28. Gianna #2
His voice never lifts.
He gives it away like someone handing over receipts for debts already cleared.
Dante listens to the recordings in his office, one hand on the edge of the desk, the other curled beneath the sleeve of his shirt.
When the audio ends, he gives one command. "Erase him."
The next few days bleed into each other, marked by the constant, low thrum of the house, a vibration I feel in my bones.
I spend my time in the solarium with the girls, forcing smiles, building kingdoms of syrup, counting crooked crackers on linen napkins.
Their laughter is a shield, a fragile membrane against the violence I know is unfolding.
I monitor the news feeds, not for explicit reports, but for the subtle tremors.
Odd resignations.
Unexplained bankruptcies.
Ships lost at sea.
It's the ghost of a shadow war playing out in plain sight.
Il Sangue Nero unravels first.
The Umbra system's collapse wasn't just a shutdown; it was a detonation. Without its hidden architecture, their network of influence is suddenly exposed, the leverage gone.
I imagine the panic, the scrambling in those hidden nodes my father built. Dante’s teams move with brutal efficiency.
They're leveraging the very knowledge we gleaned from the Umbra system before I wiped it.
Financial funnels freeze, politicians disappear, intercepted communications are turned against them.
I hear whispers from the periphery, from staff who talk too much, from overheard phone calls in the kitchen.
Anonymous tips to authorities.
Selective leaks to rival syndicates.
It's not a direct, bloody purge on the streets, but a dismantling from the inside out, a surgical operation.
Their strategic, targeted hits become their undoing.
Their unclaimed actions are suddenly claimed by the Salvatore name, a thunderous silence following each strike.
One by one, their operations go dark.
News reports speak of sudden, widespread organized crime arrests in Brussels, in Istanbul, in Kiev.
Not our name, of course.
Just a broad, public sweep that decapitates Il Sangue Nero's international reach.
The irony of using the very shadow infrastructure against them isn't lost on me.
My father’s system has been repurposed to erase his would-be heirs.
Arditi is never seen again.
One day he is, and then, he simply isn't.
Not in the prison cells, not in the morgues, not anywhere.
He becomes the ultimate erasure, a testament to the fact that some secrets are meant to die with the people who hold them.
I feel a chill when I realize that for Arditi, death was likely the only mercy he received after spilling everything.
Rafa is harder.
He is held alone.
Separate from Arditi.
Separate from the staff.
No one speaks his name above ground.
The family doesn’t speak of him at all.
But I see the tension in Dante’s shoulders when the reports arrive.
I hear the hesitation in Marco’s voice when he updates us on security rotation.
No one knows what the right thing is.
No one dares to decide.
So I do.
I go down on the twelfth day.
They let me in without a word.
The hallway is long.
Cold seeps into my shoes and climbs my legs like something with claws.
There is no noise except for the low click of my heels and the deeper hum of something mechanical overhead.
I open the door myself.
He is thinner than I remember.
The bandage on his leg has darkened, but someone has changed it recently.
He stands when he sees me.
It is instinct more than pride.
His eyes search my face for permission to speak.
I give none.
"You look well," he says.
I close the door behind me and remain near it.
"You look like a traitor."
"Gianna—"
"You put my daughters at risk."
He exhales through his nose.
"I never meant?—"
"I don’t care what you meant. You breached my house. You used me. You dragged me into a game Father started in smoke and ended in ash. You made me the key to a war that should have ended with his grave."
He doesn’t try to defend it.
Instead, he sinks onto the bench, shoulders bowed. "I didn’t think it would go this far," he says. "I thought I could control it."
"You thought wrong."
Silence stretches between us.
He looks smaller than I have ever seen him.
No throne to lean against.
No followers to applaud.
Just him.
And me.
And the weight of everything he broke. "I could have activated it," I say. "The system. Father’s legacy. I stood in that room and watched the world stretch open like a vein. I could have let it live."
"But you didn’t."
"No."
He nods. "Then you did better than any of us."
I turn to leave. "You came down here," he says behind me. "To decide."
"Yes."
I stop with my hand on the latch.
"So decide."
