14. Alessio #2
I finally look at her. She’s leaning against the desk, her arms crossed. She’s not afraid of the darkness I'm drowning in.
“It was him,” I whisper. “The routes. The first door. The leaks he hid under warnings. The tips that saved us because guilt couldn’t undo what debt started.
He’s been trapped between both sides for twenty years, Amara, hiding the sin with one hand and trying to save us with the other.
He sold my parents to the Bellantis to cover a debt, and then he spent the rest of his life trying to buy back his soul with our blood. "
Amara closes her eyes for a moment, a small sigh escaping her lips.
"What are you going to do?" she asks.
"I'm going to finish the war," I say, my voice hardening. "I'm going to kill Vane. I'm going to dismantle the Bellantis. And then... then I'm going to deal with the rot inside this house."
"You can't do it alone, Alessio," she says, stepping toward me.
She reaches out, her hands framing my face, her thumbs brushing over my cheekbones.
Her touch is the only thing that feels real.
"You’ve been carrying this for eleven years.
You built this room to hide from the truth, but the truth is out now.
You don't have to be the only one who sees it. "
"I can't tell Dominic," I rasp, leaning into her touch. I'm so goddamn tired of being the keeper of secrets. "If I tell him now, he’ll kill Turi in front of the whole family. It will trigger a civil war we can't afford. Not while the Bellantis are still at the gates."
"Then we wait," she says, her voice firm. "We finish Vane. We clear the path. And then we give your brothers the truth they deserve."
I wrap my arms around her waist, pulling her flush against me. I bury my face in the crook of her neck, breathing her in. She’s the only home I have left. The compound feels like a tomb, the family feels cracked open, and she is the only thing keeping me upright.
“I don’t want you near the final site,” I mutter into her skin, my possessiveness flaring. “But I know I need your hands on the system.”
Amara pulls back just enough to look me in the eye. Her expression is a mix of love and that sharp, biting wit. “I'm not running. You need me to bypass the master server, and I'm going.”
"It’s too dangerous," I growl, my hands tightening on her hips. "I almost lost you tonight. I saw those gates open, and all I could think about was you being trapped inside while the world burned. I can't do it again."
"You won't lose me," she says. "Because I'm not running anymore. I'm with the Costas now, Alessio. Whether you like it or not.”
The word hits me like cold water. She’s claiming us. She’s claiming me. Even knowing the rot, she’s choosing to stand in the wreckage.
I kiss her then, a desperate, bruising thing that tastes of salt and smoke. It’s a vow. It’s a prayer.
We stay in the workroom for hours, killing Vane’s network node by node.
A relay dies. The map redraws. Amara flags the old warehouse as a lure and Vincenzo confirms the live hub is Wabash.
There’s a grim efficiency to our movements.
The grief is still there, but it’s been sharpened into a weapon.
We are two hunters with one target left.
As the first gray light of dawn begins to bleed through the tall study windows, I walk Amara back to my suite. The house is starting to wake up, the sounds of my brothers moving in the hallways a jarring reminder of the day ahead.
In my bedroom, Amara sits on the edge of the bed, watching me as I check my weapons. My movements are mechanical. The silver in my hair catches the morning light. When I look at Amara, I don't feel the weight of the years. I just feel the hunger for a future I never thought I’d see.
"Get some sleep," I tell her, leaning down to press a kiss to her forehead. "I have to go to the war room. Dominic will be looking for a plan."
"Alessio," she calls out as I reach the door.
I turn back.
"Be careful," she says. "Don't let the dead win."
I nod, the lump in my throat too big to speak past. I walk out into the hallway, pulling the door shut. I head toward the war room, my boots echoing on the hardwood floors, a doctor walking toward a battle he has been dissecting for eleven years.
I pass the basement door. I don't go down. I don't look back. I have a war to finish, a woman to keep beside me, and a family that deserves the truth even if it breaks us first.
The war room is already full. My brothers are gathered around the mahogany tactical table, their faces grim. Dominic is at the head, a map of the South Side spread out before him. He looks up as I enter, his gaze narrowing.
"You look like hell," he says.
"I’m fine," I say, taking my place. “I have the coordinates for Vane’s master server. It’s not the old South Side warehouse. That was a lure. The live hub is South Loop, Wabash.”
