I swallow hard, the answer sticking in my throat.“He put your name on the table,” I say, voice low and raw.The kind of rough that scrapes your throat on the way out.
I move toward her, slow, each step like I’m walking through a goddamn minefield.I sink into the chair across from her, elbows on my knees, and look straight at her.
“One of my father’s men caught wind of it,” I continue.“He heard your father was reaching out.Trying to make a deal to buy his way out of a death sentence.Word was, he had something rare.Something personal.Something valuable.”I pause, jaw clenched tight.“That something was you.”
She doesn’t speak.
She just sits there like marble, frozen, flawless, breaking from the inside out.
“He was cornered,” I finally say, even though it makes me sick to say it.“The walls were closing in.He knew my father wanted blood,” I go on, slower now, more careful.“And he knew he couldn’t outrun it.So he gave them you.One of my father’s men made the call.He told them where to find you.Your alias.The address.Place of work.Packaged it neatly, wrapped in a bow, and handed it to the highest bidder.The truth is your father put your life on the market to save his own.He knew my father would jump at the chance to see if you had the information he was after.”
“But he should know your father won’t stop,” she mutters, voice tight, like she’s chewing on rage just to keep from falling apart.“Not until he gets what he wants.That’s not how your father works, he doesn’t stop until the end.How stupid for mine to think he could sell me out and buy himself time.It won’t matter.Your father will keep hunting him, Matteo.He’ll burn everything down just to find him.”
She turns to look at me, and the firelight flickers in her eyes, catching every fractured piece of her.Her stare holds mine.
“My father never wanted a daughter,” she says, her voice flat, emotion stripped bare.“I’ve been nothing but leverage to him since the day I was born.A pawn in his sick, twisted game.”
She doesn’t blink.Doesn’t waver.The words fall out, not as a confession, but a fact—cold, carved in stone.Something she’s carried forever, just waiting for someone to say it out loud.
And I feel it.
The way it hollows her out.The emptiness that one truth has carved into her.The weight of it’s been pulling her under for years, and I’m just now seeing how much space it’s taken up inside her.
She turns back to the fire, her gaze flickering with the orange glow.
“That’s why I left that world,” she says, her voice softer now, edges fraying with the weight of her words.“When your father pulled you deeper into his empire, I knew it was only a matter of time.He’d take whatever softness was left in you and crush it.And when he did...”She exhales, slow and shaky, like the weight of the past is pressing down on her.“You’d be gone.Lost to me.And I wouldn’t be able to reach you anymore.”
My gut twists, like a raw wound reopening.Because she’s not wrong.She saw the rot creeping in long before I ever tasted it.She saw the darkness that would swallow me whole, and she tried to save me from it.
“I watched it happen, Matteo.I saw it in your eyes before I left.You were already slipping away.”
For a moment, I can’t breathe because her words are the truth.They cut deep.Because I became exactly what she feared.Hard, cold, unreachable.I let myself drown in that world, and she was right.I became a stranger to myself.
“I knew he’d make you into something I couldn’t save,” she says, her words cutting through the air.“That one day you’d look at me and not see the girl you used to love, but just another weakness to be discarded.”
It hurts like hell, hearing her say that.Because in her eyes, I was never the villain.I was the boy who could’ve made it out.The boy who chose not to.And that’s what fucking kills me.
Not the blood on my hands.Not the bodies I stepped over to survive.What haunts me is the way she looked at me back then, with that stupid hope in her eyes, convinced I was still worth saving.And the worst part… the way she’s looking at me now, full of everything I never became.Everything I could’ve been.Should’ve been.
And maybe she’s right.But now it’s too fucking late to become the boy she believed in.
Chapter Eight
Emery
I’vebeensittinginthe same spot for what feels like hours.And all I can hear, on repeat, is Matteo’s voice, spelling out the truth like it was nothing.How my father put my name out there, knowing exactly what that meant.Knowing Alessandro DeLuca, Matteo’s father, the goddamn king of blood-soaked vendettas, would slit my throat without blinking.No hesitation.No mercy.Just a name on a list.Just leverage.Just me.
I’ve always known my father was disappointed in me.Hell, it wasn’t a secret.
The disappointment started the second I was born, when the doctor said, “It’s a girl,” and his dreams of a loyal little monster to carry his name died right there in the delivery room.
He wanted a son.
Someone he could mold into a weapon.
Someone cruel and cold, cut from the same brutal cloth.
He followed Alessandro De Luca’s orders without question.Matteo’s father wasn’t just powerful, he was the power.The kind of man whose name carried weight in every room, whose silence alone could break weaker men.He didn’t need threats.He didn’t need violence.He taught my father everything he knew.How to lead without mercy, how to control without raising his voice.
