22. Alessio
ALESSIO
Blood coats everything. The copper-heavy flood slicks my palms and fills the gaps between my fingers.
This is the weight of a man’s life when it abandons the body, pouring out of Turi in a rhythmic, terrifying pulse.
My hands are useless. I’ve spent a lifetime mending my brothers, but no amount of surgical precision can stop the life draining out of the man who taught me how to survive. There is too much red. Too much damage.
The world is a roar of gunfire and shouting, but focus narrows to a singular, agonizing point on the stone floor of the courtyard.
Matteo stares down, his face a mask of absolute, paralyzing horror.
Turi didn’t hesitate. He didn’t think. He didn’t weigh two decades of betrayal against the life of the boy he helped raise.
He simply moved. He threw himself into the path of a sniper’s lead, and now he breaks apart under my touch.
“Stay with me,” I growl, the words scraping out of my throat like jagged metal. “Turi, look at me. You old fool, stay right here.”
I jam my palms into the cavity in his chest. Turi’s heat spills over my knuckles, relentless and mocking, staining the pavement and my skin until there’s no distinction between us. I don’t care about the smoke or the soldiers screaming in the distance.
I don’t care about the Bellanti cowards trying to finish what they started twenty years ago.
All that exists is the man who taught me how to steady my hands, the man who gave me my first book on anatomy, the man who lied to my face for twenty years while he loved us with a fractured, desperate heart.
“Alessio,” Turi whispers. The sound is wet. Air escapes his lungs in a ragged whistle. His eyes, usually sharp and full of secrets, settle into a dull, flat clarity. He isn’t afraid. He’s been waiting for this. The bill finally came due, and he’s paying it in full.
“Don’t talk. Just breathe,” I command. My voice is the only thing left to control.
Inside, a storm of rage and grief threatens to snap my ribs.
I should scream at him for the route he sold, for my father’s murder, for the war that found my mother later.
I should thank him for what he just did for Matteo.
Both versions of this man collide in the middle of a war zone, and I am the one caught in the wreckage.
“Tell… Riza…” He chokes on the name. My mother’s name. The woman he loved from the shadows and doomed with a debt he called survival. He reaches up, his hand trembling and stained, and brushes my cheek. “Tell her I… I tried. At the end. I tried to keep them… safe.”
His hand drops. The tension in his body snaps. The light in his eyes doesn’t just fade; it vanishes, leaving a hollow, empty shell of the man who was our father in every way that mattered and a traitor in every way that destroyed us.
“No,” I mutter. I keep pressing. I try to force the life back into him. “No, you don’t get to leave yet. We aren’t done. The tribunal isn’t finished. You don’t get the easy way out.”
A hand touches my shoulder. It’s small, steady, and warm against the cold reality of the courtyard. Amara. I don’t need to look up to know it’s her. Her scent—rain and something uniquely hers—cuts through the smell of cordite and death. She is the one thing steady enough for me to reach.
“He’s gone,” she says softly. No pity filters through her voice. She knows what this man did. She knows he helped build the machine that put her brother in a grave. She knows he’s one reason I spent eleven years living inside secrets. But she also sees the man I just lost.
I look at my hands. They are red to the wrists. It feels like failure, even though the doctor in me knows no hands could have closed this wound. I let the traitor die, and I let the father die, and now only the silence of the dead remains.
I stand up slowly. My joints feel fused with lead. Around us, the brothers converge. Dominic stands motionless, eyes fixed on Turi’s body. Dante, Enzo, Nico, Vincenzo, Santi, Fabio—they are all there, faces pale under the grime of the skirmish.
Matteo is still on his knees, hands shaking as he looks at the blood on his own shirt. The bullet was meant for him. Turi bought Matteo’s life with his own, and the weight of that trade will haunt my brother for the rest of his days.
“He saved me,” Matteo whispers, his voice cracking. “He just… he stepped in front of it.”
