Page 51 of Accidental Alliance

I have done enough research to know there is no obvious husband or boyfriend moving in and out of that house, no steady male presence attached to her routines and to her child to suggest a father figure.

No second car left overnight, no school paperwork listing a spouse with pickup rights, nothing.

Whoever helped build that life with her has long since left.

Going out of my way to find out more details about him would only enrage me further than I already am since finding out she has a child in the first place.

That is the excuse I’ve been using with myself, anyway. Because the longer I dwell on it, the more the satisfaction of imagining myself killing him with my bare hands for leaving her tempts me.

Alessio’s voice greets me as soon as I enter the main room. “So, I’ve heard she’s pretending she has no involvement with Bianchi. How predictable.”

The words land with that infuriating ease only my brother can manage, light on the surface, almost conversational, as if we are discussing this week’s upcoming weather instead of a woman I haven’t stopped thinking about for years.

I hold back a sigh and cross the room without answering immediately.

The main room has been turned into an operations nest in the few hours since we arrived. Massive displays are anchored into the far wall, each one feeding a different angle of the outside perimeter. Maps are spread across the long dining table in front of the couch, weighted down with spare magazines and a half-finished mug of coffee gone cold hours ago.

I lower myself onto one of the couch cushions, feeling the ache in my shoulders and jaw more clearly the second I stop moving. Across from me, Alessio stands close to one of the monitors, his attention fixed on the camera angled down the drive leading up to the safehouse. He has one hand braced on the back of a chair and the other curled loosely around the same mug of coffee he has not touched since pouring it.

He looks perfectly composed, though of course he does. Even as boys, when I was still learning how to hide my emotions, he already understood that stillness frightened people more than raised voices ever could.

At forty, he has our father’s height and enough of our mother’s beauty to make the brutality of him unexpected to anyone unlucky enough to encounter him.

His jacket has long been shed. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled to the forearms.

His dark hair, like mine, is pushed back out of his face. To an outsider, he could be standing in a boardroom instead of a fortified safehouse holding a woman and her child against their will.

And though his tone remains light, there is a predatory satisfaction curling his lips upward that makes my shoulders tighten.

To Alessio, Isabella’s anger is proof that she is a threat.

Proof his instincts eight years ago, when he first accused her of conspiring in the move against her father, were not only correct but prophetic.

He has always loved being proven right more than he has loved almost anything else.

Especially when being right justifies his own personal cruelty.

“She hasn’t said anything specific to anyone,” I say at last, keeping my voice flat. “Only that he came to her house to visit and ask her for a favor.”

Alessio chuckles softly. He turns his head just enough to glance at me over his shoulder, and the look in his eyes makes it clear he thinks I’m insulting his intelligence by even repeating her version of events out loud.

“Brother,” he says, almost kindly, which somehow makes his tone even more grating, “please be rational. She is obviously funneling information back to him about something. Davide shows up at her door like they’re old friends catching up over tea? Please be serious. She is playing you. Again.”

I don’t deny it.

I also don’t defend her.

There is no point when I truly do not know why Davide made contact with Isabella to begin with, or what passed between them in that house before we got there.

So far, she has said nothing beyond the meeting lasting less than ten minutes. He came, he asked for a favor, she refused. That is all she has given us.

No names, no details, no strategy, and absolutely no explanation for why Bianchi found her now after years of silence.

But to what degree she is telling the truth, I don’t know.

None of us do.

And that uncertainty is precisely what Alessio feeds on.