Page 125 of Accidental Alliance

For the first time in my life, I know exactly what victory looks like.

It is Isabella’s hand in mine, Matteo safe between us, and a future we will build together from the ashes of everything we almost lost.

25

ISABELLA

I stand beside Elio in the grand war room that once belonged to my father, my hand resting lightly on the heavy oak table in the center of it.

The wood is darker than I remember.

Perhaps age has deepened the shade or grief has changed the way I see everything now.

The last time I stood in this room, I was a girl with my father’s voice at my shoulder and his cigar smoke curling lazily toward the coffered ceiling while men twice my age pretended not to notice how carefully I listened.

Now this room belongs to my and my family’s future.

The Conti empire collapsed weeks after it stormed the Bianchi safehouse, or at least what was left of it after Alessio’s death. Vittorio sits under guard now within Davide’s stronghold, stripped of the empire he believed would outlive the son he chose to sacrifice it for.

His loyalists have scattered, surrendered, or have been swallowed by the very alliances they once tried to devour.

And now I am back in Italy, trying to rebuild the syndicate my father once held with such pride.

Elio stands close enough that I can feel the warmth of him beside me, though neither of us touches beyond the faint brush of his fingers against mine.

He has learned these past few months that closeness is not something he can take from me with force. It has to be earned. He is patient with that, more than I expected a Conti man to be.

But then again, he is no longer a Conti as I once knew him to be.

Rebuilding an old empire in the wake of another’s toppling is stranger than I imagined.

Actually, strange is too delicate a word.

In reality, these months have been a funeral procession of stepping over bodies in the aftermath of the war.

Of Elio coming back from that ruined hall alive with blood on his shirt that was not all his and eyes hollow with the knowledge that he had put his brother in the ground and saved our son in the same breath.

I remember the look on his face when he saw me again and the relief that flooded through me the moment I touched him and realized he had survived.

That had been the beginning of this strange new life.

There are nights I wake and find him standing at the window, shirtless beneath the pale wash of moonlight with one hand pressed against the glass and the other touching the scars along his chest where Alessio’s last blows still mark him.

He stares out into the dark like he is searching for a version of himself that died in that hall too.

I never ask him what he sees. I know enough from my own grief to allow him the peace to come to terms with it on his own.

My hand still rests on the table when Elio speaks.

“You’re quiet.”

I glance at him.

He looks different in my father’s war room. Not out of place, exactly. Elio Conti has never looked out of place among power.

He was born beneath its chandeliers, raised in its shadows, and fed its language before he had the sense to question whether hunger and compliance were the same thing.

But here, surrounded by Russo history, he looks settled in the way I feel.