8. Alessio #2
I don’t move. I can’t move. The weight of the lie is crushing.
I feel the memory of my father’s hand on my other shoulder, a cold pressure that reminds me of the cost of secrets.
I’ve been carrying this alone for so long, and now I’m carrying it while standing next to the only woman who ever made me want to stop carrying everything alone.
“You lied to him.”
Amara’s voice is soft, but it hits me like a car crash. I turn to her. She’s watching me, her eyes narrowed, her expression unreadable. She’s a forensic accountant. She spends her life looking for the missing cent, the hidden entry, the lie in the ledger. She saw it. She saw me flinch.
“I’m doing what’s necessary,” I say, my voice rough.
“Necessary for who?” she asks, stepping closer. “For the family? Or for you?”
“There are loyalties in this house that go back twenty years. If I tell them there’s a mole before we deal with Vane, the war is over. We’ll be too busy killing each other to kill the enemy.”
“Is that what happened to my brother?” she asks, and her voice trembles just enough to let me see the raw trauma underneath. “Did someone decide it was ‘necessary’ to let him die? Did someone decide that a secret was worth more than his life?”
I reach for her, my fingers grazing her arm. She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t soften either.
“I am going to find the person who signed your brother’s life away,” I vow, leaning into her space until our foreheads almost touch. “I am going to find the person who betrayed my parents. But I have to do it my way. I have to make sure the family survives the truth.”
“The truth doesn’t care about your family, Alessio,” she whispers. “The truth just is. And if you keep burying it, eventually you’re going to run out of room for the bodies.”
I don’t have an answer for her. Because she’s right.
I can feel the walls closing in, the secrets piling up until there’s no air left.
I look at her, at the woman who has spent ten years hunting the same ghost I have, and I realize I can’t keep her out of this.
Not anymore. She’s already in the vault. She’s already seen the scars.
“Help me,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve said those words to anyone. “Help me dismantle the switch. And then we’ll deal with the rest. Together.”
She looks at me for a long time, her eyes searching mine for some sign of the man underneath the surgeon and the vault. She finds it. She always finds it.
“Together,” she agrees.
But the word feels like a promise and a threat all at once.
We spend the next several hours in a fever of preparation.
The war room becomes our world. The rest of the family moves around us like shadows, but we are the center of the storm.
Amara is brilliant. She navigates the layers of Vane’s encryption with a cold, clinical efficiency that makes my blood run hot.
She doesn’t need to be told what to do. She anticipates the next move, the next firewall, the next trap.
I watch her hands as they fly across the keyboard. They are steady, purposeful. I want those hands on me. I want her to look at me the way she looks at the code—like a puzzle she’s determined to solve, like something that matters.
I stay close. I bring her water. I bring her food she doesn’t eat. I stay close enough to read her screen and far enough to let her work. I’m grounding myself in her, using her presence to drown out the whispering voice in the back of my mind that tells me I’m making a mistake.
The mole. The pings. The shadow in the house.
Vincenzo has a theory, and I let him keep it, because it’s wrong in a useful direction. The anonymous pings route through the chapel guest network, a low-priority node everyone treated as harmless because Father Domenico’s routines never changed.
And the only outsider who walks that wing daily is Father Domenico, the compound priest who crosses to Matteo’s bakery every morning at five fifty-five, regular as a church bell. A collar with access, routine, and twenty years of this family’s confessions in his pocket.
It would be clean, if it were him. A stranger’s sin. Something we could cut out without bleeding.
I’ve run him six times in eleven years. Six times he’s come back exactly what he appears to be. I’ve never told Vincenzo everything, but I’ve let him watch the priest while I watch the house.
I pull up the data Amara found earlier—the internal traffic.
It’s sophisticated. It’s been happening for years.
Little bursts of data, tiny pings that look like background noise but carry a signature.
It’s a “watcher” protocol. Someone has been monitoring the compound’s security grid, the communications, the movement of the vehicles.
And they’ve been doing it from a terminal that has access to the most sensitive areas of the house.
I look at the list of suspects. It’s short. It has to be someone with the clearance to move freely, someone no one would question. Someone who has been here from the beginning.
I see Turi’s name on the list. I want to strike it through. I want to erase it until the paper tears. Turi isn’t a suspect. He’s the foundation. He’s the one who stayed when the world burned. He’s the one who looked at eleven orphans and decided they were worth saving.