"I already have," I say.
Later that night, Dante joins me in the war room.
"He lives," I tell him. "But not here."
"Where?"
"Where the Rossi name no longer means anything. Where power does not shield. Where he can’t rebuild, not even in his mind."
Dante nods.
Not because he agrees, but because he trusts me.
The next morning, a convoy leaves the estate.
Rafa is inside it.
He wears no restraints, but there are no windows.
The guards do not speak.
His destination is known only to three people.
He does not get to say goodbye.
But then again, neither do I.
And perhaps this how it goes down in history for my brother and me, even though the love still exists, even though it always will.
Sometimes, it’s easier and safer to love from a distance.
One month later, the house no longer feels like a place I borrowed.
The courtyard has been repainted, the stonework scrubbed clean of soot, salt, and smoke.
The fig tree is blooming again, late for the season, but persistent.
Alessia insists the fairies came back to help it recover.
Arietta just wants to know when she can climb it again.
The guards are less visible now, though I know they’re still there.
Hidden in the angles of the estate.
In the rhythm of footsteps that never echo without reason.
The nanny, Clara, walks the girls to their tutors every morning.
Valentina joins them on the balcony with a fresh journal, Luca by her side with a stack of reports and the same cup of black coffee he always forgets to finish.
They survived.
The poison took its toll.
There were days after we returned when I thought Valentina would never walk again without a tremor in her right hand.
But she does now, firm and straight-backed, sharp as ever.
Luca recovered more slowly, his voice rougher, his patience thinner.
But his gaze has softened when he looks at Dante.
And at me.
He never once asked what I saw in that room beneath the monastery.
Never once asked what I chose.
He didn’t need to, because when the fire rose from the earth and swallowed what was left of Operation Umber, the Salvatores rose too.
Not to claim what was beneath it, but to confirm what had always mattered: Nuova Speranza.
This city.
This house.
The blood they still had, not the ghosts they had buried.
Dante has made all of us proud.
He doesn’t give speeches.
He doesn’t bark orders.
He shows up.
Every day.
Every meeting.
Every decision.
His name no longer floats at the edge of things.
It is sewn into the fabric of the family, steady and inevitable.
There are men who used to roll their eyes when he walked into a room.
Those men now rise when he enters and keep their voices low when he passes.
He doesn’t demand it.
He earns it.
He comes home every night, and every night he finds his daughters asleep beside me or under the stars by the fountain or halfway through a book they made him promise to finish reading.
He never breaks the promise.
Not once.
Tonight, he brings wine.
We sit on the southern terrace where the rosemary climbs the wall and the cicadas hum between breaths.
The girls are asleep.
The estate is quiet.
My legs stretch across his lap, and his thumb traces circles along the curve of my ankle.
The moon is full.
I sip the wine and watch the garden stretch into shadows. "You should take a vacation," I tell him.
He smiles, not looking at me.
"We just dismantled a regime. This is the vacation."
I lean my head against the back of the chair.
"We could go south. Somewhere with less stone and more lemon trees."
He finally glances at me.
"You hate the south."
"Maybe I want to relearn it."
He turns the glass in his hand, thinking.
Then nods once. "After the fundraiser next week."
Always a fundraiser.
I don’t mind, not when I know the only maps he reads are the ones that keep our home intact.
Not when I know I was never meant to be a pawn.
Or a placeholder.
Or an access code.
I was meant to survive and find my way to this family.
These names carved into stone.
"I never thanked you," I say, after a while.
"For what?"
"For letting me end it."
He leans forward slightly and presses a kiss to the inside of my wrist.
"You didn’t need my permission. You just needed someone who would stand beside you when it burned."
"And you did."
"I always will."
I close my eyes and let the night hold us.
The stars are fewer here than they were at the Rossi estate, but they shine clearer.
Less competition. Less noise.
I can still feel the ghosts of what we chose not to become.
But they no longer haunt me.
They stand behind us, unmoving, like the trees planted by our mothers and the stone laid by our fathers.
They are there, but we are here.
And for once, I believe that’s enough.
Not forever.
Not for all things.
But for now.
For home.
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