Elio
Three days is all it takes for my family to come to the Bianchi stronghold.
I know before the first alarm finishes screaming that it is them. The sound cuts through the grounds with an ear-shattering screech, tearing everyone out of the tense, sleepless quiet Davide’s house has been holding onto for seventy-two hours.
Men start shouting in the hallway while boots thunder over polished floors. Radios crackle with commands half-drowned out by the chaos.
“North gate. Two vehicles—no, four. Movement near the eastern perimeter. Shots fired!”
The Bianchi stronghold sits on old land fortified over generations, but no house is perfect. Every syndicate has its flaws, every fortress has a seam.
The north gate is not the weakest point in the obvious sense, but the road leading from it bends through dense trees before opening into sight of the cameras.
It creates a blind pocket just long enough for a strike team to get close enough before the system fully catches them.
I know because I would have chosen to exploit it too.
The alarm screams again, then comes the first deep thud, though not from gunfire, from an explosion. The walls tremble from the shockwave hard enough to cause the monitors on the security desk to flicker.
Somewhere nearby, a window shatters, the sound loud as glass rains onto the marble floor. One of Davide’s men curses under his breath nearby while another tightens the grip on his rifle, eyes trained on the feeds in front of him.
I close my eyes for a brief second.
I know the way my family begins a breach. It’s never with chaos, not in a true sense.
That is what they want their enemies to see. Beneath it, there is order, cold and calculated.
They have brought charges, not enough to flatten the grounds entirely—not unless my father has lost his mind completely—but enough to cripple one section and force Davide’s men to redirect soldiers there.
When I open my eyes again, I look toward the security feeds. Next to me, Davide stands at the central console, one hand planted on the table while the other grips a radio so tightly, his knuckles have gone pale, though his face gives nothing away.
I see the tension beneath his stillness, the calculation working behind his eyes as his men move across the screens in tight formations as they shift toward the front of the estate. He is a good commander, better than most.
That might be the only reason this house is still standing.
Next to him, Isabella remains tight-lipped and focused on the tablet in front of her.
Her hair is pulled back from her face. A few strands of it have slipped loose around her temples.
Her mouth is set in a hard line. Her eyes move from the tablet to the monitors and back again, focused as a headset is pressed to one ear and a radio in her other hand. Her finger hovers over the button, ready to redirect forces where necessary.
In any other situation, the sight would fill my chest with pride.
She should not be here, standing in the heart of a besieged Mafia estate and commanding soldiers through a breach my family has brought to her doorstep once again.
She should not have to think three moves ahead while the walls tremble around her, doing everything she can to protect everyone behind these walls.
Especially our son.
My eyes flick toward the lower corner monitor, the one showing the basement corridor outside the panic room. Two of Bianchi’s men stand guard outside, rifles ready to light up anyone who dares to wander down there.
Another camera inside the outer vestibule shows nothing but reinforced steel and the faint glow of a keypad.
Matteo is behind that door.
Safe, for now.
Isabella had not hesitated. The moment the first warning shrieked through the house, she had taken him down there and locked him safely behind that door.
I cannot imagine the strength it took to watch that door close, knowing there was a strong possibility that could be the last time ever laying eyes on him again if things did not go according to plan.
Isabella’s voice breaks through the quiet. “Alessio spotted.”
My eyes snap to the tablet in front of her. I step closer before anyone can stop me.
One of Davide’s guards shifts, rifle rising a fraction in my direction, but Davide lifts two fingers without looking at him.
I barely notice.
Isabella angles the tablet slightly so we can see, but I am already looking over her shoulder.
The feed is grainy, washed in the cold green-gray of night vision.
He’s moving east toward the lower courtyard. Smoke drifts across the image in broken veils, blurring the lines of other soldiers moving between stone columns and clipped hedges.
As soon as I spot him, every part of me goes still. He wears a dark coat with the collar turned up against the night air. His gun is held low in one hand. Two men flank him from behind while another three move ahead.
I recognize them instantly—his personal guards, his preferred killers.
They are men he trusts because he has frightened them enough or dirtied them so thoroughly, they cannot run without sealing their own fates.
My hands curl into fists at my sides. For several seconds, I do not recognize the feeling moving through me.
It is not fear. That would be easier to name and push aside in favor of training and instinct to take over as the cold arithmetic of survival coaxes me forward. I know fear.
I was raised in a house where fear was fed to me until it either sharpened me into something useful or destroyed me until there was nothing left.
This is different.
This is rage with grief buried under it.
“I’ll go.”
The security room seems to contract around the statement as the words leave my mouth, both Isabella and Davide’s attention suddenly pulling toward my direction.
Isabella’s face changes first. It isn’t in a dramatic sense.
She would never give that much away in a room like this with lives on the line, but I see the shift because I have spent too many years haunted by her not to notice the smallest cracks in her expression.
