Elio
Nearly a week has passed inside Davide Bianchi’s fortified estate. Every hour has felt like walking a razor’s edge between salvation and damnation.
I have given them everything I know, from codes to the safehouse and the routes taken for supply drop-offs to names of men who will always remain loyal to my brother and father.
Davide takes it all in, never fully trusting me, but he uses the information, anyway. Isabella stays close during the planning sessions, her brilliant mind dissecting every detail I offer, her honey-gold gaze flicking to me only when she thinks I won’t notice.
The tension between us is a living thing, thick and electric, made worse by the memory of her body pressed against the terrace wall and the confession that still burns on my tongue.
She loves me and Matteo is mine.
That knowledge does not come with pride as much as I would have expected it to. Instead, it comes with grief from seven years of missed mornings, scraped knees, school lunches, bedtime stories, birthdays, fevers.
Seven years of a boy growing into my face without knowing mine ever existed. Isabella spent years surviving alone because I gave her no reason to believe I would choose anything other than duty when it mattered.
It wouldn’t be fair of me to hate her for keeping him from me. She did not do so out of cruelty. I understand why she chose to run and hide him from the Conti name.
Matteo is never far from her side. My son watches me with quiet curiosity, asking careful questions that cut deeper than any interrogation I’ve ever faced before.
I answer what I can, trying to earn the trust I don’t deserve yet. Every small smile he gives me feels like both a gift and a punishment.
One that I readily accept without question.
However, tonight, that fragile balance breaks when my phone vibrates on the nightstand, waking me.
At first, I think it is part of a dream. Some distant buzzing beneath the surface of sleep, low and insistent like a fly trapped behind glass. My body resists it because for the first time in days, maybe years, I have managed to drift into something close to rest.
Isabella is warm against me, her back tucked to my chest, her hair spilling across my arm. For a few stolen hours, the war outside Davide’s walls has felt like a beast pacing somewhere beyond the property line instead of breathing down my neck.
Her hand rests over mine where it lies against her stomach. Even in sleep, she holds me there as if part of her body has forgotten all the reasons she should push me away.
The phone vibrates again.
Isabella stirs faintly, her fingers tightening over mine before relaxing. I go still, waiting to see if she wakes. Her breathing remains slow, her body curled into the mattress with exhaustion heavy in every line of her.
I should let it go to voicemail. I know that before I move. There are only so many people who still have this number, and none of them come with clean hands.
Over the past few days, I have earned enough of Davide’s trust to allow me use of my phone again, something I have been steadfast in not taking advantage of.
I know what trust costs in houses like this. I know how quickly it can become a collar around my neck if handled wrong.
I pull away from Isabella carefully. She makes a soft sound in her sleep, turning slightly toward the warmth I leave behind. The sight of it twists something deep inside me.
For years I dreamed of having her beside me again. I never imagined I would have to leave the bed like a thief because someone is calling me.
I roll to grab the phone. The number flashing across the screen freezes the blood in my veins.
My father.
I stare at his name until the letters stop looking correct. I could ignore it. I should ignore it.
Nothing good has ever come from answering when my father calls, least of all now when I’ve been MIA for several days after my flight returned from Italy.
My thumb slides across the screen almost unconsciously.
I press the phone briefly to my chest as I stand, letting the silence on the line listen to my heartbeat before I step away from the bed. The floor is cold beneath my bare feet.
I cross the room without turning on the light and slip out onto the private balcony overlooking Davide’s grounds.
“Elio.” My father’s voice cuts through the other end of the line, edged with command and, surprisingly, exhaustion.
Vittorio Conti is not a man who ever sounds tired. He drains the life from his enemies and delights in the satisfaction of watching those he deems weaker crumble.
Strangely, though, tonight, there is something worn beneath his anger, frayed enough to let me hear the age in him.
“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you. Isabella and the boy are gone. Alessio is tearing the city apart looking for them. I know your flight landed days ago. Come home immediately,” he demands.
I lean against the iron banister and stare out at the armed patrols. “No.”
A stunned silence follows. “What did you just say?”
My hand grips the banister until my knuckles go white.
Once, those words would have moved my body before my mind had time to object. Now they strike something that has long since grown cold.
“No.”
A stunned silence follows. It is almost satisfying. “What did you just say?”
“I said no.”
“Elio.”
He used to use my name like a hand around the back of my neck when I was a boy, shaking whatever defiance I had in me out of my system until all that was left was blind obedience.
One word used to carry that weight of ownership, silently telling me, You are my son, my blood, my weapon. You do not refuse me.
I close my eyes briefly.
All I see is Amos Russo’s handwriting.
Alessio Conti approached me privately.
Threatened to remove me as an obstacle.
Elio is blind to it.
My eyes open. “Did you know Alessio met with Amos Russo privately weeks before the assassination? That he offered a deal to merge territories and threatened to remove Amos if he refused?”
