Elio
I fly back to Italy under the cover of a business trip alone and without an entourage.
That alone has made half my men nervous the moment my announcement made it through the chains of command. Underbosses do not travel without their shadows.
It’s considered dangerous for men like me to move through the world unguarded.
Oftentimes, when going on business trips similar to this one, we turn hotels into temporary fortresses and restaurant reservations into perimeter checks.
Every public step is measured, every private one documented by someone loyal or too afraid of the repercussions to not keep us breathing.
For the next two days, though, it will just be me, a forged itinerary, a private jet logged for a meeting with investors in Milan, and a dark suspicion sitting heavily in my chest.
The flight there feels endless.
Outside the window, the sky stretches on endlessly. I sit in the cabin with one glass of whiskey untouched on the table in front of me and my phone lying face down beside it, silent except for one encrypted message sent to my brother and father detailing the takeoff.
The long hours stretch on, giving me time to get lost in my own thoughts, though I try to stay away from thinking about Isabella left behind in that room. I’m sure she’d be elated to know I’m gone, far enough away from her that I can no longer reach her or her son.
Her hatred I can understand. I can carry it because it is well deserved, much like most of the vitriol and insults she’s hurled at me thus far.
It keeps distance between us even if I hate it, reminding me once again that I am the one who stormed into her life and dragged her back into this darkness.
What I never expected was for Isabella Russo to thank me.
I wasn’t looking for anything to come from reuniting her with her son, least of all that.
I gave Matteo back because keeping him from her had become unbearable to watch.
For years I let myself imagine she disappeared because she wanted to punish me. Because she found a life better than the one I refused to choose and maybe, somewhere far away from me, she had learned to breathe easier without me.
I had held onto that resentment and anger for years, allowing it to excuse the hurt I continued to inflict on her the longer I kept her separated from her son.
Yet every hour I kept them apart, something in me tightened.
Watching her pace that room, her eyes lifting every time to the camera like she knew I was there witnessing her impending breakdown, felt the claws dragging down my chest and splitting me open.
I told myself giving him back was the only logical conclusion. It was a way to calm her and stabilize an already toxic situation from becoming worse than it already had turned into.
I could not keep watching her suffer and still pretend I was anything other than my father’s son.
That should have been the end of it, a wrong made slightly less wrong though never quite undone. I expected relief from her and maybe rage once she realized the gesture did not mean freedom.
But then she did something I never accounted for. She turned her eyes up to the camera I watch every single night and thanked it—thanked me.
I grip the armrest of the jet seat and stare out the small oval window at the black sky beyond it, but there is nothing out there to anchor me. My reflection stares back at me in the glass.
Gratitude is a small, treacherous thing.
It slips beneath my armor and finds the soft places still left inside me and whispers that maybe she believes I am not entirely beyond saving, after all.
If Isabella hates me, I at least know where I stand.
I can survive as a villain in her world because that’s what I’ve been for almost the past decade.
But this… this tenderness… I don’t know how to deal with it.
She is planning something. I know it by the way she watches the hallway outside when the guards come and go with her food. That should alarm me. Instead, a grim sort of pride rises in my chest before I can kill it.
Of course she is planning to do something. Isabella Russo could be chained in the belly of hell and still be looking for loose stones to wiggle and escape through.
She was born for strategy, trained by a man who understood that power is not always held by the person holding the gun. Sometimes, it belongs to the one patient enough to know where the gun will be pointed to next.
My father never understood that about her. That is why he believes she is worth nothing more than to use as a pressure point against someone else. Alessio does, and that is why he fears her influence over me.
My mouth almost curves up despite myself. Then the pride curdles into something heavier, flattening my expression once again. If she is planning something, then she is planning against me too.
She has to.
I am not separate from the system she’s trapped inside. I am not some guard standing outside the cage with orders I cannot refuse and regret in my heart.
