The glint comes off the broken wall a full second before the shot ever could. High and left. Patient. A professional, waiting out the smoke for his one lane, and Matteo stands in it like an answer to a prayer I never had the right to pray.
Here is the last thing I will ever know, so let me say it plainly.
All the ledgers of my life sit open at once—the debt, the routes, the graves, the warnings, fifteen years of midnightmessages that never weighed an ounce against Carlo’s grave and Riza’s false stone—and for once, for once, the arithmetic is simple. One old man, already dead, already paid for. One boy with his mother’s hands.
The column closes.
I am moving before the thought finishes. My knees, my hip, the body’s whole late paperwork—none of it argues, the old machine giving me everything it has left, and it is enough, it is just enough, because a bullet is faster than an old man, but an old man does not need to be faster than the bullet.
He only needs to be closer.
Riza. The stone is warm where the sun has touched it. I laid these stones with your husband, and I am coming to tell you both?—
22
ALESSIO
Blood coats everything.The copper-heavy flood slicks my palms and fills the gaps between my fingers. This is the weight of a man’s life when it abandons the body, pouring out of Turi in a rhythmic, terrifying pulse. My hands are useless. I’ve spent a lifetime mending my brothers, but no amount of surgical precision can stop the life draining out of the man who taught me how to survive. There is too much red. Too much damage.
The world is a roar of gunfire and shouting, but focus narrows to a singular, agonizing point on the stone floor of the courtyard. Matteo stares down, his face a mask of absolute, paralyzing horror. Turi didn’t hesitate. He didn’t think. He didn’t weigh two decades of betrayal against the life of the boy he helped raise. He simply moved. He threw himself into the path of a sniper’s lead, and now he breaks apart under my touch.
“Stay with me,” I growl, the words scraping out of my throat like jagged metal. “Turi, look at me. You old fool, stay right here.”
I jam my palms into the cavity in his chest. Turi’s heat spills over my knuckles, relentless and mocking, staining the pavement and my skin until there’s no distinction between us.I don’t care about the smoke or the soldiers screaming in the distance.
I don’t care about the Bellanti cowards trying to finish what they started twenty years ago. All that exists is the man who taught me how to steady my hands, the man who gave me my first book on anatomy, the man who lied to my face for twenty years while he loved us with a fractured, desperate heart.
“Alessio,” Turi whispers. The sound is wet. Air escapes his lungs in a ragged whistle. His eyes, usually sharp and full of secrets, settle into a dull, flat clarity. He isn’t afraid. He’s been waiting for this. The bill finally came due, and he’s paying it in full.
“Don’t talk. Just breathe,” I command. My voice is the only thing left to control. Inside, a storm of rage and grief threatens to snap my ribs. I should scream at him for the route he sold, for my father’s murder, for the war that found my mother later. I should thank him for what he just did for Matteo. Both versions of this man collide in the middle of a war zone, and I am the one caught in the wreckage.
“Tell… Riza…” He chokes on the name. My mother’s name. The woman he loved from the shadows and doomed with a debt he called survival. He reaches up, his hand trembling and stained, and brushes my cheek. “Tell her I… I tried. At the end. I tried to keep them… safe.”
His hand drops. The tension in his body snaps. The light in his eyes doesn’t just fade; it vanishes, leaving a hollow, empty shell of the man who was our father in every way that mattered and a traitor in every way that destroyed us.
“No,” I mutter. I keep pressing. I try to force the life back into him. “No, you don’t get to leave yet. We aren’t done. The tribunal isn’t finished. You don’t get the easy way out.”
A hand touches my shoulder. It’s small, steady, and warm against the cold reality of the courtyard. Amara. I don’t needto look up to know it’s her. Her scent—rain and something uniquely hers—cuts through the smell of cordite and death. She is the one thing steady enough for me to reach.
“He’s gone,” she says softly. No pity filters through her voice. She knows what this man did. She knows he helped build the machine that put her brother in a grave. She knows he’s one reason I spent eleven years living inside secrets. But she also sees the man I just lost.
I look at my hands. They are red to the wrists. It feels like failure, even though the doctor in me knows no hands could have closed this wound. I let the traitor die, and I let the father die, and now only the silence of the dead remains.
I stand up slowly. My joints feel fused with lead. Around us, the brothers converge. Dominic stands motionless, eyes fixed on Turi’s body. Dante, Enzo, Nico, Vincenzo, Santi, Fabio—they are all there, faces pale under the grime of the skirmish.
Matteo is still on his knees, hands shaking as he looks at the blood on his own shirt. The bullet was meant for him. Turi bought Matteo’s life with his own, and the weight of that trade will haunt my brother for the rest of his days.
“He saved me,” Matteo whispers, his voice cracking. “He just… he stepped in front of it.”
“He did,” Dominic says, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. He looks at me, and the cracks in the Don’s mask show. We were all his sons. We were all Turi’s children. The betrayal was a knife to the heart, but this sacrifice is a brand on the soul.
“The sniper?” I ask. My voice has changed. The clinical detachment is gone. Grief drops into a black, bottomless pit of fury. It rises in me, cold and precise, until all I can see is Lorenzo.
“Dead,” Dante says, wiping a streak of soot from his forehead. “Santi took him out from the roof. But they’re retreating. They’re running back to the South Side.”
“Lorenzo,” I say. The name tastes like ash.
“He’s at the warehouse,” Amara says. She steps into my line of sight, her dark eyes fierce and unwavering. She doesn’t look away from the blood on me. She doesn’t flinch at the monster waking up behind my ribs. Her spine is made of iron. “The last relay from Turi’s burner routes back to the original South Side warehouse. The place where they lured Carlo before they left him in that alley. Lorenzo is waiting for the end.”
