43. CHAPTER FORTY‑FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Dante
Matteo sat hunched in the war room chair, wrists metal-bound to the bolted ring at the table’s edge.
Sweat slicked his brow and darkened the fabric beneath his arms, but the rest of him radiated taut defiance.
His eyes, red-rimmed with sleeplessness and the swelling from his beating, never left Dante’s silhouette in the doorway.
“Boss.” The word was spit, not spoken, but it formed a shape in the air that was old loyalty gone rotten. “You finally figured it out.”
Luca lingered against the wall behind him, arms folded, watching with the air of a man who had expected this all along. Alina stood a pace behind Dante, invisible to Matteo and forgotten by Luca in the crosshairs of what came next.
Dante stepped into the room, his shadow stretching across the table. He looked at Matteo the way a surgeon might look at a wound that would not close, regretful but utterly resolved. The light caught his jawline, blue and harsh. “Why.”
Matteo’s laugh was a dry scrape. “Because you’re not the man you used to be.” He rolled his shoulder, testing the manacle, not the words. “You’re distracted. Soft. Weak. Ever since her.”
He didn’t even glance at Alina, but Dante’s eyes moved minutely in her direction. He stood so still she thought he might not breathe again. Then: “Say that again.”
Matteo’s teeth bared in a smile that was more snarl. “You heard me. She’s ruining you. And I won’t let the Moratti’s name go down because you can’t keep your emotions in check.”
Dante’s voice fell to a precise, dissonant calm. “So you tried to have her killed.”
Matteo’s smile didn’t change, but his hands curled in the cuffs. “I did what had to be done.”
The words burned holes in the floor between them.
For a moment, nothing moved; even the air was suspended, as though the room itself was holding its breath.
Dante’s right hand trembled at his side, then steadied.
He looked down at the table, then at Alina, as if weighing her against the sum of everything he had ever risked.
Alina surprised herself by moving first. She stepped forward—one clear, deliberate step—and the click of her heel on the tile was louder than any gunshot. Luca tensed but did not interfere.
She stood between them, eyes level with Matteo’s, the bruises on his face reflected in the sharp blue of her own.
“You think I’m making him weak?” she asked, the syllables blunt as stone.
Matteo’s gaze met hers, unblinking. “You are.”
She almost smiled, but it was too cold for that. “No. I’m reminding him that he has something to lose.”
Matteo let his head loll back, a parody of amusement. “Humans die,” he spat, as if the words were a doctrine.
Alina’s mouth twitched. “And monsters betray their own,” she said. It was not an accusation, only a diagnosis.
Dante’s hand came up, almost involuntarily, to her shoulder. He guided her back, gentle but insistent, until she stood again behind the line of his own body. Then he turned to Matteo, something ancient and closing in his eyes.
“You could have come to me,” Dante said.
Matteo shook his head, slow and certain. “You’ve lost the right.”
Dante’s jaw flexed, but his voice was a scalpel. “Take him away.”
Luca moved forward in a single, unbroken motion. Matteo’s chair scraped as he pulled him up, the legs shrieking against the concrete. Matteo twisted, tried to look past Luca to Dante, but Luca’s grip was absolute.
“Dante—” This time the word was a plea, gutted of its contempt, just a bare echo of what had once been faith.
Dante stood turned away, as if the sight hurt too much to bear. “You betrayed the family. And you tried to kill the woman I—”
He stopped. The room filled the silence with the weight of what he could not say.
“You chose her over me,” Matteo said. It was so quiet Alina felt it in her bones before she registered the words.
Dante answered with the chill of real absence. “I chose the truth over a lie.”
Luca pulled Matteo toward the door. At the threshold, Matteo wrenched free enough to turn. The look he gave Dante was not hatred, but injury. “She’ll ruin you,” he said. “You’ll thank me, one day, for trying to stop it.”
Dante didn’t move, didn’t even blink. Luca yanked Matteo into the hall, the door slamming behind them with a gunmetal finality. In the echo, Dante seemed to shrink, his posture hollowed by something deeper than defeat.
He did not look at Alina for a long moment. When he finally did, his face was open, unmasked, and so wounded that she forgot every smart, deflective thing she might have said. She reached up, brushed a thumb across the new bruise purpling beneath his left eye.
“I didn’t want it to be him,” he whispered. The words staggered him, as if he had never admitted to wanting before.
She pressed the side of his face in her palm, grounding him with touch alone.
He leaned into her, all the tension that had held him together unraveling at once.
She wrapped her arms around his ribs and held him with the kind of strength that didn’t need witnesses.
He pressed his face into her hair and neither spoke, because there was nothing to say that would not make it worse.
They stayed like that until the distant sound of footsteps gave warning: Luca, returning alone.
He paused at the threshold, gaze flicking between the two of them and then away, giving them privacy even as he spoke. “It’s done. He asked for a blindfold. Said he didn’t want to flinch.”
Dante nodded, the smallest motion, but his voice was steady this time. “Thank you.”
Luca lingered, weighing words, then seemed to decide against them. He left as quietly as he’d arrived.
Alina held Dante until his breathing evened. When he finally pulled back, his eyes had dried, but there was something unfamiliar and dangerous in them—resolve, but also something like hope twisted into it.
She took his hand and led him to the far end of the table, where the city map lay scarred and coffee-stained from too many sleepless nights. He sat, and she did too, their knees touching beneath the battered wood. The war was not over, but for the first time she could see how it would end.
Dante’s voice broke the silence, low and deliberate: “We finish this. On our terms.”