13. War for the Throne
THIRTEEN
WAR FOR THE THRONE
MATTEO
The war eats everything.
It eats sleep. It eats food. It devours the hours between midnight and dawn when the estate goes quiet and I sit in my study with reports spread across my desk and the taste of bourbon I can't feel on my tongue.
It eats the silence in the hallways that used to feel lived in.
The kitchen counter where her coffee mug sat every morning — always the same mug, the blue one with the chipped handle that Gianna tried to replace twice and Sofia refused.
The library door that used to be closed in the afternoons because she was inside, curled up in the armchair, lost in a book she'd pulled from the bottom shelf.
All of it is quiet now. All of it feels wrong.
I don't go to the east wing. I don't ask about her. I don't let myself think about the sapphire ring I didn't ask for back or the tea Gianna leaves outside a door that I pretend I don't notice.
I don't think about her.
I think about her constantly.
The war fills the space she left — or I force it to.
Every hour consumed by operations, countermoves, the methodical dismantling of Sebastian's network and the defense of my own.
Territories shift. Alliances fracture. Men who swore loyalty last month are hedging their bets this month, reading the wind, calculating which De Santis brother will be standing when the dust settles.
Enzo is at my side through all of it — steady, tireless.
But something has changed between us. He follows orders.
He executes. He reports. And then he looks at me with those three-second silences that contain entire arguments he won't make, and I feel the weight of his judgment like a hand on my shoulder.
He doesn't believe Sofia betrayed me. He's never said it. He doesn't need to.
I sit in my study and run the war and tell myself that the hollow feeling behind my ribs is exhaustion, not loss, and the woman in the east wing is a security risk I neutralized, not a person I destroyed.
The lies are getting harder to maintain.
The call comes on the eighth morning.
Not from Enzo. Not from Marco. From Gianna.
Gianna doesn't call me. In all the years she's managed this estate, she has never once picked up a phone to reach me. She walks. She finds me. She stands in the doorway of whatever room I'm in and delivers what she needs to deliver with the precision of a woman who doesn't waste words or minutes.
She calls.
"Matteo." Her voice is wrong. Gianna's voice is always controlled — the temperature of polished silver, cool, and exact.
In all the years I've known her, through every crisis this family has weathered, I've never heard her voice break.
It breaks now. "Sofia is gone. They took her.
You need to come to the east wing. Right now. "
The phone is still against my ear, but I've stopped hearing.
The room narrows. The reports on my desk, the coffee, the war I've been running for eight days — all of it fades away, stripped from my awareness like scenery torn from a stage.
What's left is a single, white-hot point of focus: they took her.
I'm already moving. Down the hallway, past the study, through the corridor that connects the main house to the east wing — the corridor I haven't walked in eight days because walking it means passing her door and passing her door means thinking about her and thinking about her means...
Her door is open.
The room is wrong.
Not ransacked — not the dramatic wreckage of a fight in a movie.Wrong in the quiet, brutal way a room looks when something happens too fast for anyone to stop it.
The chair by the window is knocked sideways, one leg caught on the edge of the rug.
The book she’d been reading lies face-down on the floor, spine cracked, pages bent beneath it.
Dropped mid-sentence. The lamp on the nightstand is tilted, its shade knocked crooked.
A water glass rests on its side, the spill already dried into a thin ring on the wood.
And her shoes. Her sneakers are still beside the bed.
The old ones. The worn ones. The ones she refuses to replace because they are hers, because they have carried her through alleys and hospital halls and the gravel drive of this estate. One is upright. The other is on its side.
She did not leave.
The thought lands hard enough to stop my breathing.
She was here. She was sitting in this room I put her in. This room I told myself was temporary. Controlled. Protected. A necessary cruelty. A place to keep her close while I waited for the real traitor to move.
Because that is what I told myself.
That I was not abandoning her.
That I was not exiling the woman I loved to a guest room and letting her believe I had chosen a folder over her. That every locked-down hallway, every guard outside her door, every unanswered letter was part of a strategy. A trap. A way to bait whoever had been feeding me photographs and lies.
