19. Alessio
ALESSIO
The safety on Dominic’s Beretta clicks off, the sound like a gunshot in the tomb-like silence of the library. The air tastes of dust, gunpowder, and the copper tang of the breach earlier.
It’s the smell of a foundation that’s been hollowed out by termites for twenty years. Amara stands beside me, close enough that I can feel her steady breathing. She is the one thing keeping me from moving on instinct while the world tilts on its axis.
Turi sits in the center of the room on a hard-backed wooden chair.
He looks small. It’s a trick of the light, or maybe the weight of the truth finally crushing his spine.
The man who taught me how to steady my hands, keep a secret, and carry the family’s legacy looks like a stranger wearing Turi’s skin.
Around him, my brothers are a circle of predators.
Matteo’s face is a mask of weeping rage, his hands trembling where they hang at his sides.
Dante is a statue of granite. Nico and Enzo stand near the door, silent and lethal, their eyes dark with the kind of betrayal that turns a man into a monster.
“Talk,” Dominic says. His voice is a low, vibrating growl, the sound of a man who is one heartbeat away from becoming the devil. “Talk before I decide that a tribunal is a waste of a good morning.”
Turi looks up. His eyes are watery, rimmed with a red that isn’t from the smoke of the attack. He doesn’t look at the gun. He doesn’t look at Dominic. He looks at me. Then his gaze shifts to Amara, and for a second, I see a flicker of something that looks like pride.
It makes my stomach turn. I hate that he can look at her with pride when he owes her shame. Her brother is dead because of the machine this man helped make possible. My father is bones in the dirt because he opened the gate, and my mother died in the war that gate let in.
“It started with the cards,” Turi whispers. His voice is a dry rattle, like dead leaves on a driveway. “A man gets old, and he thinks he can outsmart the luck that’s been tailing him. I was in deep. Deeper than the family’s accounts could hide without Igor noticing.”
“You sold my father for a debt?” Matteo’s voice cracks, a jagged sound that rips through the room. “You gave them the routes for a handful of chips?”
Turi shakes his head slowly. “Not just the debt. Lorenzo… he knew. He knew things I hadn’t even admitted to myself.” He pauses, his chest hitching. “He knew about Riza.”
The name hits the room like a fist to the sternum. Riza. My mother. I feel the growl start in my own chest, a feral, vibrating heat that makes my vision blur at the edges. I step forward, pulling Amara with me, my body shielding hers even as I move toward the man I once called father.
“Do not say her name,” I snarl. My teeth are bared, the predator in me screaming to end this now. “You don’t get to speak her name.”
“I loved her, Alessio,” Turi says, and there’s a desperate, pathetic softness in his tone that makes it worse.
“I loved her before Carlo married her. I stood by while she chose him. I stood by while he gave her the life I couldn’t.
I thought… God help me, I thought if the routes were gone, if the power was stripped away, Carlo would take Riza and the children and run.
I thought they’d be safe. I thought they’d just be a family. Not a target.”
“You thought a wolf like Lorenzo Bellanti would let them walk away?” Dominic’s laugh is a jagged, ugly thing. “You gave him the keys to the kingdom and expected him to leave the royalty alive? You’re a fool or a liar, Turi. Which is it?”
“A fool,” Turi says, a single tear carving a path through the grime on his cheek.
“A broken, selfish fool. I didn’t know about the warehouse.
I didn’t know he’d lure Carlo there. I didn’t know Igor and Victoria were already marked too.
I was at the docks, waiting for a signal that never came.
By the time I got back… the blood was already drying. ”
I remember that night. I remember the calls, the blood, the way the air felt like it was made of iron. I remember Turi’s hands—those same hands—pulling me out of the dark. I thought he was my savior. I thought he was the hero of the story. Instead, he was the man who opened the first door.
Amara’s hand covers mine where it’s gripped tight on her hip.
Her touch is cool, steadying. She’s the spine beside me right now, the only one in my reach who isn’t drowning in the history.
She sees the data. She sees the cold, hard facts.
She’s the one who brought this to light, and yet she’s the one holding me together while I want to shatter.
“The Guardian,” she says, her voice clear and level, cutting through the thick, suffocating grief in the room. “Tell them about the fifteen years of tips. Tell them why you stayed.”
Turi looks at her, and the shame finally wins. He drops his head.
