Elio #3
My father studies me for a long time. When he exhales, there is a quiet laugh attached to it. “You see? This is what love does. It makes them weak and untrustworthy.” Then he turns away, heading for the door. “Enjoy your victory, Elio. Small ones are often the most expensive.”
I don't move. My hand stays near my gun until his back disappears through the doorway. Alessio follows, but not before giving me one final look.
It is full of warning and disappointment and something sadder than both. Grief, maybe, buried so deep, he would rather slit his own throat before admitting to it.
His eyes flick once toward Giovano, then back to me, a silent promise flashing in his eyes.
This is not over.
I answer with nothing but my stare.
When the door closes behind him, I am left in the interrogation room with Giovano Russo’s blood on the floor and his eyes on me. Blood has dried in dark streaks along his chin and has painted the front of his shirt in thin rivulets, his left eye swelling shut from Alessio’s blow.
I know what he sees, someone standing between him and death, but still a Conti.
The son of the man who he believes destroyed his brother. Trust is not something men like me get to demand after an event like this.
It is built slowly over time or destroyed quickly, and everything my family has ever touched has apparently ended in ruin.
But that does not stop the question that has been chewing at the inside of my skull. “Do you truly believe my father was behind Amos’s death?”
For a second, he does not answer. His chest rises and falls in shallow, painful pulls, his breath rasping faintly through his nose.
Then he coughs, a wet, brutal sound that bends him forward as far as the restraints allow. The chair creaks beneath him as pain flashes across his face, tight enough that even his hatred cannot fully hide it.
When he recovers, he spits blood onto the plastic sheeting at his feet and winces as he lifts his head again.
“Yes.”
I feel something in me resist it on instinct. Some old, loyal part of me that still flinches away from the possibility of my family being involved, reaching for explanations or some version of history I was fed and swallowed obediently.
“What proof do you have?” I ask. “Other than what you have already said.”
He pulls in a ragged breath, spitting out more blood before rolling his shoulders back.
“There was a ledger my brother wrote in religiously back then. One he never left the estate without. After his death, I had been searching for information to help piece together a timeline of his movements the day of the assassination. That’s when I found the ledger. ”
There is a faint ache behind his eyes.
Amos Russo with a ledger.
Of course, it fits too well.
I remember seeing him at meetings with his hand sometimes resting over a closed leather book beside his glass. I never thought much of it then.
Amos had always seemed like the type to keep evidence close, though not because he feared betrayal, exactly. There always seemed to be another hidden agenda within him. One I never cared to question until now.
Had he planned on needing an insurance policy? Proof for something?
Giovano swallows, his throat working hard.
“After his death, I searched for information. Who he met, which routes he took and if they changed for some reason, what calls came in before he left the estate for the gala. I wanted to know every step he took that night leading up to what happened.” His eyes harden. “That is when I found the ledger.”
My hand drops from my gun.
Something has shifted inside me again, a slow grinding turn of machinery that cannot be reversed. This is no longer an accusation he has shouted out of anger.
Unlike what my father suspected, I cannot definitely say this is his grief sharpened into suspicion and aimed at the wrong target. If there is a record that may have survived the fall of Isabella’s father, then it needs to be examined thoroughly.
I glance back over my shoulder to make sure the door is still closed before walking toward Giovano. He watches me warily, his body tensing even before I reach him, bracing for whatever pain he thinks will come next.
I hate that I cannot blame him. He has no reason to believe I am different from any of my family members.
Quite honestly, I’m not. Maybe the only thing separating me from my brother in this moment is the simple fact that my curiosity has been piqued.
My hand rests over the file left behind by him.
The folder is still open on the metal table, pages inside marked with printouts of messages between Giovano and Davide, timestamps, routing chains, all of it neat and damning and now suddenly suspect.
The elegant little noose Alessio had been so pleased to tighten is now being called into question.
I press my palm down over the paper.
“Where is this ledger?”
He doesn’t answer me right away. His one open eye tracks my face, searching for the trap. His suspicion breathes between us and I understand too well why.
Standing here and asking for the one thing that may prove my father’s guilt will undoubtedly put Giovano in a precarious position.
One where he will be forced to decide whether handing the information over will guarantee his and Isabella’s safety or damn them.
“Why protect her?” he asks suddenly.
Why now?
Why her?
Why stand up to your father after eight years of kneeling?
I could give him the simple answer, because Isabella is mine, though not in any way I have the right to say out loud. My father just proved every fear she ever had was justified, as did my brother.
The thought of her standing in this room, forced to watch the last living piece of her father’s world die under Conti hands, makes something in me grow violent.
I think of Matteo’s frightened eyes looking at me from his mother’s arms. I look at the blood on the floor and think of Isabella at just nineteen standing by my apartment windows with tears in her eyes she refused to let fall.
I think of her asking me to run away with her, and of myself saying I couldn’t.
Regret is a horrid beast.
“Because someone should have,” I finally say.
I press my tongue hard to the back of my teeth until pain steadies me. I turn away before he can see too much written on my face. There is already too much of me exposed in this room.
If I let myself feel all of it now, I will not make it down the hallway without tearing this house apart trying to get back to her.
Behind me, Giovano speaks again. “If you want to protect her, protect her from all of it. Including yourself.”
I close my eyes for half a second, my hand pausing on the door handle.
In a way, he is right. I am part of the danger closing in around Isabella and her son.
I have been from the beginning, even when I thought I was keeping my distance to spare her.
I told myself my absence was a mercy, a brutal kindness and the only gift I knew how to give a woman born too close to the same violence that made me.
I was the blade hanging over her head, polished enough to reflect whatever lie I needed to believe in order to push her away.
I still am.
And yet, I still want to be her shield.
What a grotesque kind of arrogance.
I step out and lock the door behind me. For a moment, I stand in the hallway with my hand still on the knob while the safehouse moves around me.
Men murmur somewhere down the corridor while a radio crackles. Boots move across the hardwood in steady increments.
Life continues on in the belly of the monster as if nothing fundamental has changed at all. Inside me, an old allegiance has cracked, however. I can no longer ignore what is blatantly standing right in front of me.
By the time I reach the end of the hallway, I know one thing with absolute clarity. I need to find that ledger.