But the pings don’t lie. The pings are coming from the family wing near the library, close enough to Turi’s rooms to make my chest go tight.
My chest tightens. The trauma of the massacre isn’t just about the blood and the fire.
It’s about the loss of safety. It’s about the realization that the world can turn on you in a heartbeat.
I spent eleven years building these walls, turning this compound into a fortress, and now I’m realizing the enemy might have been inside the gates the whole time.
I look at Amara. She’s focused on the Gold Coast node, her brow furrowed in concentration. She doesn’t know the names on my list. She doesn’t know the history of the man she sat with at dinner, the man who told her stories about my mother.
If it’s him… if it’s Turi… the betrayal will be worse than the massacre itself. It will be the final death of our family.
“Alessio.”
I snap my head up. Amara is looking at me.
“I have the entry point for the Gold Coast server,” she says. “But I need a physical bridge. We have to be on-site to bypass the biometrics. If we try to do it remotely, we’ll trip the switch.”
“Once the bridge is in,” she adds, reading the question on my face, “the geography changes. Every command I send from your vault rides our own hardware straight into his rack. The node reads it as local traffic. As far as the dead-man’s switch is concerned, I’ll be standing in Vane’s server room for the rest of the war. ”
I take a deep breath, forcing the thoughts of the mole into a dark corner of my mind. Focus. One task at a time.
“The Gold Coast residence is a fortress,” I say, my voice steadying. “Vane uses it as his primary data hub when he’s in the city. It’s guarded by high-end private security. Not Bellanti thugs. Professionals.”
“Then we go in as professionals,” Amara says.
I look at her, really look at her. She’s wearing a dark, functional tactical jacket I gave her. Her hair is pulled back, tight and neat. She looks like a warrior. My warrior.
“You stay in the car,” I say.
She scoffs, a dry, sharp sound. “Like hell I do. You need me to run the bridge. You can’t do it alone.”
“It’s too dangerous, Amara. If something happens to you—”
“If something happens to me, the switch triggers and we all die anyway,” she interrupts, stepping into my space. She pokes a finger into my chest, right over my heart. “Stop trying to cage me, Alessio. You wanted a partner. This is what a partner looks like.”
I wrap my hand around her wrist, pulling her closer until her chest is pressed against mine. I can feel the rapid-fire beat of her heart, the heat of her skin. She isn’t afraid. She’s ready.
“You stay behind me,” I growl. “You don’t move unless I tell you. You don’t take risks.”
“I’ve been taking risks for ten years, Alessio. I’m still here.”
I lean down and press my mouth to hers, a hard, desperate kiss that tastes of caffeine and adrenaline. It’s a claim. It’s a prayer. I need her to understand that she is the only thing in this world I cannot lose.
She kisses me back with an equal ferocity, her hands tangling in my hair, pulling me closer. For a moment, the war room disappears. The dead-man’s-switch, the mole, the Bellantis—it all fades into the background. There is only her. The way she fits against me. The way she tastes.
I pull back, my breath hitching in my throat.
I look at her, and the feral, possessive urge to lock her in a room and burn the rest of the world down is almost overwhelming.
But I know she wouldn’t let me. She’s a runner who decided to stay, and I have to trust that she’s staying for the fight, not just for me.
“We go at 03:00,” I say.
She nods. “I’ll be ready.”
I turn back to the monitors, but my mind is already moving ahead. I need to coordinate with my brothers. I need to make sure the teams are in place. And I need to do it all while keeping the secret of the mole buried.
The weight of the leadership, the weight of the secrets, is a physical pressure on my chest. I think of Dominic, of the trust he placed in me. I think of the lie I told him.
A leader has to make the hard choices. That’s what Turi always told me. A leader has to decide who lives and who dies, and he has to be willing to carry the guilt of those decisions until his dying day.
I didn’t realize until this moment that Turi was describing himself.
The thought is a cold spike of dread. If Turi is the mole, if he’s the one who’s been feeding information to the enemy, why? Why save us? Why raise us? Why feed us tips that keep us alive?
The pieces don’t fit. A traitor sells you out and disappears. A traitor doesn’t stay for twenty years to watch the orphans of his victims grow into men.