Page 48 of Accidental Alliance

I am hauled up off the floor by my bound arms before the words even finish leaving me. Pain rips through my shoulders and I choke on it, my feet barely finding the ground before I am shoved forward, dragged across my own living room like dead weight toward the door. My knee clips the edge of the coffee table. I twist, trying again to reach him, but two men have me now and the leverage I had is now all theirs.

Matteo’s cries are distant now, muffled as the front door slams behind him and the man dragging him out of the house.

The man sitting on the couch finally lifts himself up from it. The motion is slow, controlled in a way that instantly sets me on edge. He who has never doubted he is in control of everything, who does not need to rush because he already knows the ending. A man who has always treated violence as both a first language and a birthright.

He has always been a predator no matter how easily he can pretend to play nice.

Even when he was younger and his mouth softened around the edges of my name. When he could look at me from across a dimly lit room and make me feel like I was the only thing there worth seeing. It had always been a trick of the light. A mask he’d used to get those he wanted into his bed and wrapped around his finger.

I know that now in ways I did not know it back then.

He is just as tall as I remember. I have spent so long forcing myself not to imagine what time would have done to his face, his body, his eyes. He is heavily muscled, built thick through the shoulders and chest like the fighter I know he is, the violence of his bloodline prominent even now.

He was always strong, always dangerous. But there is something harder about him now. Less of the young man who once leaned against doorways in rolled-up sleeves assessing from the shadows and more of the syndicate prince who has survived exactly by becoming worse than what hunts him.

His thick black hair is immaculately styled, but one hand pushes it back in that familiar gesture that nearly knocks the wind out of me yet again. Even now my body recognizes him before my mind can stop it.

Dark eyes, almost black, stare down at me with a blank mask. Unreadable to anyone else, maybe, but not to me. I know the stillness of that face and what it means when his expression locks down so completely, it looks cold.

With strangers it means calculation. With enemies it means someone is about to get hurt. With me, once upon a time, it usually meant he felt too much and hated himself for it.

Now I do not know where I fall on the spectrum.

Friend? Foe? Something infinitely worse?

“You always have to make everything so difficult,” he murmurs.

Elio Conti.

My first love.

My worst heartbreak.

The man who walked away eight years ago when I needed him most.

The man who chose family and duty over the woman who carried his child in secret. The underboss of the Conti syndicate, my ruthless protector turned enemy.

He has found me.

Whatever fragile peace I carved out for Matteo and I has been completely eviscerated.

9

ELIO

The safehouse feels too small with this many men packed inside it, despite being big enough on paper to pass for comfortable.

It is one of our family properties kept off the books and behind shell corporations that run deep enough to cross most accountants’ eyes.

A raised-ranch type structure tucked deep enough into the trees three hours outside of town that no passing stranger would clock it for what it really is.

From the outside it looks laughably ordinary. The outside is weathered with a gravel drive leading up to the front of the property, looking old enough that it could belong to any middle-aged couple who likes privacy and off the grid living.

Inside, it is another thing entirely.

Reinforced doors, security feeds glowing in the master-sized room, weapons cache at the back of the house.

Men are stationed at every window and entrance, covering every blind spot possible. Bootsteps thud faintly down the hall behind me, murmured updates drift from the main room.