17
ALESSIO
The north wallof the compound groans, a structural scream of concrete and rebar buckling under the blast of a shaped breaching charge. The vibration rattles my teeth. Dust and cordite fill the courtyard, a choking cloud of pulverized stone. Lungs burn. Grit coats my skin as the home is torn apart, but none of that matters. Nothing matters more sharply than the woman in the reinforced room, but my brothers are bleeding around me.
Amara.
I never should have left her. The strike on Wabash was a slaughter—Vane is dead on the floor of the hub he thought would save him—but the victory is ash. Vane is dead, but the betrayal is still inside my walls. The traitor is here. And now, the Bellantis pour through the breach like a fever.
I hit the ground sliding, my shoulder slamming into a stone planter. Bullets chew the dirt inches from my head, spraying mulch and woodchips across my face. No time to look back. I don't need to see the shooters to know they’re Bellanti soldiers, desperate men sent by Lorenzo before the freeze finishes choking his empire to grab whatever pieces of us they can before they hit hell.
The rifle racks—a sharp, metallic snap against the cacophony of screams and outgoing fire. My brothers are everywhere. Dante’s roar echoes from the terrace, punctuated by the rhythmic thud of his heavy caliber. Enzo ghosts through the smoke, a blade in one hand and a suppressed pistol in the other. We’re a machine built for this, forged in the fire of the first massacre, raised to be the monsters other monsters fear.
But my focus keeps dragging back to the reinforced room where I locked her for her own safety.
Safety was a lie. The whole world is a lie.
"Alessio! Six o'clock!"
Matteo’s voice cracks like a whip. Boots skid on blood-slicked pavement. I don't calculate. I pull the trigger until the man charging with a shotgun becomes a heap of useless meat. No recoil felt. No heat from the brass ejecting against my arm. My heart hammers against my ribs, a frantic, jagged rhythm demanding I get to her.
She is my life. She is the one thing this war gave me that I can still choose without tasting Carlo's blood or Turi's lies. If a single round finds her, I will become too precise for mercy.
I’m moving before the body hits the ground. I leap a fallen bench, eyes scanning the chaos for the one person who shouldn't be here.
Turi.
The name is a cancer. It’s been growing for eleven years, and now that it has a face, it’s eating me alive. He got out when the breach killed the holding-room feed and pulled the guard line north. He’s out here somewhere. The man who tucked us in, the man who taught us how to survive what had already been done, is out here in the crossfire.
The air turns cold as I round the west wing. Smoke thins here, the wind whipping off the lake and tearing the gray shroud away.
Bellanti soldiers are pinned down behind the fountain, trading lead with the security team on the roof. In the middle of the carnage, a man kneels in the open. He isn't crouching. He isn't hiding.
Turi is kneeling over Fabio. My cousin, my brother in every way that mattered—the one with the quick smile and the soft heart—is on his back, his shirt soaked in a dark, spreading crimson. Fabio’s eyes are wide, fixed on the sky, his face gray, his breath coming in shallow, ragged pulls.
Turi is holding him.
Vision tunnels. Those old, weathered hands—the hands that used to press sugar-dusted treats into my palms when I was a boy—are clamped over the wound in Fabio’s chest. Turi’s head is bowed, lips moving in a silent prayer. He’s shielding Fabio with his own body, his back turned to the Bellanti shooters.
A round whistles past Turi’s ear, clipping the stone of the fountain. He doesn't flinch. He doesn't even look up. He just keeps his weight on the wound, fingers steady, face a mask of focus.
I freeze, rifle lowered. The dissonance hits like a rifle butt to the gut. This is the man who sold the routes. This is the man whose debt opened the door twenty years ago. And here he is, putting himself in the path of a bullet to save the son he helped orphan.
A shooter rises from behind the fountain, his barrel leveling at the back of Turi’s head.
Muscle memory takes over. I don't decide to save the traitor; I just refuse to let Fabio die, and I won't let this man take the truth to the grave before I’ve ripped it out of him. Three rounds. The shooter’s head snaps back, a spray of red painting the marble of the fountain, and he falls into the water with a heavy splash.
I reach them in seconds, skidding to a halt beside the fountain.
"Get back," I growl, the words tearing out of my throat like gravel.
Turi doesn't look at me. "He’s hit bad, Alessio. The femoral. His pant leg is soaked dark from hip to knee. I have the pressure, but he needs the kit."
He sounds normal. Calm. Like we’re back in the kitchen and someone has just scraped a knee. The normalcy makes me want to scream. I want to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze until he tells me why.
But Fabio is dying.
I drop the rifle and rip the med pouch from my belt. Muscle memory is the only thing keeping Fabio from bleeding out in the dirt. I shove Turi’s hands aside, replacing his pressure with mine. The blood is hot and slick. It’s the same color as the blood on my father’s shirt twenty years ago.
