“Maybe he was,” Dante whispered. “In his own, warped way.”
I shot him a look sharp enough to cut stone. “By murdering my father?”
Pain flickered across his expression. He didn’t look away.
“Inhis way,” he repeated. “Giovanni’s protection always came with a price. Sometimes, that price was paid with blood that wasn’t his.”
I let out a low, humorless laugh. “Don’t defend him. He’s not my uncle anymore.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke. The old clock on the wall ticked away. One of the many bells tolled again somewhere across the water, its sound muffled by distance and the blood rushing in my ears.
I’d spent so long hating Marcello, I hadn’t set nearly enough hatred aside for Giovanni.
“Ember. Tesoro,please.” Dante’s voice was softer now, his hand on my shoulder, warm and anchoring.
He reached for me, slow enough I could have pulledaway. I didn’t. The backs of his fingers brushed my cheek, rough knuckles catching on long, wet tracks I refused to acknowledge as tears.
I hadn’t even realized I was crying.
“Both our families are rotten at their cores.” Dante’s voice dropped. “We will root out the corruption and fix this. The sins of the father and all that bullshit.”
“How fucking poetic,” I tried to joke, but the word broke halfway through.
He stepped closer, his body heat bleeding into mine, his scent wrapping around me—cloves, smoke, and something darker, something so uniquely Dante, my heart broke a little bit more. His thumb traced the line of my jaw, calloused pad gentle when he was capable of so much violence.
My pulse raced against his fingertips, blood quickening as it always did when he was close.
“I’m not telling you this to hurt you.” He cupped my chin. “I’m telling you we’re in this together now. Our families are rotten to the core, and that corruption might be more widespread than we know. If we’re going to do this—if we’re going tosurvivethis—we have to be willing to burn everything down to ash.”
I thought of the D’Immortali Dynasty as everyone else saw it—marble and gold and bloodlines stretching back two thousand years, as noble and unshakable as the foundations of this city. Then I thought of Salvatore’s murder by his own son, of Enzo’s blood soaking into the stones in the garden.
How power, in the wrong hands, twisted weakness into evil.
“Strong dynasties aren’t built on rotten foundations,” Dante echoed my thoughts. “You can patch over the decay, pretend it isn’t there, but eventually, the pillars collapse from the inside.”
My throat was so tight I could barely swallow. “And we’re the only ones who know how deep the rot goes.”
“We’re the heirs of centuries of corruption,” he agreed. “It’s our job to clean up the mess. Or walk away, which I’m not willing to do. Luca will make a good Pentarch, Emberline. Give him time. He’s young, but he is your father’s son, and that means something.”
“I’m not walking away either.” I looked up into his wild blue eyes, seeing the yearning and sorrow there. “I know how I’ll deal with my uncle. What about Marcello?”
Dante’s hand stilled against my skin.
“Marcello chose his path a long time ago.” His voice was unyielding. “He cannot be allowed to continue. And Gabriel has trained his entire life to lead this Dynasty. Severin is with us. We’re not sure of Rocco’s loyalties; he tends to follow the money, though Emilia seems to have a heart under all that fang and love for drama.”
“You sound very confident that you know where everyone is going to land.”
He huffed out a breath. “I’m trying to be realistic.” He framed my face between his palms, as if he was afraid I’d disappear if he let go. “Immortals are fairly predictable. Giovanni has been blackmailing Marcello for centuries. That means there’s one thing we can count on.”
“My uncle’s greed?” I asked bitterly.
“Your uncle needs to have the upper hand,” Dante corrected. “You can’t blackmail the Don of a Dynasty without powerful leverage. You needproof.”
The word penetrated the fog of my grief. The part of me that had survived this long by paying attention, by thinking three moves ahead, by listening when powerful males talked like I wasn’t in the room… that part sat up andlistened.
“You think Gio kept Father’s documents.”
“And I believe he’d keep them close, close enough to use as leverage against Marcello should he need them in a hurry.”