“He did,” Dominic says, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. He looks at me, and the cracks in the Don’s mask show. We were all his sons. We were all Turi’s children. The betrayal was a knife to the heart, but this sacrifice is a brand on the soul.
“The sniper?” I ask. My voice has changed. The clinical detachment is gone. Grief drops into a black, bottomless pit of fury. It rises in me, cold and precise, until all I can see is Lorenzo.
“Dead,” Dante says, wiping a streak of soot from his forehead. “Santi took him out from the roof. But they’re retreating. They’re running back to the South Side.”
“Lorenzo,” I say. The name tastes like ash.
“He’s at the warehouse,” Amara says. She steps into my line of sight, her dark eyes fierce and unwavering.
She doesn’t look away from the blood on me.
She doesn’t flinch at the monster waking up behind my ribs.
Her spine is made of iron. “The last relay from Turi’s burner routes back to the original South Side warehouse.
The place where they lured Carlo before they left him in that alley. Lorenzo is waiting for the end.”
I look at her, and fear hits me so hard I nearly mistake it for control.
I want to put walls between her and the world.
I want to make safety simple, even though she has never been simple.
But she isn’t a trophy to be hidden. She is my partner.
She is the woman who found the truth when I was too blinded by loyalty to see it.
“Stay with me,” I say, and force my hand to loosen before fear turns into something that hurts her. I need to feel her pulse. I need to know she’s real and alive in a world that just turned into a graveyard.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, her voice steady. She reaches up and wipes a smudge of Turi’s blood from my jaw. Her touch is a silent anchor. “Let’s finish it, Alessio. For Carlo. For Riza. For Curtis. For everyone this war has taken.”
Dominic steps forward, his presence commanding the space. He looks at Turi one last time, then turns to the rest of us. The time for mourning hasn’t arrived. We are in the middle of the storm, and the only way out is through the heart of the enemy.
“Load up,” Dominic orders. “Every able man. We end this today. We end the Bellantis at the place where they tried to end us. Anyone who raises a weapon dies. Lorenzo comes home breathing.”
The brothers move as one. The shock of the betrayal has been forged into a singular, lethal purpose. We are the Costas, and the world is about to remember why that name was whispered in fear for generations.
I lead Amara toward the SUVs, her hand in mine until we reach the convoy. The vibration of the compound hums through my boots—the sound of magazines being slammed into rifles, the heavy thud of boots on stone, the low drone of engines idling. It’s the sound of a family going to war.
At the SUV, I stop long enough to turn toward her, my forehead lowering to hers. I don’t care about the mission for this one, selfish second. I lean down, my forehead resting against hers.
“If anything happens—”
“Nothing is going to happen to me,” she says, her hands coming up to frame my face.
“And nothing is going to happen to you. You hear me? You’re the one who keeps everyone alive, Alessio.
Today, you just worry about ending the man who started all of this.
I’ll be your eyes. I’ll be your back. We do this together. ”
I kiss her with a desperation that has no room left for pride. I don’t need words for home or vows. I need the friction of her breath against mine to remind me I’m still standing. I need the fire in her to burn away the cold of Turi’s skin.
“We stay together,” I say against her mouth.
“I’m right here,” she whispers back.
I pull away, the black hole of my rage focusing into a laser-fine point.
I open the door for her, watching as she slides into the seat, her laptop bag clutched in her lap.
She is the most brilliant woman I have ever known, and today, she is the mind that will dismantle what is left of a criminal empire.
I climb into the driver’s seat, my hands gripping the wheel. The blood has dried on my skin, a dark, stiff reminder of what I lost minutes ago. I don’t wash it off. I want to feel it. I want to remember every drop of Turi’s sacrifice and every ounce of his treachery.
The convoy moves out, a line of black armor cutting through the gray Chicago morning. We aren’t the police. We aren’t the feds. We are the sons of the people Lorenzo Bellanti thought he buried twenty years ago, and we are coming to take him alive.