicate. She is looking at me, Elio.
The man who rejected her nearly a decade ago and who came back with armed men and turned her life upside down.
If she slapped me, it would hurt less.
I force myself not to look away. Looking away first is surrender, and that is simply a weakness I cannot show her. Not with my brother already circling the scent of my hesitation like a wolf. “Davide Bianchi came to your house. Why?”
Her mouth twists. “I already told you. He came to ask me for a favor and I told him to leave and never come back.”
Every answer she gives feels plausible enough to trust and strategic enough to doubt. I push my tongue against the back of my teeth to keep my expression neutral. “What favor, Isabella?”