The line goes so quiet, I can hear my own breathing. Then my father growls, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m asking you a question.”
“And I am telling you to get home. Now.”
The old instinct kicks once inside me, a phantom chain tightening around my throat that has slowly begun to slip from it. I cut him off before it can pull any harder. “I saw Amos’s private journal and the dated entries from that time period. He recorded everything.”
His voice grows hard. “Where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters very much if you have placed yourself in the path of a war you do not understand.”
A laugh almost leaves me.
A dead ally… even now, he’s trying to save face despite the ghosts of his past coming back to haunt him and point the finger of judgment in his direction.
Has he always seen me as a fool? Or have I just been so complacent all my life that he’s never had to convince me to believe him?
“He wasn’t your ally at the end, though,” I say. “Was he?”
“Elio.”
“Did you know,” I bite back, “or did you not?”
“You’re letting that Russo woman poison you again.”
As if the only explanation for my sudden disobedience is her influence and not the fact that what I found in Italy is proof our family’s deception runs far deeper than I ever expected.
It is insulting that he believes my conscience is too weak to wake without a woman whispering treason in my ear.
That I am somehow still the boy he molded, incapable of seeing the rot hidden underneath unless someone else has poisoned me into seeing it.
“Come home. We will fix this together as a family. That is an order,” he says.
Family.
The word turns my stomach now.
For most of my life, family meant both the altar and execution block I would lay myself at the mercy of. I worshiped it, bled for it, sacrificed everything I loved because that is what was asked of me over and over.
My father spoke of family as if it were a sacred thing meant to be preserved, but he built it like a prison none of us were ever allowed to escape from.
“Did you know?” I snap.
My father says nothing, long enough for the last stupid, loyal piece of me to hope.
Maybe he didn’t.
Maybe Alessio lied to him too.
Maybe my father profited from the death unknowingly without ordering it and only found out after the fact when it was far too late to do anything.
Perhaps he believed looking too closely at the fact would put not only his syndicate in jeopardy, but his son’s life as well.
Maybe he could not bear the consequences that would come from putting my brother on trial.
However, when he finally answers, it is what I have always known and refused to believe until now. “Amos was getting in the way. He needed to be eliminated.”
For a moment, I cannot move.
All I see is Amos Russo’s faded blood staining the marble steps and Giovano slumped in that chair, bleeding out from the wound in his chest while refusing to give us anything of value to use against the only person who helped the last remaining piece of Amos escape.
The phone remains against my ear.
My father continues, his voice colder now.
“Do not make this into something sentimental. Amos was shifting toward Bianchi long before his death. He would have fractured our routes and exposed half our infrastructure in the process were I to allow it to continue. Alessio acted rashly, yes, but the outcome was necessary.”
My grip on the phone tightens until the casing creaks.
“You let me believe she was involved.”
“You needed distance from her,” he argues. “She was a distraction. She had too much influence over you at the worst possible time. Alessio may have been wrong in some details, but he was right about one thing. She has always weakened you.”
I look through the glass doors. Inside, through the darkness of the room, I can make out the shape of Isabella in bed, still curled on her side, one hand resting near the space I left behind while she sleeps.
She weakened you.
No, it has only ever been the opposite. She has been the only thing in my life that has made me question whether strength built on obedience is something I truly wanted or something I should have broken away from long ago when she asked me to run away together.
“You realize what you’ve done, then?” I ask. “What this means? I can’t stand by you. I won’t.”
“Then you are a traitor,” he replies.
I lower the phone without answering and end the call.
Guilt and exhaustion crash over me in waves. The family I was raised to die for, the brother I once looked up to, the father who tried to build me into the perfect, obedient weapon… all of it has been built on lies I can no longer ignore.
I turn to go back inside.
Isabella sits up when I approach the bed, her chestnut hair falling over one shoulder, honey-gold eyes watching me with that fierce intensity that has always stripped me bare even while she’s still half-asleep. She reaches for me without question, beckoning me back into bed.
I set my phone down on the nightstand and slip in beside her, pulling her close to bury my face in her hair. I breathe her scent in deeply, letting it wash over me and stifle the waves of grief.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
The question is quiet, but it carries the weight of everything we have lost over the near decade we’ve been apart.
I look at her, at the woman I walked away from and have regretted doing so ever since, at the only person who has ever made me want to be more than the weapon forged by my father’s hand.
“I am with you.” I cup her face with both hands. “I give you my word. I choose you. From this moment forward, my loyalty belongs to the family we created together. No one else.”
She searches my eyes for any sign of hesitation. Finding none, she leans forward and presses her forehead to mine. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
For the first time since I walked away eight years ago, the weight on my chest feels lighter. I am no longer the underboss who sacrificed everything for the Conti name. I am the man who will burn it all down to protect what truly matters.
And I will never walk away from it again.