Page 151 of The Cost of Silence

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.”