“Penance. It wasn’t enough. I knew it would never be enough.
But I couldn’t leave you. I watched you boys grow.
I saw the way you looked at me, and every time you smiled, it was a knife in my lungs.
I started feeding the information back. Anonymous nodes.
Encrypted pings. Every time Lorenzo moved against you, I made sure you knew.
I saved your lives a hundred times to try and pay for the ones I helped put in the ground. ”
“You didn’t save them,” I spit, the words tasting like ash. “You just delayed the funeral. You let us live in a house built on the corpses of our parents, and you sat at our table and broke bread with us.”
The silence that follows is heavy enough to break ribs.
The brothers are processing the math—the lives saved versus the lives lost. The math doesn’t work.
It will never work. You can’t balance a ledger with Carlo’s blood, Victoria’s, Igor’s, Riza’s.
You can’t trade a brother for a thousand warnings.
Dominic moves then, the barrel of the gun leveling right between Turi’s eyes. Turi doesn’t flinch. He looks ready. He looks like he’s been waiting for this for two decades.
“Dom, wait,” Amara says.
The room freezes. Dominic’s eyes cut to her, cold and lethal. Anyone else would have backed down, would have withered under that gaze. Amara doesn’t blink. She stands her ground, her hand still anchored to mine.
“He knows where Lorenzo is,” she says. “He told me. The original South Side warehouse. The place where they lured Carlo before they left him in that alley. Lorenzo is hiding in the ghosts of his own making.”
Dominic’s jaw tightens. The warehouse. The site of the first betrayal. The place where the war began twenty years ago. It’s poetic in a way that makes me want to scream. Lorenzo is going back to the start. He’s circling the drain.
“Is this true?” Dominic asks, his voice like the edge of a razor.
“Yes,” Turi whispers. “He’s there. He thinks the Costas are too broken by the betrayal to follow. He thinks the internal rot will keep you from the door. He’s waiting for the dust to settle so he can finish what I started.”
Dominic lowers the gun, but the malice doesn’t leave his face.
He turns to the rest of us, his brothers, his pack.
“We hit the warehouse before dawn. We end the Bellantis. We end the war.” He looks back at Turi, his expression going flat and hollow.
“And then, we deal with you. When we come back, the tribunal convenes in the courtyard. You’ll answer to the family you broke. ”
“I expect nothing less,” Turi says.
Dominic signals to Nico and Giovanni. They move forward, their faces stone-cold, and haul Turi to his feet. They don’t use the careful hands they used before. They treat him like the garbage he is. As they lead him out of the vault, the air seems to clear slightly, but the weight of it stays.
One by one, the brothers filter out. Matteo is the last to go, his shoulders slumped, his entire body radiating a grief so profound it feels like a physical coldness.
He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t look at anything.
He just walks out into the hallway, a man who lost his father once in an alley and his second father in this room.
Then it’s just me and Amara.
I let go of her vest and wrap my arms around her, pulling her flush against my chest. I bury my face in the crook of her neck, breathing in the scent of her—the one real thing I can still reach.
My body is shaking, a fine, high-frequency tremor that I can’t stop.
The feral need to protect her, to hide her away from all of this, is a roaring fire in my blood.
“I have to kill him, Amara,” I mutter against her skin. “I have to be the one.”
“No,” she says, her arms winding around my waist, holding me with a strength that surprises me. “You have to be the one who survives. You have to be the one who builds something new. Let the family decide his fate. Don’t let his ghost take your soul too.”
“He killed my mother,” I growl, the words vibrating through her. “He let them take her. He watched me cry for her for years while he held the secret in his pocket.”
“I know,” she whispers. “I know. The world he helped build killed Curtis too. Every dollar, every route, every hidden account led to my brother’s blood on that pavement. I want him dead too, Alessio. But I want you more. I want the man who doesn’t let killing become the only thing he is.”
I pull back just enough to look at her. Her eyes are dark, filled with a fierce, uncompromising love that I don’t deserve but will never let go of. She is the anchor in the storm. She is the home I never let myself imagine. My woman. Mine.
“Tell me the road doesn’t get to have you tonight,” I say.
“I’m not going tonight,” she says. “I unpacked, remember? I put my clothes in your drawer. I’m with the Costas now, apparently. Even if the house is burning down.”