24. Alessio
ALESSIO
The adrenaline has burned out, leaving nothing but the cold ash of a twenty-year vendetta. My chest is a cavity, scraped clean and echoing. The war is over. The monster who ordered the hits is rotting in the dirt, and the financier is nothing more than a dark stain on a warehouse floor.
The vault inside me is empty. For eleven years, I carried the weight of every secret, every suspicion, and every lie told to my brothers to keep the family from imploding while I hunted the traitor in our midst. Now, the heavy doors are unhinged.
The dead have been answered. I should be able to breathe.
Instead, I lie in the dark of my bedroom, the heavy velvet curtains drawn tight against the Chicago moon, listening to the woman beside me.
Amara. The woman I love. The runner who stayed tonight.
Her breathing is too shallow for sleep. She’s staring at the ceiling, eyes wide in the gloom. Tension radiates off her skin in waves.
It’s a low-frequency vibration that sets my own marrow humming.
She’s a live wire, and I can feel the current looking for somewhere to go.
She stayed tonight. She didn't bolt when the last bullet was spent. She let me bring her back to the compound, let me guide her through the halls that still smell like cordite and lemon polish, but she’s beside me in my own bed and somehow still halfway gone.
The sheets are a battlefield of tangled linen and unspoken fears.
I reach out, fingers grazing the silk of her shoulder.
She doesn’t flinch, but she doesn’t soften either.
My hand moves to her back, and I draw her toward me slowly, giving her every chance to pull away before her spine settles against my chest.
She’s cold. I wrap my arms around her, then force myself to loosen them before desperation turns me into another locked door, burying my face in the crook of her neck. She smells like the rain, the metallic tang of the warehouse, and the sharp floral soap she used to scrub the blood away.
“Amara,” I rasp. The name is gravel in my throat.
She doesn't answer. She just covers my hands with hers, her grip tight, nails digging into the backs of my knuckles. It’s not a caress. It’s an anchor. We’re two survivors of a high-speed collision, still vibrating from the impact, waiting for the secondary explosion.
The morning arrives with the gray, suffocating light of a Chicago winter. There is no sun, only a leaden sky sitting heavy on the roof of the compound, demanding penance. Today we bury the man who raised us. Today we bury the man who killed our parents.
The house has gone quiet in a way that makes every hallway feel sealed. My brothers move through the hallways like men carved out of grief, faces carved from granite, eyes empty. There is no talking. No breakfast. Only the sound of heavy closet doors opening and the rustle of black wool.
I stand in front of the mirror in my dressing room, fumbling with my tie. These hands have navigated the internal geography of a hundred wounds, yet they won't stop shaking. The silk slips through my fingers, a dark, slippery thing I can't master.
A pair of hands appears in the reflection.
Dark, steady, beautiful. Amara steps behind me, her eyes meeting mine in the glass.
She doesn’t say a word. She just takes the silk from me and begins to loop it, her movements precise and certain.
She’s wearing a black dress that fits her like armor, hair pulled back tight, her face a mask of forensic calm.
She looks like she’s preparing for a mission, not a funeral.
“You’re shaking,” she says. It’s the first thing she’s said since the lights went out.
“I don’t know what to do with my hands.” My voice barely sounds like mine. “For eleven years, they were busy. They were searching. They were holding the line. Now there’s nothing left to hold.”
She finishes the knot, tightening it against my throat until the silk feels heavier than it should. She doesn’t pull away. She rests her palms against my lapels, looking up at me. “There’s the future, Alessio. There’s Pine Valley. There’s the mountain. There’s the quiet.”
The mountain. Pine Valley. The place Lucia built a life in.
The place Dominic has decided will hold the family while Chicago is cleaned, buried, and locked behind us.
It sounds like a fairy tale. It sounds like a lie.
I don’t know how to exist in the quiet. I am a creature of the dark, of the secret, of the war.
If I go to the mountain, I’ll just be a hollow man standing in the sun.
I grab her wrists, my grip too tight, thumbs pressing into the delicate skin where her pulse jumps. “Tell me you’re coming,” I say, the words rougher than I mean them. “Tell me the road doesn’t get to have you again.”
