Chapter 39 Nico
The estate looks smaller than it did when I was a kid.
That’s the first thought that hits me as I bring the car up the long drive, taking the turns faster than my father ever would have allowed.
The old trees lining the lane are bare now, their branches like black veins against the winter sky.
The main house rises out of the grayness, all stone and memories.
Beyond it, where the garden slopes down toward the water, smoke is rising.
My stomach drops. “Fuck,” I breathe, and hit the gas.
Matteo’s voice is in my ear, tinny through the headset. He and Adi are on their way to the docks, their car peeling off in the opposite direction fifteen minutes ago when the pieces clicked.
“The bell,” I’d said, pacing my office while Adi pulled up maps and Matteo rifled through old photos. “On the call. When Domenico rang, there was a church bell in the background. Two low chimes, then one high. I know that pattern.”
“It could be anywhere in the city,” Adi had argued, but even as he spoke, his fingers were flying over the keyboard.
“Not like that,” I’d insisted. “That bell. Santa Lucia. Next to the old estate. Papà used to time our curfew with it. ‘When Santa Lucia sings three, my boys are home’.”
Matteo’s eyes had narrowed. “You think he’s keeping her at the gardener’s cottage?”
“Where else would he feel safe?” I’d said. “On ground he thinks is his, on land he thinks we don’t remember.”
“Fuck me, that’s bold, even for him.” Matteo’s eyes widen a fraction. “Right under my damn nose.”
“It’s like you said, he loves the symbolism of it.”
Adi had found the satellite images then, the property still in our holding company’s name, the little outbuilding near the back tucked in by the trees. It can be accessed by the lane at the back that nobody uses.
“He wants us at the docks,” I’d said. “He expects us to come to him.”
“So, we split,” Matteo had replied. “I go with Adi to the meet. We stall. You get her but take some of our men with you.”
I’d wanted to argue, to insist on being at the confrontation myself, but even in my rage, I knew this: if Isabella was burning somewhere because I chose to stand on a dock and trade words with my uncle, I’d never live with myself.
So, we split. She was what mattered most, not some grudge.
Now, as I pull around to the back road, the gardener’s cottage comes into view, the world tilts.
The building is on fire.
Not fully, flames haven’t gutted it yet, but smoke pours out of two upstairs windows, thick and black in places. Orange tongues lick at the curtains.
For a second, I can’t breathe.
I slam the car into park and I’m out before the engine fully dies, gravel slipping under my shoes as I sprint toward the cottage.
“Isabella!” I shout, throat tearing on her name. “Isabella!”
A shape stumbles out from behind the hedges, coughing. For half a heartbeat, I think my brain is conjuring her, some cruel mirage, but then she trips on the uneven ground and instinct overrides shock.
I catch her.
She collides with my chest, all smoke and shaking limbs and stubborn life, and I wrap my arms around her so tight I’m afraid I might hurt us both. She smells like burnt cotton and sweat and the faint trace of her perfume, ghostly under the ash.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathe into her hair. “Belle.”
She clutches the front of my jacket, fingers digging in, like she doesn’t quite trust gravity. “You’re early,” she croaks, voice wrecked. “I was going to meet you halfway.”
I pull back just enough to see her face. There’s soot smeared along her cheekbones, a raw scrape on her chin, tear tracks carved through the ash. Her eyes, though, are clear. Furious. Alive.
For a moment, nothing else exists. “Are you hurt?” I demand, hands skimming her arms, her sides, searching for blood, burns, broken bones.
“Singed pride,” she says. “Minor smoke inhalation. My hair will smell like barbecue for a week.”
“Did they touch you?” The question comes out sharper than I intend.
“Not like that,” she says. “They preferred emotional warfare.”
Of course they did.
I swallow down the images my brain offers, her in that burning room, gasping, alone, and focus on what’s in front of me. “You got out,” I say, equal parts awe and something like terror. “How?”
She glances back at the cottage, where a window is now belching flame. “Window, roof, trellis,” she says, a little dazed. “Turns out rage makes a great substitute for a ladder. I also might take up parkour after this.”
A laugh tears out of me that feels dangerously close to a sob. “You are never leaving my sight again,” I say. “Ever.”
“That sounds clingy,” she replies, but there’s no real protest in it.
I cup her face in my hands and silence the rest of her words with a kiss I never thought I’d get again. She tastes like smoke and her and everything that matters most in the world. “Fuck, I love you, Belle.”
Her laugh is gentle but fills me with warmth as I look at her. “I love you too, Nico.”
“Why the laugh?”
“This is just so us, declarations amidst drama.”
“It is, and I wouldn’t change us.”
She holds her finger and thumb up, an inch apart. “Maybe a little less murder, death, kill vibes going forward.”
“Yeah, I had enough of that when I told your mother you were gone.”
Isabella groans. “You told her?”
“I had to. She scares me. I can’t lie to my future mother-in-law.”
“Hold your horses, cowboy, I don’t see a ring on my finger.”
I kiss her nose, wondering how I ever lived without her. “Something I’ll be remedying the first chance I get.”
I hold her close as we move away from the building, the heat at our backs increasing as part of the upper wall groans and spits sparks. I get her to the car and sit her on the hood, the metal cool under her. Her hands tremble against my sleeves, then still as she consciously tightens them.
“Domenico?” she asks, sobering us both.
“At the docks,” I say. “Waiting for me. He has no idea I’m here instead.”
“Good,” she says. “Let him be wrong about something for once.” Her gaze searches mine, and something in it shifts, softens. “He told me,” she says quietly, “about my dad. About the article. About… what he claims Enzo knew.”
