When the men return later with a proposal, laying it out carefully as if they expect resistance, I let them finish, then smile.
“Perfect,” I say, folding my hands together. “Get it done.”
Security increases visibly across the estate, guards doubling at the gates, patrols tightening, cameras repositioned to make it look as though we are retreating inward, frightened, hiding behind walls and guns and silence.
Bellandi will read it exactly as intended.
He will think we are afraid.
What he will not see is the quiet planning happening just beneath the surface, the conversations whispered in hallways,the cars that leave the estate without fanfare and do not return right away.
By the time the sun begins its slow descent, the plan is already in motion.
When I receive the phone call I’ve been waiting for, I change clothes deliberately, choosing something simple and dark, my hair pulled back from my face, my posture steady as I walk down the front steps of the house that is no longer just Giovanni’s but mine as well.
The house that feels like home.
The air feels charged, humming with the kind of anticipation that makes my skin prickle.
Headlights cut through the dusk as vehicles pull up in a tight formation, engines idling, doors opening in perfect unison.
My capos step out first, faces unreadable, movements precise.
Then the rear door opens.
They drag her out.
Isabella Bellandi doesn’t look like the woman who threatened me over the phone or made me the butt of her jokes in my own house.
Her composure is stripped away along with the silk and confidence she’s used to wearing like entitlement and armour, her eyes wide with terror as she stumbles forward, restrained but very much awake.
She sees me and freezes, and I savour every expression that shudders across her face.
Shock. Fury. Bewilderment. Then… fear.
I step forward slowly, letting her take me in, the house behind me looming with quiet menace, the men flanking me a reminder that she is very far from anywhere her father’s influence can reach.
“Your father tried to kill my husband,” I say, my voice carrying easily across the space between us. “Now he gets to watch me disembowel you, piece by piece.”
The words land with brutal clarity.
And as Isabella’s breath shudders, as terror finally cracks her polished façade, I accept something with cold certainty.
I did not choose this war.
But I will finish it.
Isabella Bellandi sits exactlywhere I told them to put her.
Not bound like an animal, not displayed like a prize, but placed deliberately in the centre of a room that strips away every illusion she has ever relied on.
The chair is hard, the basement light unforgiving, the stark grey walls bare enough that there is nowhere for her eyes to land without circling back to me.
I make sure I am already there when she is brought in.
Waiting.
The door closes behind her with a sound that carries weight, and the men step back without instruction, taking up their positions along the walls, silent and immovable. She looks from face to face, searching for sympathy, leverage, recognition, anything that might remind her she is still someone who matters.