Her eyes flicker. A flash of the runner—the girl who keeps her bags packed and her heart behind a locked door. “Alessio—”
“No,” I growl, pulling her flush against me.
I don’t care about the suit. I don’t care about the brothers waiting downstairs.
I need her to be real. I need her to be mine.
“The vault is gone, Amara. The hunt is over. If you leave, I’ll have nothing but the ghosts.
I don’t know how to survive watching you leave. ”
She sighs, a long, weary sound that cracks my ribs. She leans her forehead against mine, her eyes closing. “I’m here. Right now, I’m here.”
Right now. The words are a knife. They aren’t forever. They aren’t always. They are a stay of execution.
We descend the stairs together. The foyer is filled with black. My brothers stand in a phalanx, a wall of Costa muscle and grief. Matteo looks the worst. He’s by the door, hands shoved deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched. Turi died for him.
Turi stepped into the path of a bullet meant for the brother who loved him the most, the one who made him cannoli and saved him a plate even when he hated him. Matteo is vibrating with the force of his own agony. He doesn't know whether to mourn the man or curse the traitor.
Dominic nods at me, his face a mask of iron. He’s the Don. He doesn't have the luxury of breaking. He looks at Amara, a sharp, assessing glance that lingers on the way I’m holding her hand, fingers interlaced so tightly our bones might fuse. He doesn't say anything. He just opens the door.
The funeral is private. We don't go to the family plot.
Turi doesn't deserve the hallowed ground where our parents lie, but we can't throw him in an alley. We find a small cemetery on the outskirts of the city, quiet enough that the family can decide later what kind of marker he deserves. It’s fitting. A place for the complicated dead.
Father Antonio stands there, vestments fluttering in the biting wind. The war has aged us all. The casket is simple wood. No flowers. No gold. Just the weight of a man who spent twenty years trying to atone for one night of weakness and two decades of silence.
I stand at the edge of the grave, the cold seeping through the soles of my shoes. Memory stands behind the wood—the man who tied my shoes when I was small and the man who sold our routes. The two versions of him don't fit together; they just grind against each other like broken bone.
Amara is a steady heat in the freezing air.
She’s looking at the grave with a different kind of grief.
Her brother’s name was on the ledger Vane kept hidden inside the world Turi helped protect.
Curtis is dead because of that machine, and Turi helped keep the machine alive.
She has every right to spit on the wood.
But she just stands there, face unreadable, her hand a warm weight in mine.
Father Antonio’s voice rises over the wind, Latin first, then English. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. The words are supposed to bring peace, but they only bring more cold.
When it’s time to lower the casket, Matteo breaks.
He lunges forward, hands grasping at the ropes, a choked sob tearing from his throat.
Dante and Enzo catch him, pulling him back, their own faces wet.
It’s a messy, ugly display of love and hate.
It’s the Costa way. We don't do anything halfway. We love until it kills us, and we hate until there’s nothing left to burn.
The dirt hits the wood with a final, rhythmic thud. Each shovelful buries another piece of the last twenty years. The investigation is over, and the silence is a threat.
When the grave is filled, Dominic steps forward. He places a single black stone on the fresh earth. A marker. Not a name. Just a weight. One by one, my brothers do the same. When it’s my turn, I look down at the stone in my hand. It’s cold and smooth.
“Goodbye, Turi,” I whisper.
I don’t forgive him. I can't. But I can't stop loving him either. That’s the true trauma of the betrayal. It doesn't erase the years of care. It just makes them hurt.
I turn back to Amara. She’s staring at the horizon, eyes fixed on something far away.
The wind whips her hair around her face, and she looks like she could just step into the gust and vanish.
My chest tightens. My lungs refuse to expand.
I reach for her hand before the wind can make her look farther away than she is.
“Let’s go,” I say. “We’re done here.”
The ride back to the compound is silent. Chicago rolls past the windows, a gray, concrete jungle that has been our hunting ground for twenty years. It looks like a place we don't belong anymore. Closed storefronts. Empty corners. The silence of a fallen empire.
When we reach the compound, the air is thick with the scent of change. Moving boxes have started to gather in the foyer. Some paintings are down. A few rugs are rolled up. We are stripping the house bare, leaving nothing of ourselves behind.