Elio #3
Christ, no. My brother has enough blood on his hands to fill this room ten times over with it. But against Amos, our closest ally?
A man whose death would knowingly shift the balance of power so completely that even now, eight years later, the ground beneath us is still moving with uncertainty?
He would never be that stupid, that brash, to think the repercussions of assassinating Amos would be absorbed easily.
I turn the page with fingers that no longer feel like mine.
Met with Davide tonight for advice. Warned him Alessio is moving against us. Something is wrong inside the Conti family—Vittorio may know about plans, no confirmation currently. Elio is being kept in the dark. He would not want this.
A rough breath leaves me.
He saw me, perhaps better than my own father ever has.
He knew I would not be leading the move against him because I had no reason to.
I did not understand there was a game being played around me, that I was standing in a room full of traitors with knives drawn behind their backs, waiting to strike at the perfect moment.
The words should absolve me from this crushing guilt, but all it does is deepen the wound forming.
Blindness is not a virtue to celebrate. It is what made me useful in allowing my brother to scheme behind my back and let my family’s empire remain intact while Amos’s life burned to the ground.
If I had been less trusting, perhaps none of this would have happened.
I keep reading.
Giovano—If anything happens to me, protect Isabella. She is the only one who can see the board clearly. Show her these journals.
My throat burns as I flip to the final entry. It is dated the night Amos died.
The handwriting is still neat as it always is, but there is tension in every stroke, a pressure that nearly tears through the page with each curled letter.
Alessio called. Said it was time to choose sides. I chose my daughter and our family. I chose what my ancestors built. May God forgive me for what comes next.
I stare down at the cold, irrefutable proof that my family—no, Alessio—orchestrated Amos Russo’s assassination.
My brother.
The boy I grew up beside.
The heir who smiled at dinners across from Amos while plotting to remove him from the board because he was inconveniently getting in the way.
None of this had been for the syndicate or because our family had been facing a catastrophic end and had been backed into a corner with nowhere else to go.
This has all been for his own personal ambition to monopolize the market. To take power he could not wait to inherit and expand it further.
And he let my father believe what?
That Amos had become unstable and needed to be taken out?
That Bianchi was involved and that is why we have spent the last six years trying to eradicate his syndicate from existence?
Or perhaps my father never knew, only discovering the truth afterward and choosing silence because the outcome had served him better.
That thought sits in me like poison.
My own brother had tried to warp me into believing Isabella had been the one playing me, that she had been the hand behind the knife all along.
All the while, he murdered her father and forced me to choose the same family that had already destroyed hers.
My brother stole not just Amos’s life, but Isabella’s innocence, her inheritance, safety, trust, and her future with me.
I helped him by not seeing clearly.
By obeying the rules I have always known and believing what was easiest because I have never had to question otherwise.
I had thought cowardice looked like running.
Like hiding under another name and disappearing from the world to start a life with someone else far away from the one that had molded you.
Now I understand cowardice can wear a suit and stand in war rooms. It can follow orders and call it honor.
It can look the woman you love in the eyes and tell her how things must end because fighting the inevitable seems foolish.
Because duty has already built the road.
Because family has already chosen the direction of the compass.
Because standing against your own blood feels like stepping off a roof and expecting the ground below to save you.
I told myself leaving Isabella alone was mercy.
I believed it because I needed to. The alternative was looking directly at the truth and admitting that fighting for her would have required me to become someone I was not brave enough to be.
It was easier to stand beside Alessio and my father and pretend the world had arranged itself beyond my control.
But there is nothing noble in surrendering someone else’s heart because yours is too afraid to revolt.
I press the heel of my hand against my sternum as if I can force the pain back. It sits there immovable, lodged beneath muscle and bone.
It’s guilt with a pulse, rage with nowhere to go, shame so deep, it feels inherited, as if the Conti name has stopped being armor to protect myself with and finally revealed itself as the very chains locked around my throat.
I will not be returning to the safehouse as the loyal underboss.
I can’t.
That man died the moment I recognized the bloodstain on the marble steps and read Amos’s final entry.
Or maybe he died eight years ago and has only now had the decency to show.
I look around the war room once more—at the maps pinned to the walls, the sagging strings connecting territories men have bled over, at the dust covering everything like the slow hand of judgment.
This room belonged to a dead man who saw the board clearly enough to understand the threat before it killed him and had been too late to stop it from happening.
Protect Isabella.
His words were not written to me, but they might as well have been.
I failed her once. More than once. I failed her in the silence after her father’s death and when I let Alessio’s suspicion become an excuse to push her away.
I failed her every year I let resentment take the place over wanting her because that would have required me to admit I still loved her.
And Matteo.
Christ.
Matteo.
He isn’t mine in any sense, but in some strange way, I still feel the ache of those seven years of his life all the same.
His mother spent all that time building a life with someone else because I was too stubborn to allow myself to claim her like we both wanted.
I cannot go back in time and convince her not to have a child with someone else, but I can be there for them both now without question.
For the first time in my life, that feels more than just a strategy detailed over a war table to punish my enemies.
It feels like penance for every hurt I’ve ever caused the one person I care about most in this world.
I gather the journal carefully and press the pages back together, slipping it into the inside pocket of my coat to keep safe.
It belongs to Isabella. She deserves to have the only piece of her father that is still left in this world.
I do not expect gratitude or forgiveness for returning the journal to her once I get back to the safehouse. She may still hate me, she has every right to, but I will tear the Conti syndicate apart from the inside before I let Alessio touch her or her son.
Once, the idea of destroying my family would have felt like treason. Now it feels like cutting rot from a wound before the infection reaches the heart.
Alessio has been the festering blight for years now, smiling at dinner tables while arranging our allies’ deaths and calling them opportunity.
My father may not have been the one to pull the trigger, but his silence built the gun Alessio fired from. His empire has always rewarded the kind of monster my brother became.
And I, the loyal son, obedient weapon, blind and ignorant underboss, helped keep it standing.
No more.
I am done putting family above the woman I love.