I told myself she was safe.
I told myself she was safer hating me than she would be standing beside me with a target on her chest.
But the chair is sideways. The book is on the floor. Her shoes are still beside the bed.
And on the desk, there is a letter. My name in her handwriting. The seal is still unbroken.
Something inside my chest tears open.
I cross the room and pick it up with hands that do not feel like mine. I know what it is before I open it. A defense. A confession. A truth she tried to give me while I was too proud, too wounded, too consumed by the game to receive it.
I thought I was protecting her.
I thought I was using the room as bait for the real spy.
Instead, I made her the bait.
The room tilts. For one second, I cannot hear anything but the blood rushing in my ears and the sound of her voice in my memory. Saying my name. Trusting me with it. Loving me with it.
And I left her here.
I left her here alone.
The bed is made. The bookshelf is untouched. The garden waits beyond the window, bright and useless in the morning light.
But Sofia is gone.
And the worst part — the part that hollows me out completely — is that she was taken from the prison I built and called protection.
Gianna stands in the hallway. Her hands are clasped in front of her, the way she holds them when she's struggling to keep her composure. The reading glasses are off — folded in her pocket, put away, because what she's about to say requires her full face, unshielded.
"Two men," she says. "They came through the service entrance. Early — before the shift changes. The east wing guard was gone. I don't know how long. I found the room empty when I brought the morning tea."
"How long ago?"
"An hour. Maybe less."
An hour. She's been gone for an hour. Sixty minutes. While I sat in my study running a war, someone walked into my house and took her.
Sebastian.
The name arrives with the force of a collision — not thought, not deduction, just the absolute certainty of a man who knows his brother the way prey knows the predator.
Sebastian took her. Because this is what Sebastian does — he finds the thing you can't afford to lose, and he takes it.
He's been circling Sofia since the penthouse dinner, studying her, measuring her value, and calculating exactly how much damage she could do if he pulled her out of my hands at the right moment.
This is the right moment. And I handed it to him.
I reach for the letter on the desk. Her handwriting. My name. The letter I sent back without reading.
I pick it up. I break the seal. I read it.
Matteo, I didn't betray you.
I don't know how to prove it. I don't know how to make you believe something when you've already decided not to.
But I need you to know this, even if you never read it, even if you burn it, even if you lock it away the way you lock everything that scares you: What happened between us was real.
All of it. The garden was real. The hallway was real. The night in your room — every word, every touch, every moment — was real.
I didn't perform it. I didn't manufacture it.
I didn't sell it to your brother or trade it for a better deal or use it as cover for some operation I don't even understand.
I chose you, Matteo.
Not the contract. Not the money.
You.
And if you can't see that — if the folder on your desk is louder than everything we built — then I feel sorry for both of us.
Sofia
The paper trembles in my hands.
My hands are not steady.
For the first time in my life, my hands are not steady.
I read it again. And again. Each word is landing like a blow delivered by a woman who isn't here to deliver it because I made sure she couldn't leave and then I failed to make sure she couldn't be taken.
I chose you.
She chose me. And I chose a folder.
I fold the letter. I put it in my breast pocket, over my heart. I turn to Enzo, who is already on his feet, already reading my face, already running calculations behind those steady eyes.
"Find her," I say. "Find her right now."
"I will. But Matteo — there's something else. Something I was coming to tell you when Gianna called."
"What?"
"I found the guard. Ricci."
We drive to Revere. Enzo talks while he drives — fast, precise, the briefing delivered at ninety miles an hour through city streets.
"I've been reviewing the new hires on the security detail," Enzo says, eyes on the road.
"One name kept coming back. Angelo Ricci.
Hired six weeks ago through a staffing agency we've used before — clean background, solid references.
But when I dug deeper, his references were fabricated.
The staffing agency was paid through a shell company.
Same lawyer as the Quincy accounts. Same filing patterns as Sebastian's other operations. "
Enzo checks the mirror.