My hands tremble as I flip to the second to last page. The handwriting changes drastically from the neat, disciplined script I’m used to and into slanted, hurried marks. On this page, the ink is pressed into the page hard enough that it bleeds through to the other side.
Matteo knows.It’s the first sentence that grabs my attention.
I freeze, my eyes scanning the rest of the short paragraph.
“He’s going to confront Don Carlo. If he speaks, they’ll kill him. I know they will. They’ve killed others before. Must warn Elena and get her out before she gets tangled in this mess. Must disappear before it comes back to us.”
What?
I read it again and again, each time growing more confused than the last.
Don Carlo.
Why wouldhebe involved in any of this? He was never more than a familiar acquaintance to the Cosenzas. A man who lingered at the edges of their alliance and was only ever tolerated rather than trusted. A booker turned broker turned Don of a small, barely influential syndicate.
Ambitious, yes. Opportunistic, certainly. But dangerous enough to be at the center of this? Not likely… and what, exactly, did Matteo find out?
At the top of the next page is a date burned so deeply into my memory, it feels carved into my very bones. It was the last day my life was ever normal.
The day Matteo died.
My vision blurs as I stare at it. There is only one short paragraph on the page, scrawled so hard, the pen has nearly torn through the paper.
“They used my accounts to fund the hit. Matteo was never meant to die. I tried to warn him, but it was too late. They are planning on framing him as a mole. Dante is next.”
My mouth drops open. I can’t breathe. The truth crashes over me in waves, undeniable now.
Matteo wasn’t caught up in another’s path and at the wrong place and the wrong time like we all thought. He was acting as a direct threat, a man who knew too much and planned to confront the wrong people when he should’ve never put himself in their crosshairs to begin with.
I swallow hard and flip back to the page before it, back to the chart.
The longer I stare at it, the tighter my chest becomes because the picture finally becomes crystal clear. This isn’t simply a map of kinship. It’s a map of influence. Of loyalty and power quietly flowing in directions it was never meant to.
Suddenly, memories begin to surface in my mind.
Late nights where secrets were whispered against my skin, during moments when Dante’s guard slipped. In the aftermath of our stolen nights and when the weight of his family pressedtoo heavily on his shoulders and he needed someone to listen, he’d tell me things I was never meant to know.
He used to talk about them all like chess pieces. Who answered to whom within the circle, who smiled in public and undermined in private. I remember the bitterness in his voice when he spoke about his father’s closest men, those who shook hands with each other while sharpening knives behind their backs.
“Blood doesn’t mean loyalty in my family,”he once told me quietly.“It never has. That’s why Matteo and I have to stick together.”
I trace one of the lines now, my fingertip hovering just above the ink where Cesare’s consigliere’s name lies. This chart confirms my father hadn’t been cataloging relationships out of paranoia. He had been documenting a slow-moving coup, a quiet restructuring of the Cosenza empire that began long before Matteo’s death. Long before Cesare hung himself and Dante was forced to step into power.
This chart isn’t historical, it’s predictive. It shows who would survive a purge of that scale. Who would benefit and who would thrive if all three of the Cosenza line were removed from the board.
It was all a calculated dismantling of power engineered from within by men patient enough to wait decades for the right moment to strike. All of it was a conspiracy. Notagainstthe Cosenzas, but from within them.
The ledger slips from my fingers as the room suddenly spins.
My father didn’t kill Matteo like Dante always thought he did.
He tried to save him.
9
DANTE
By the time Elena returns to the villa, the sun has long since disappeared behind the hills, dragging the last of its warmth with it.
