My father would never have chosen greed over power, or power over family. He understood better than most that power gained through treachery was fragile and easily overturned, destined to rot from the inside out. No matter how deeply he disagreed with Dante’s father and how often he criticized his methods of brutality and his willingness to rule through fear, he would never have wished him dead.
Let alone Matteo.
Matteo was everything Dante’s father was not. He was gentle and earnest, open-hearted to a fault. He treated allyship as something sacred rather than transactional. My father admired that in him.Respectedit. Matteo had always been kind to me, even when our engagement was more political than romantic. He never raised his voice or treated me like a pawn. He deserved none of what happened to him.
And in that same vein, my father would never have allowed Matteo to be caught in the crossfire of whatever happened to unravel both of our families, and certainly not in the horrifically brutal way his life was taken and used as a message against the Cosenzas.
The thought twists painfully in my chest as I move deeper into the villa. Dust motes swirl in the shafts of light that cut through the skewed drapes. Whatever happened between all of them—between my father, Dante’s father, Matteo, and the Cosenza family at large—it wasn’t as simple as Dante believes.
It can’t be.
The version Dante paints of my father as a traitor, a thief, a man willing to burn everything down for his own gain, doesn’t exist in my memories. I refuse to believe he suddenly became someone unrecognizable without reason.
There are pieces missing. Lies layered over truth. Motives buried beneath deception. If I’m right, if there is more to this than simply power grabs and greed, then uncovering it may be the only thing that saves Luca from one day inheriting a legacy built on a lie.
In my father’s old study, time seems to have stalled mid-collapse.
The safe is the first thing I notice when I enter the room. Its heavy steel door hangs crookedly open, the hinges cracked and pried apart with brutal force. Whatever had been taken was done in a hurry. When I get closer, I spot deposit boxes pulled apart and the papers that were once inside them scattered. The careful order my father always prized has been reduced to chaos.
At first glance, it looks like a clean sweep—that whatever documents were important enough to pry open a fireproof safe for were taken and the rest discarded like trash. Except when I bend and sift through the ones in the very back corner, I find something strange.
A leather-bound ledger is wedged beneath one of the broken deposit boxes, half-hidden as if deliberately overlooked or hastily shoved aside for something far more valuable. My breath catches as I pull it free, the worn cover familiar beneath my fingers.
I recognize this book instantly.
My father never let it out of his sight. It was always within arm’s reach or tucked beneath his arm whenever he left the house or locked in his desk drawer at night when my mother would finally coax him to bed. He carried it with him even when he traveled, treating it with a reverence that bordered on obsession.
It isn’t a ledger by any industry standard. There are no neat accounting columns meant to satisfy auditors or bankers if ever needed to prove our family business’s legitimacy. Instead, it reads like a hybrid between a journal and a cipher, a place where my father recorded what mattered tohim. Names scrawledin shorthand only he understood, numbers that don’t add up unless you know how to read between them.
As a child, I always thought it was just my father being eccentric, maybe even a little bit paranoid. He had always been careful and thinking several steps ahead with whatever was thrown his way. I’d chalked his obsessive protection of this book up to habit more than necessity, assuming it was the burden of being a man who lived among powerful people and this was how it manifested.
Now, standing here with it in my hands, a cold realization settles over me. If this book mattered so much back then… why would he leave it behind?
The thought sends a chill down my spine.
The lock on the side is easy to break open.
The first twenty pages are dense with coded transactions. Columns of numbers fill the paper in tight, precise lines. Dates, offshore account numbers, shell corporations layered on top of one another in a way that makes my head ache, money moved through channels designed to look mundane—consulting retainers, foreign investments, secret payments routed through innocuous fronts.
There are names that appear between the figures, written in my father’s careful shorthand. Names of politicians, businessmen, and financiers I vaguely recognize from the periphery of our world.
The longer I stare at it, the more I recognize the system, though. I’d spent years glancing over his shoulder while he worked, absorbing the patterns without quite understanding their significance. Back then, it had all blurred together intoadult things I wasn’t meant to question. Now I can see it for what it is.
The entries that follow shift in tone.
Journal notes replace raw data and switch to exclusively kept records of meetings with Don Cesare Cosenza, Dante’s father. The margins are crowded with personal observations tucked between formal meeting summaries. Anecdotes about dinners and negotiations sit beside biting commentary that barely disguise my father’s growing disapproval.
It was never a secret that the two men clashed, but what shocks me is the undercurrent running through these pages. It’s obvious that my father had been desperately trying to maintain peace by appeasing Cesare, talking him down and preventing fractures growing within the other Sicilian syndicates before they became outright declarations of war.
Then I turn the page and the content shifts yet again.
The next set of data points befuddles me at first.
There are names that fill the page in careful script, all of them members of the Cosenza inner circle. Lines connect them in strange patterns, some bold and heavy while others are marked with faint, tentative lines.
At first glance, it looks almost harmless. An oddly notated family tree, maybe, or a visual shorthand for alliances that only my father understood at the time of his involvement with the Cosenzas.
Some names are connected directly to Don Cesare while others bypass him entirely, looping instead toward his consigliere. A few lines are broken, scratched out, rewritten darker andheavier, as if my father changed his mind or discovered something new that forced him to rearrange the truth yet again. Certain names sit on the outskirts of the map, while others form a dense, central knot that pulls everything inward.