I’ve kept the keys to her freedom in my pocket while telling myself I am protecting her from dangers worse than me, as if that absolves the fact that she still wakes behind a locked door each and every morning.
Giovano’s words move through me again.
Protect her from all of it. Including yourself.
I stare down at my hands.
They are the same ones that have signed orders, broken bones, pulled triggers, dragged men out of hiding, and held Isabella’s face when I had no right to ever touch her again.
The Conti in me wants to claim what is mine while the man in me, whatever is left of him, knows I have not earned that right in the slightest.
Flying back to the birthplace of her grief with the taste of my family’s sins still bitter on my tongue feels both overwhelming and impractical.
Chasing the remains of a dead man’s ledger and the possibility that every lie I have lived under was built with my own father’s hands comes with its own high price.
One I am willing to pay if it means finally finding out the truth.
Italy rises beneath me in glittering fragments.
The faintly illuminated coastline breaks when it touches the scattered lights of the residential areas beyond it. Roads stretch through them like veins beneath the skin of the land. I watch it appear and feel no homecoming, only the sick sense of dread slowly washing over me.
By the time the plane touches down, I have folded every feeling back into its proper boxes and pulled the familiar mask of my family’s underboss over me.
It doesn’t take long to move through the private terminal under a false passport and head for the main entrance leading out into the cool morning air.
A car is already waiting for me at the front terminal, parked exactly where I arranged for it to be dropped off.
I take the keys from the valet and go.
The road out of the city is quiet beneath the dark wash of early morning.
Fog still clings thickly over the road, making it almost impossible to see through even with the car’s lights cutting through it.
The closer I get to the Russos’ former territory, the more the landscape seems to withdraw into itself.
I remember coming here with my father years before its downfall and finding myself bored by the beauty because I was young and stupid enough to think it resembled exactly what I had at home.
I remember Isabella walking ahead of me through one of the gardens at the estate while her father guided us on a tour of the property, finding myself drawn to her with no reasons as to why.
Her dress had been pale blue then, complimenting the color of her hair that had been loose down her back in thick waves.
She had turned once to glance over her shoulder, catching me looking, and instead of blushing, she lifted a brow as if daring me to deny it.
I had wanted her even then.
Maybe that was why Alessio saw the danger before I did.
I thought attraction was something I could control, but perhaps he had recognized worship in its earliest form taking root and believed crushing it would save us all from future disputes.
In hindsight, it had been a noble effort.
One done far too late.
The abandoned Russo estate appears through the thinning fog, emerging slowly as the car takes the winding road up to it. At first, it is only a vague shape of pale stone and black iron, half swallowed by the morning mist clinging low over the grounds.
Then the road bends again and the cypress trees fall away, the house revealing itself piece by piece.
Even after eight years with neglect pulling it apart by the seams, the estate still has a grand presence, that old Russo arrogance carved into stone with its tall windows, wide terraces, and iron balconies twisted with dead vines.
My hands tighten around the wheel. I park far enough from the entrance that the car is hidden by overgrowth, pulling it into a gap between wild hedges and a collapsed stretch of stone wall.
I kill the engine and sit there for a moment, listening to the ticking heat of the car settle around me. The silence feels unnatural without the usual machinery of my life moving around me.
I step out of the car and close the door quietly, adjusting my coat as I scan the road behind me.
Only fog eats the distance in both directions.
While I doubt any syndicate would be stupid enough to still patrol this dead section of Russo territory, I am also not in the mood to unexpectedly involve myself in a shoot-out over it.
Gravel crunches quietly beneath my shoes as I move toward the entrance.
The sound feels too loud in the morning hush. The gates are chained shut, the iron old and weather-bitten, dark with rust where rain has eaten through the metal.
The chain is rusted badly enough that a few hard kicks sever it apart.
The metal snaps with a brittle groan, falling against the gate in a clatter that slices through the fog. I exhale slowly and push the gate open.
It complains the whole way, hinges shrieking softly as if the estate itself resents being disturbed.