She doesn’t give up.
Her fists pound against the door almost immediately, frantic and relentless. She calls my name over and over, her voice muffled by the thick wood but no less piercing. Each hit lands like a blow against my own body.
I don’t move. I don’t go back to my desk or pour myself another drink to chase away this horrifically raw wound tearing open inside my chest. Instead, I press my back against the door and only when the pounding finally stops, when her voice fades into silence, do my legs finally give out. I slide down slowly, my back dragging against the wood until I’m sitting on the floor with my head tipped back and my eyes squeezed shut.
If the past four years have all been built on a lie, then everything I thought I understood about my life goes down with it.
Every decision I’ve made in Matteo’s name, every order given, every alliance severed, every man I’ve condemned to die because I believed justice demanded it has allowed me to build an empire on grief and certainty. On the belief that I was avenging my brother and honoring my father’s final truth.
If the past four years were false, then so is the man I’ve become.
And worst of all, if it was all a lie, then Elena was never truly my enemy to begin with.
She was just the collateral damage I created along the way.
10
DANTE
The ledger refuses to leave me.
After an hour—or maybe several, time has lost all meaning at this point—I finally drag myself up off the floor. I move on instinct alone, stooping to gather the scattered pages one by one. I don’t read them again. Instead, I keep my gaze fixed elsewhere and shove the pages roughly into the ruined binding, locking all of it in one of the drawers in my desk.
Out of sight, out of mind. That has always been my method.
And yet, nothing changes.
Over the course of the next few days, the drawer stays shut, but the knowledge inside it prowls relentlessly in my thoughts.
I try to drown it out the only way I know how. By working. By burying myself in meetings over the next few days that run long into the night, mediating territorial disputes and issuing punishments with cold calculus. I remind myself over and over who I am, what this family requires of me. What Sicily expects from someone in my position.
A Don cannot afford self-doubt.
I tell myself I’ve buried worse things than this. I’ve compartmentalized much darker truths. This should be no different. Whatever Elena placed in my hands and whatever poison of doubt it carried can be sealed away just like everything else.
But at night when the villa goes quiet, that drawer becomes impossible to ignore.
I find myself alone in my study staring at the place where it is hidden. Sometimes, my eyes trace the grain of the wood, my thoughts circling dangerously close to reaching out and opening it and leafing through the pages until all of this can make sense again.
Every time I get close to it, though, that’s when I hear him.
Matteo.
Not as he was at the end—broken, bleeding, struggling to form the words for whatever he was so desperate to get out in those final moments before he took his last breath in my arms—but as he used to be. His voice slips into my mind with cruel clarity, light and infectious, carrying that familiar warmth. But then just as quickly, it fades into disappointment.
You never questioned it? Why not?
My jaw tightens.
I tell myself it’s guilt, grief. I know it is. I know how the mind works when it’s been wounded this deeply and how it invents new ways to torture you day after day, year after year. I’ve lived with that truth since the night my world split apart.
But nonetheless, the echo of his voice persists. It is unforgiving in its gentleness just as he always was.
You trusted them, Dante. There is no shame in that. We all did.
A pause.
But didn’t you ever wonder why they moved on so quickly?
