Isabella #2
I have spent years avoiding even thinking about that place too deeply, as if the country itself could send its ghosts to collect me even from hundreds of miles of ocean separating us.
Sometimes, the nostalgia for that time in my life hits me in waves, pieces of my life before all of it crumbled flashing through my mind without warning.
My family’s estate glowing gold in the afternoon, the cypress trees outside. My mother’s perfume hovering faintly in every hallway, the sound of the sea in the distance. Home before it became a crime scene.
Elio continues. “Your uncle told me about a ledger your father had been writing in at the time of his death. I wanted to go back to your family’s estate to see it for myself.”
I blink.
For a second, surprise cuts through every other emotion.
It is not the first time I have heard of it, nor have I been unaware of my father’s habits. Amos Russo recorded everything. He believed memory was only as useful as the records it derived from.
Every deal and promise ever made with a handshake, every lie disguised as respect was written and recorded in neat, disciplined script and stored like weapons.
As a child, I thought the ledgers were boring. Thick books with leather covers, locked away in cabinets I was not supposed to open.
I used to watch my father write in them late at night, his cigar burning low in the ashtray, his face half-lit by the lamp on his desk.
Sometimes, he would notice me standing in the doorway and sigh as if I were a nuisance, but he never sent me away.
Come here, Stellina. If you insist on haunting doorways, at least learn something useful, is what he would always say to me.
I would sit beside him, my legs dangling above the floor, while he explained things no girl my age should have understood.
I should have thought of those ledgers after his death. I should have searched his study and taken whatever pieces of him I could. But back then, I was not thinking like my father’s daughter.
I was nineteen and hollowed out by shock. I was grieving, terrified and unknowingly pregnant, betrayed by the man I loved so thoroughly that my own life felt unsafe in the only country I knew.
Before I left Italy for the States, I did not think about going through my father’s belongings and finding evidence of some hidden truth.
I thought only of survival, and then, once Matteo began growing inside me, I thought only of him.
My voice comes quietly. “What was in it?”
Elio inhales slowly. “Amos wrote about everything leading up to his assassination. Alessio…” He stops, eyes falling again.
The complicated look that tightens his expression is almost painful to witness.
Love, loyalty, disgust, grief, all of it braided together into something harsh and ugly.
“My brother approached him months before, offered your father a private deal to consolidate Russo territory with ours.”
My entire body goes cold at the words.
“When your father refused,” Elio continues, voice lower now, a little rougher, “Alessio threatened to kill him.”
My eyes widen. “What?”
Elio’s expression does not change much, but something in his eyes flinches. “I’m sure… you can connect the dots from there.”
My stomach twists.
I remember those late nights with my father leading up to his death, him teaching me how to read people, to see the moves three steps ahead, drilling it into me over and over until it felt almost desperate.
I remember the night of the gala when he was parading me around to the others in attendance under the guise of presenting me to find a husband.
All the while, he had been whispering tests in my ear to see if I could read the room around us in the way he’d taught me.
At the time, I had been annoyed and thought he was preparing me for marriage in the only way someone like him knew how.
As if a husband were another rival to negotiate with, another threat to assess across a table. Maybe in a way, he was.
But now I see something else.
Desperation.
He must have known he was walking into a trap. That at some point, he would no longer be around to protect me.
That night, he had not been showing me off. He had been testing whether I could survive without him or not.
Elio continues, his voice growing a little more gravelly. “The final entry was dated the night he died. Alessio called and gave him one last chance to choose sides. Your father chose you and your family, and Alessio had him killed for it.”
I stare at him for a long time. “Why?”
Elio is quiet for a while. When he lifts his eyes, they look sad. “For a monopoly of power. He has spent the last eight years convincing all of us that it was someone else’s doing. He wanted to take what your father would never have willingly given him.”
For eight years I have carried my father’s death as a wound of abandonment even though I know that is unfair.
Grief is rarely reasonable. It makes children out of all of us.
