“Fine,” Dominic says. “You and Amara handle the Gold Coast. Matteo, you take Cicero. Dante, the West Loop. I’ll take the South Loop site personally. We move when Alessio clears the switch.”
He looks around at his brothers. “This is it. The end of the Bellantis. The end of Vane. We do this right, or we don’t come home.”
The brothers begin to disperse, their voices low as they coordinate logistics. It’s a familiar dance, the preparation for war. I’ve seen it a thousand times, but this time feels different. The stakes are higher. The air feels thinner.
As the room empties, Dominic lingers by the table. He waits until it’s just the three of us—him, me, and Amara.
“Alessio,” Dominic says, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Is there anything else? Anything you haven’t told the room?”
My heart stutters. The secret of the mole sits in my chest like a shard of glass. I think of the pings we found coming from inside this house.
I think of the anonymous tips that have saved us, tips that only someone with intimate knowledge of our movements could have sent. I think of Turi, the man who held me after Riza was killed, the man who taught the younger boys how to stand when the house wanted to collapse.
I look at Dominic. My brother. My Don. If I tell him now, if I tell him we have a traitor in the house, he’ll burn everything down. He’ll lock this place down, he’ll interrogate everyone, and the unity we need to hit Vane will shatter. We are at the finish line. If we stumble now, we die.
“There is an internal-feed anomaly,” I say. “I don’t have proof of a name. Give me until the switch is dead before we tear the house apart.”
Dominic stares at me for a long beat. He’s looking for the crack. He’s looking for the lie. I’ve spent eleven years becoming a vault. I don’t crack. I don’t leak.
“Good,” Dominic says, finally. He reaches out and claps a hand on my shoulder. His grip is heavy, a reminder of the bond we share. “Take care of her, Alessio. And take care of yourself. I can’t lose any more brothers.”
He turns and walks out of the room, his footsteps echoing in the silence.
I don’t move. I can’t move. The weight of the lie is crushing. I feel the memory of my father’s hand on my other shoulder, a cold pressure that reminds me of the cost of secrets. I’ve been carrying this alone for so long, and now I’m carrying it while standing next to the only woman who ever made me want to stop carrying everything alone.
“You lied to him.”
Amara’s voice is soft, but it hits me like a car crash. I turn to her. She’s watching me, her eyes narrowed, her expression unreadable. She’s a forensic accountant. She spends her life looking for the missing cent, the hidden entry, the lie in the ledger. She saw it. She saw me flinch.
“I’m doing what’s necessary,” I say, my voice rough.
“Necessary for who?” she asks, stepping closer. “For the family? Or for you?”
“There are loyalties in this house that go back twenty years. If I tell them there’s a mole before we deal with Vane, the war is over. We’ll be too busy killing each other to kill the enemy.”
“Is that what happened to my brother?” she asks, and her voice trembles just enough to let me see the raw trauma underneath. “Did someone decide it was ‘necessary’ to let him die? Did someone decide that a secret was worth more than his life?”
I reach for her, my fingers grazing her arm. She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t soften either.
“I am going to find the person who signed your brother’s life away,” I vow, leaning into her space until our foreheads almost touch. “I am going to find the person who betrayed my parents. But I have to do it my way. I have to make sure the family survives the truth.”
“The truth doesn’t care about your family, Alessio,” she whispers. “The truth just is. And if you keep burying it, eventually you’re going to run out of room for the bodies.”
I don’t have an answer for her. Because she’s right. I can feel the walls closing in, the secrets piling up until there’s no air left. I look at her, at the woman who has spent ten years hunting the same ghost I have, and I realize I can’t keep her out of this. Not anymore. She’s already in the vault. She’s already seen the scars.
“Help me,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve said those words to anyone. “Help me dismantle the switch. And then we’ll deal with the rest. Together.”
She looks at me for a long time, her eyes searching mine for some sign of the man underneath the surgeon and the vault. She finds it. She always finds it.
“Together,” she agrees.
But the word feels like a promise and a threat all at once.
We spend the next several hours in a fever of preparation. The war room becomes our world. The rest of the family moves around us like shadows, but we are the center of the storm. Amara is brilliant. She navigates the layers of Vane’s encryption with a cold, clinical efficiency that makes my blood run hot. She doesn’t need to be told what to do. She anticipates the next move, the next firewall, the next trap.
I watch her hands as they fly across the keyboard. They are steady, purposeful. I want those hands on me. I want her to look at me the way she looks at the code—like a puzzle she’s determined to solve, like something that matters.
I stay close. I bring her water. I bring her food she doesn’t eat. I stay close enough to read her screen and far enough to let her work. I’m grounding myself in her, using her presence to drown out the whispering voice in the back of my mind that tells me I’m making a mistake.