Dominic nods, his hand flat on the map. “Then we hit Wabash tonight. We end the financier, freeze the accounts, and use what he gives us to take Lorenzo alive.”
"Tonight," I agree.
The secret weighs heavy in my pocket—the strip I tore from the list before the fire reached Turi’s name. I didn't burn it because I needed to remember. I needed to remember that love does not make betrayal impossible. Sometimes it makes the betrayal worse.
I look around the table at my brothers. Matteo, Dante, Enzo, Santi, Fabio, Vincenzo, Nico, Giovanni. They are my blood. They are my life. When Vane is dead and the switch is gone, I'm going to tell them something that will change everything.
But for now, I look at the map. I look at the plan. And I think about Amara, waiting upstairs, the one place in this house that does not feel like a lie.
The old warehouse was a lure. Wabash is the vein. Tonight, we cut it.
The house is getting ready for war, and it sounds like a heartbeat.
Boots on stairs. Magazines clicking home.
The armory door swallowing men two at a time and giving them back heavier.
Somewhere below me, Matteo is baking—at ten o'clock at night, before a battle, because that's what his hands do with fear—and the smell of bread drifts up through a house full of guns like a prayer nobody will say out loud.
In four hours, the Costa brothers roll on the South Loop before dawn can reach the city and put a bullet in Alvarado Vane.
And a lie sits in the basement, eating this family from the inside, with a plate of bread going cold outside its door.
I find Alessio in the third-floor study.
The whiteboard is clean for the first time since he opened this room to me—eleven years of hunting wiped down to white—and he's standing at the fireplace in full tactical black, holding one piece of paper.
I know what it is. The page he didn't burn.
Five names on paper reduced to one, with the sixth he never wrote still haunting him, folded twice, kept the way you keep a wound.
"You should sleep," he says. “You've been at the terminals since yesterday.”
"You should tell them."
His shoulders go still. That stillness—I used to think it was calm. It isn't. It's a man bracing a door with his whole body.
"We've had this conversation."
"No, we've had this silence." I come around to where I can see his face, firelight moving over the hard lines of it.
"You've decided, and I've disagreed, and you've called that a conversation.
Your brothers are strapping on armor downstairs, Alessio.
They're going to bleed tonight. Some of them might die tonight—and they'd die not knowing the truth about their own house. "
"The truth doesn't stop bullets." His voice stays level. It's worse than shouting.
“The truth is a grenade, Amara. I pull that pin tonight, and I don't get a strike team—I get a funeral in advance.
Matteo doesn't function. Dante starts breaking things that don't grow back. Dominic convenes a tribunal on the spot, and while my family tears its own heart out in the courtyard, Alvarado Vane sees the house fracture, realizes the switch is dead, and uses the chaos to vanish. I lose the ghost, and then I lose the family anyway. Sequence, Amara. Four hours. Vane first. Turi after.”
"You don't get to schedule other people's grief."
“Watch me,” he says, and there it is—the vault door, slamming down over the man I've been prying open. “I have carried this secret for eleven years. I know what it will do to them. This part is my call.”
"And I'm what?" I don't raise my voice either. Funny thing, I learned that from him. "The accountant? The guest? The woman you keep in your bed and your war room but not your decisions?"
"That's not—"
"My brother knew, Alessio." It comes out of me like a blade coming out of a sheath, ten years of it.
“Curtis found the Bellanti trail three weeks before they killed him.
Three weeks. You know what he did with it?
Nothing. He didn't tell his boss. He didn't tell anyone who could protect him.
He didn't tell me—his own sister, the one person who could have read those numbers and seen the noose tightening.
He kept it, because he thought the silence would protect everyone he loved. " My eyes are burning. I let them.
“They shot him in a parking lot for forty thousand dollars, and I found out four years later, buried in a case file I had no business reading. The silence didn't protect anyone, Alessio. The silence is what killed him. Kept secrets are just bullets that take longer to land."
The room is very quiet. The fire ticks. Down in the belly of the house, a magazine slots home, and somebody laughs at something, easy and alive.
"I'm sorry about your brother," Alessio says, and I can hear that he means it, and I can hear the but coming, and I could almost love him less for how steady he says it. "But I've made the call. After Vane. That's final."