Some deeply traumatized part of me has always been angry with him for dying.
That he left me with enemies, questions, with a legacy that could never decide whether it wanted to crown me or bury me.
But now another truth pushes through. He tried. He tried to prepare me, and I had no idea I was being loved in the language of war.
I swallow hard, forcing my voice steady. “And you expect me to believe you discovered all of this and suddenly had a change of heart?”
Elio’s jaw tightens, shame flickering across his face for the briefest moment.
“I was blind, Isabella. I chose the syndicate over you because I believed it was the only way to protect you from the chaos. I convinced myself that distance would keep you safe. I was wrong. Everything I sacrificed was built on lies.”
A bitter laugh presses at my throat, but it dies before reaching my mouth.
He shifts in the chair. The cuffs bite at his wrists but he doesn’t seem to care.
His eyes are still focused entirely on me.
“I can’t ignore the truth anymore. I won’t watch Alessio come for you or Matteo again.
I came here alone because I am offering myself to you, and to Davide, as leverage.
Use me however you want, just… let me stay here so I can help end this war before it swallows what’s left of both our lives. ”
For a moment, I can only stare at him.
This is not the controlled underboss who walked away without a goodbye eight years ago or the man who’s kept me at arm’s length since ripping me away from my new life.
This is the man who once held me in that room inside the safehouse and kissed me like he meant it, like every brutal thing in him had gone quiet for one impossible moment because I had given him a reason to believe there might be more to life than duty and obedience.
This is the man who once whispered about nurseries and rings, about a future without our families’ names written in blood on opposite sides of the same grave.
Nearly a decade ago, he said those things to me with his hands in my hair and his forehead pressed to mine. He spoke so softly, I could almost pretend the world outside that room did not exist. All that mattered was the foolish, golden possibility of us.
I push up from the chair and slowly move around to the other side of the table.
His eyes track my movement, his hands still visible, posture tense but accepting, as if he has already decided that whatever I intend to do to him, he has earned it.
I move slowly around the table, each step feeling like a mistake I am choosing with full knowledge of the damage it will inevitably cause. His gaze never leaves me.
Not once.
It follows me with a kind of aching caution that makes my throat tighten.
When I stop in front of him, I can see the bruises more clearly. Faint traces of his fight with Alessio. Evidence that blood has already turned against blood, that the Conti family is no longer the disciplined machine they want the world to fear.
I lift my hand and Elio goes utterly still. For half a second, I think I might slap him. I imagine it vividly, the crack of my palm against his face.
The satisfaction of watching his head turn from the force of everything I never got to say. Eight years of grief and silence, of raising his son while he remained a ghost with a living pulse.
I should slap him.
Part of me desperately wants to.
Instead, my fingers touch his jaw lightly.
The shock of it moves through both of us.
His breath catches as I cup his face gently, my thumb brushing just beneath the line of bruising. His skin is warmer than I’m expecting. For years, Elio has existed inside me as memory, a figure preserved in the cold amber of betrayal.
Touching him now is a brutal reminder that he is real. That the man who ruined me beyond repair is sitting beneath my hand, tired and aching and looking at me like I am the last thing left standing in a city burned flat to the ground.
“Why should I trust you?” My voice comes out softer than I expect. “You disappeared from my life the night I needed you most. What makes this time any different?”
His eyes close just for a second. The words hit him harder than any slap could have. I see it in the way his expression tightens, in the way his throat works as if he has suddenly swallowed glass.
Alessio bruised his face, but I have found the tender spot beneath the bone. When he opens his eyes again, they are softer than I am expecting.
That terrifies me. Cruelty would be easier. Arrogance would give me something to hate without complication.
If he sneered, lied, if he wrapped himself in that familiar Conti pride and demanded my deferment, I could reconcile with that.
But this?
This quiet remorse of a broken man pressing his face almost imperceptibly into my palm like he has been starving for this tenderness he has no right to ask for?
This is far more dangerous.