Her mouth parts slightly in protest, her hand tightening around the tablet. The strategist in her is pushed aside temporarily while the woman who loves me is brought to the surface.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
I nod. “He is my responsibility.” My gaze moves back to the screen, to Alessio’s dark figure cutting through smoke. “I’ll end this the way I should have a long time ago.”
Before he murdered Amos Russo.
Before Isabella ran and Matteo was born into secrecy.
Before my father chose to build our family’s future on betrayal.
I should have seen it sooner.
Instead, I called it ambition rather than what it truly was, because by doing so, it would have forced me to choose a different path from the one laid out for me since birth.
Alessio’s cruelty was never hidden from me. In reality, it had been polished and justified, dressed in family loyalty and wrapped in the familiar language of necessity because that is how the Conti line has always functioned.
And now look where it has led us all.
“Your father…” Davide begins.
I shake my head before he can finish. “He won’t be here.”
I know Vittorio Conti well enough to answer that without hesitation. Even now after hearing him condemn himself and justify it all in the same breath, I understand him as well as I always have.
“If he’s sent Alessio, that means he is still at the safehouse. He would never leave our family without a head if one of us were to fall in battle,” I finish.
Especially not now. Not when I have turned against him and Alessio has risked himself by stepping onto Bianchi ground.
My father is too disciplined to put both heirs in the same line of fire along with himself.
He will stay where he can command and can preserve the myth of control, where he can make the next move, no matter which son comes home breathing.
That is who he is—a man who thinks mourning is best done after succession is secured.
Davide’s expression grows grim. “We will need to deal with him later, then.”
I nod, though I do not respond.
Later, if the estate still stands and Isabella survives. If Matteo remains sealed behind that panic room door, untouched by the hands of men who would turn his blood into leverage, and I am the one who comes back from facing my brother.
Whatever happens tonight will determine how my father responds in the aftermath.
If I fall and Alessio survives, Vittorio will continue pushing until the Bianchi syndicate is swallowed completely.
He will call me a traitor, convince himself I deserved the end I got in order to bury whatever grief my death leaves behind.
He will use my betrayal as proof that mercy creates weakness and that love can corrupt even his own son. It will give him enough ammunition that the family must become harder, crueler, and more unified beneath his hand.
But if Alessio falls first…
I do not know.
That uncertainty is almost worse. Alessio is his chosen heir, the son who has always stayed obedient. While unprompted, he had been the one willing to murder Amos Russo in order to expand the foundation of our empire.
That is the son my father has decided is worth protecting even at the cost of everything else.
If Alessio dies here, I do not know if my father will retreat, rage, or break completely.
Only time will tell.
I do not make it two steps before Isabella grabs my arm. Her fingers close around me with enough force to stop me dead in my tracks.
My lips part to speak—to tell her I know what I am doing, to offer some brittle assurance neither of us would believe—but she cuts me off before a single word can leave my mouth.
She hauls me down into a kiss.
In that moment, I forget the war and the monitors, the armed guards, the alarms, the sound of my family trying to tear the Bianchi stronghold apart from the outside in.
I forget the weapon waiting to be placed in my hand and the brother moving through smoke, the father commanding from a safehouse like God with dirt under his nails.
There is only Isabella.
Her mouth is fierce against mine, desperate and furious and shaking with everything she refuses to say in front of these men.
Her hand grips my arm while the other presses against my chest, right over the place where my heart is trying to break through to reach her warmth.
At first, I am too afraid that if I lift my hand and press it over hers, she will remember she hates me.
Then she makes a small sound against my mouth and it destroys whatever restraint I thought I still possessed.
I cup the back of her head and kiss her back. Her body presses close as my fingers slip through her hair.
I remember my apartment back in Italy, the way she looked at me when I whispered about a future I did not have the courage to protect filled with rings and nurseries, a house without soldiers at the gate.
A life away from the Contis and Russos.
Our life.
When she pulls back, it is not far. Her forehead rests against mine, her breath trembles against my mouth while her eyes jump between mine.
We stand there with our faces close enough to share air, surrounded by men who wisely pretend not to comment as the world fractures between us.
Then she whispers, “Be safe. And come back to us.”
My heart squeezes so violently, I almost cannot breathe.
Us.
To her and Matteo.
For the first time in eight years, Isabella gives me something that is worth destroying the family that made me in order to come back to the one she is offering up for me to claim.
“I will,” I say.
That is a promise I intend to keep.
She turns to Davide, her voice steady again. “Give him a weapon.”
Davide studies her for one long beat, then he nods. Every eye in the room follows him as he moves to a weapons locker built into the wall. I feel the tension rise as metal clicks and a drawer slides open. He removes a pistol and checks it with practiced hands.
He crosses to me, then carefully settles it into my hand.
“Good luck.”