Page 120 of Accidental Alliance

The feed is grainy, washed in the cold green-gray of night vision.

He’s moving east toward the lower courtyard. Smoke drifts across the image in broken veils, blurring the lines of other soldiers moving between stone columns and clipped hedges.

As soon as I spot him, every part of me goes still. He wears a dark coat with the collar turned up against the night air. His gun is held low in one hand. Two men flank him from behind while another three move ahead.

I recognize them instantly—his personal guards, his preferred killers.

They are men he trusts because he has frightened them enough or dirtied them so thoroughly, they cannot run without sealing their own fates.

My hands curl into fists at my sides. For several seconds, I do not recognize the feeling moving through me.

It is not fear. That would be easier to name and push aside in favor of training and instinct to take over as the cold arithmetic of survival coaxes me forward. I know fear.

I was raised in a house where fear was fed to me until it either sharpened me into something useful or destroyed me until there was nothing left.

This is different.

This is rage with grief buried under it.

“I’ll go.”

The security room seems to contract around the statement as the words leave my mouth, both Isabella and Davide’s attention suddenly pulling toward my direction.

Isabella’s face changes first. It isn’t in a dramatic sense.

She would never give that much away in a room like this with lives on the line, but I see the shift because I have spent too many years haunted by her not to notice the smallest cracks in her expression.

Her mouth parts slightly in protest, her hand tightening around the tablet. The strategist in her is pushed aside temporarily while the woman who loves me is brought to the surface.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

I nod. “He is my responsibility.” My gaze moves back to the screen, to Alessio’s dark figure cutting through smoke. “I’ll end this the way I should have a long time ago.”

Before he murdered Amos Russo.

Before Isabella ran and Matteo was born into secrecy.

Before my father chose to build our family’s future on betrayal.

I should have seen it sooner.

Instead, I called it ambition rather than what it truly was, because by doing so, it would have forced me to choose a different path from the one laid out for me since birth.

Alessio’s cruelty was never hidden from me. In reality, it had been polished and justified, dressed in family loyalty and wrapped in the familiar language of necessity because that is how the Conti line has always functioned.

And now look where it has led us all.

“Your father…” Davide begins.

I shake my head before he can finish. “He won’t be here.”

I know Vittorio Conti well enough to answer that without hesitation. Even now after hearing him condemn himself and justify it all in the same breath, I understand him as well as I always have.

“If he’s sent Alessio, that means he is still at the safehouse. He would never leave our family without a head if one of us were to fall in battle,” I finish.

Especially not now. Not when I have turned against him and Alessio has risked himself by stepping onto Bianchi ground.

My father is too disciplined to put both heirs in the same line of fire along with himself.