The old fear sinks its claws into my chest. “Isabella…”
“Look at me,” she says, and there’s steel in it.
I do.
“He didn’t pick me because I was convenient. He picked me because I was smart enough to follow the trail. Honest enough to publish it. Close enough to hurt you. And carrying a grief he thought he could reopen and aim.”
I swallow around the lump in my throat. “You weren’t the accident, Isabella. You were the plan.”
She nods once, agreeing with me. “He wanted to hurt me,” she says.
“To rip open everything I’ve held together since I was twelve and dump salt in it.
But the thing he doesn’t understand, and what I should have realized sooner, is that there’s a difference between grief and truth, and he weaponized both. ”
A wind gusts across the lawn, carrying smoke and the faint sound of the church bell in the distance, chiming the half-hour.
“What did you tell him?” I ask, because I need to know, even if it kills me.
“That he doesn’t get to write my story,” she says simply. “Or yours. Or your father’s. That whatever you knew or didn’t, whatever Enzo had to live with, it’s not his legacy to twist.”
Emotion punches through me, sharp and unexpected.
“I didn’t know the details,” I say, the confession scraping on its way out.
“Not all of them. I knew there was a reporter who got too close. I knew Papà made a choice not to expose his brother. I suspected Domenico had more blood on his hands than he admitted. But I didn’t know it was your father until after your article, when Rossi dug deeper, when Matteo found a newspaper clipping among our father’s things. And by then…”
“By then it felt like an atom bomb,” she finishes softly.
“Yes.” The word tastes like guilt. “I told myself I was protecting you. That knowing would only break you more. Maybe that was arrogant. Maybe it was cowardice. But I swear to you, Belle, I was never sitting on that truth like some kind of… leverage. I wasn’t keeping it to own you.
I was keeping it because I didn’t know how to put that kind of pain in your hands and not watch you shatter. ”
She studies me for a long moment, wind lifting strands of hair around her face. “I know,” she says finally.
The relief is so immense it almost knocks me off my feet. “You do?” I manage.
She nods. “Some part of me has known for days. The way you looked when you talked about him. The way you flinch at your uncle’s name.
If you were the man Domenico tried to paint, you’d have used my father’s death as a shield, not a wound.
You’d have told me in our first argument and thrown it in my face. That’s not who you are.”
“That might have been who I was once,” I say quietly, “when everything was war. When leverage was the only language we spoke.”
“People change,” she replies. “You did. I did. My mom did. And Enzo, whatever mistakes he made, whatever silence he chose, he changed, too. You’re walking proof.
” She reaches up, smudged fingers cupping my jaw.
“I love you. I was planning to tell you after we dealt with your murderous relatives and their pet arsonist. I’d still like to, but you beat me to it. ”
The world narrows to the space between us. “Ti amo anch’io,” I say, the Italian coming easier now than it ever has. “I love you so much. More than this house. More than this name. More than any of it.”
A tear slips down her cheek, carving a clean line through the soot. “Good,” she whispers.
I kiss her like the cottage isn’t burning behind us, like the world isn’t waiting to end. It’s messy and desperate and tastes like ash and hope. She kisses me back with equal ferocity, fingers digging into my shoulders as if this is the only solid thing in a spinning world.
When we break apart, we’re both breathing harder.
“Okay,” she says, voice steadier. “Romantic crisis portion addressed. Now, can we go stop your uncle from murdering your brothers?”
“Yes,” I say. “We can definitely do that.”
“You’re not leaving me here,” she says, sliding off the hood before I can suggest it. “So don’t even try. I’ll bite you and then chase after you.”
Despite everything, I can’t help it; a laugh escapes me. “Get in the car.”
We peel away from the cottage as the fire starts to eat through the roof. In the rearview, smoke pours up into the gray sky like a signal. We pass two fire engines that my men must have called on the way, and I hope they can save the old cottage. It was my mom’s favorite part of the estate.
Matteo’s voice crackles over the line when I patch him through. “We’re almost at the docks. You?”
“Leaving the estate,” I say. “I have her. She was in the gardener’s cottage, and they set fire to it with her inside.”
There’s a sharp exhale. “She okay?”
“Mostly singed, very angry,” I say. “You know. Normal.”
I feel Isabella’s hand find mine on the console, fingers threading through, grip firm.
“Put her on,” Matteo says.
I hit the speaker.
“Matty?” she asks.
“You better still be pretty, Romano,” he says gruffly. “I didn’t sign up for you going full Phantom of the Opera on us.”
“Couple of smoky highlights, nothing major,” she replies. “Please don’t die. Either of you.”
“No promises,” he says, “but we’ll try to keep it to minor injuries.”
Adi’s voice cuts in, tightly controlled. “You coming here is insanely risky, Isabella.”
“She’s already been kidnapped and nearly set on fire,” Matteo points out. “We’re past the point of coddling.”
“I’m not planning to walk into the middle of the first volley,” she says. “I just want to be where the truth lands.”
I glance at her. She meets my eyes, unwavering.
“She stays behind me,” I say. “Non-negotiable.”
“Obviously,” she says.
We kill the call with directions and timing. The plan isn’t perfect; it’s not even particularly good. But we’ve fought wars with less.
Domenico wanted us on our back foot.
He’s about to find out what happens when we swing forward instead.
“So that was your father’s estate?”
I roll my lips, thinking of Matteo and how close he came with them on the estate, and I know he’ll blame himself. “It is.”
“Huh. Maybe next time we come, you can show me around.”
I take her hand and kiss her knuckles. “You got it.”