Page 122 of Accidental Alliance

My heart squeezes so violently, I almost cannot breathe.

Us.

To her and Matteo.

For the first time in eight years, Isabella gives me something that is worth destroying the family that made me in order to come back to the one she is offering up for me to claim.

“I will,” I say.

That is a promise I intend to keep.

She turns to Davide, her voice steady again. “Give him a weapon.”

Davide studies her for one long beat, then he nods. Every eye in the room follows him as he moves to a weapons locker built into the wall. I feel the tension rise as metal clicks and a drawer slides open. He removes a pistol and checks it with practiced hands.

He crosses to me, then carefully settles it into my hand.

“Good luck.”

24

ELIO

I move through the grounds like the weapon I was trained to be, cutting down three enforcers trying to breach the inner perimeter.

Through the smoke and gunfire, I finally see Alessio moving through the ruined outer hall.

His confidence radiates like armor, but beneath it thrums a manic edge born from desperation. He has come to end this personally, to remove the last obstacle standing between him and uncontested power.

Me.

Our eyes lock across the wreckage.

A chandelier hangs above us at an angle, several of its crystal strands shattered and scattered across the floor like frozen rain droplets. Smoke curls along the ceiling, turning the old portraits on the walls into blurred, judgmental ghosts.

Somewhere behind me, deeper inside the estate, another alarm wails.

Gunfire cracks in the distance, muffled now by stone and doors and the thickening pulse inside my own skull.

But here, for one breath, the war narrows.

Not to Conti and Bianchi forces.

To brothers.

Alessio’s smile is thin and vicious. His voice carries easily, echoing slightly off the blood spattered walls around us. “So, this is what it’s come to.”

A thin streak of blood marks one side of his temple, though I do not know if it is his or someone else’s.

Knowing Alessio, it is likely both. His gun hangs loose in his hand, the barrel dipped toward the floor as if this stand-off is so natural to him, he no longer needs a weapon.

I step forward, my hand tightening around the gun. The metal is warm now, fitted to my palm like an old companion that still remembers the shape of me. “This is the path you have chosen. If you didn’t orchestrate Amos Russo’s death, perhaps neither of us would be standing here now.”

Alessio does not flinch in the way I’m expecting him to. That is the part that guts me. There is no flash of surprise or panic to deny his involvement. His expression only hardens, his smile fading and leaving something colder beneath it.

I have seen him this way before only once, and never toward me. It is the face he wore when Giovano spat in his face, refusing to give him anything even if it was to save his own skin.

Now I see it for what it truly is. Not strength, but empty pride wearing a false crown.