Page 56 of Accidental Alliance

“You will after you answer my questions,” I tell her.

She holds my stare for a long, long time. There is nothing in her gaze now except contempt.

She looks at me like she can see every rotten layer beneath my clothing, under my title and the orders I give without hesitation, all the way down to the man who once agreed to impossible promises and just as quickly broke them.

There is hate in her eyes the longer that I hold her gaze with my own. But hatred from Isabella does not feel distant like it does with all of my other enemies. It feels deeply personal.

She is not looking at the underboss of the Conti syndicate. She is looking at me, Elio.

The man who rejected her nearly a decade ago and who came back with armed men and turned her life upside down.

If she slapped me, it would hurt less.

I force myself not to look away. Looking away first is surrender, and that is simply a weakness I cannot show her. Not with my brother already circling the scent of my hesitation like a wolf. “Davide Bianchi came to your house. Why?”

Her mouth twists. “I already told you. He came to ask me for a favor and I told him to leave and never come back.”

Every answer she gives feels plausible enough to trust and strategic enough to doubt. I push my tongue against the back of my teeth to keep my expression neutral. “What favor, Isabella?”

Her laugh is soft this time. “Does it matter? I turned him down.”

My patience is already starting to thin and we’ve barely made it through the beginning of this conversation. “Yes.”

She lifts her chin a fraction, that old, infuriating pride refusing to bow even when severely outnumbered. It used to thrill me, that small upward tilt of defiance. I used to want to pull her closer and argue until we ended up in my bed with the fight still burning between us.

“He wanted me to help him against a syndicate trying to move and take over some of his territory.” Her eyes roam me from head to toe slowly while she says it. By the time her gaze returns to mine, there is a brutal kind of understanding there. “I see now that the family must be yours.”

So, just as Alessio suspected, after all.

It shouldn’t surprise me. Alessio all but said it outright before I came in here. Bianchi has been losing ground ever since our war started over two years ago.

He would need someone clever to help him out of the mess he’s created, someone detached enough to see the angles his own people have missed with enough experience to understand how men like us build defenses and where they crack under pressure.

Who better for the job than a former ally?

Perhaps Davide also knew that if revenge had still been living inside her after all these years, he would only need to knock once on her door to wake it.

Tending to that fire, nursing it until it could grow on its own and lay waste to whatever he deemed necessary, that would make for a perfect weapon he would not need to monitor once it gained its own traction and pushed forward to fight his battles for him.

Isabella is not ordinary, no matter how soft her alias made her seem.

She is the exact polar opposite, which makes her the exact type of person never to underestimate regardless of the circumstances. Being at the helm of a syndicate and cultivating strategies to crush enemies are exactly what my family has been after to contain.

Now with her in the mix of it, even with her promise of turning him down, it changes everything.

Before I’m conscious of it, I close the distance until we are merely inches apart, towering over her smaller frame. She doesn’t back down, though that shouldn’t at all surprise me. Realistically, she never has. This woman could stand toe-to-toe with an underboss of any syndicate, friend or foe, and make him question not only his strategy but the center of his own convictions.

My hand lifts before I can stop it, fingers brushing a loose strand of chestnut hair away from her face. The contact is barely anything, more of a whisper of skin against her silk-soft hair—the smallest theft I’ve ever taken for myself.

When she flinches, the movement is slight, but I feel it like a knife jabbing between my ribs and twisting. Even though she does not pull away, that small motion is enough to almost make me back off. A smarter man would. A better man would apologize and leave.

But I am neither.

After eight years of starvation, touching her like this sends a wave of electricity pulsing through my veins. For one cursed second, I am not in this reinforced room in a safehouse with disabled cameras and my own family circling.

I am in my apartment eight years ago with her hair spread out on white sheets and her mouth on mine, our limbs tangled together as I bury deep inside her.

My fingers hesitate when they brush her cheek. Some sick part of me, some starving, jealous, self-destructive part, opens its mouth and asks the question I have been trying not to let fully form since the second I saw that boy but have been dying to know, nonetheless.