Page 81 of Accidental Alliance

But then she did something I never accounted for. She turned her eyes up to the camera I watch every single night and thanked it—thanked me.

I grip the armrest of the jet seat and stare out the small oval window at the black sky beyond it, but there is nothing out there to anchor me. My reflection stares back at me in the glass.

Gratitude is a small, treacherous thing. It slips beneath my armor and finds the soft places still left inside me and whispers that maybe she believes I am not entirely beyond saving, after all. If Isabella hates me, I at least know where I stand. I can survive as a villain in her world because that’s what I’ve been for almost the past decade.

But this… this tenderness… I don’t know how to deal with it.

She is planning something. I know it by the way she watches the hallway outside when the guards come and go with her food. That should alarm me. Instead, a grim sort of pride rises in my chest before I can kill it.

Of course she is planning to do something. Isabella Russo could be chained in the belly of hell and still be looking for loose stones to wiggle and escape through.

She was born for strategy, trained by a man who understood that power is not always held by the person holding the gun. Sometimes, it belongs to the one patient enough to know where the gun will be pointed to next.

My father never understood that about her. That is why he believes she is worth nothing more than to use as a pressure point against someone else. Alessio does, and that is why he fears her influence over me.

My mouth almost curves up despite myself. Then the pride curdles into something heavier, flattening my expression once again. If she is planning something, then she is planning against me too.

She has to.

I am not separate from the system she’s trapped inside. I am not some guard standing outside the cage with orders I cannot refuse and regret in my heart.

I’ve kept the keys to her freedom in my pocket while telling myself I am protecting her from dangers worse than me, as if that absolves the fact that she still wakes behind a locked door each and every morning.

Giovano’s words move through me again.

Protect her from all of it. Including yourself.

I stare down at my hands.

They are the same ones that have signed orders, broken bones, pulled triggers, dragged men out of hiding, and held Isabella’s face when I had no right to ever touch her again.

The Conti in me wants to claim what is mine while the man in me, whatever is left of him, knows I have not earned that right in the slightest.

Flying back to the birthplace of her grief with the taste of my family’s sins still bitter on my tongue feels both overwhelming and impractical. Chasing the remains of a dead man’s ledger and the possibility that every lie I have lived under was built with my own father’s hands comes with its own high price.

One I am willing to pay if it means finally finding out the truth.

Italy rises beneath me in glittering fragments.

The faintly illuminated coastline breaks when it touches the scattered lights of the residential areas beyond it. Roads stretch through them like veins beneath the skin of the land. I watch it appear and feel no homecoming, only the sick sense of dread slowly washing over me.

By the time the plane touches down, I have folded every feeling back into its proper boxes and pulled the familiar mask of my family’s underboss over me.

It doesn’t take long to move through the private terminal under a false passport and head for the main entrance leading out into the cool morning air.

A car is already waiting for me at the front terminal, parked exactly where I arranged for it to be dropped off.

I take the keys from the valet and go.

The road out of the city is quiet beneath the dark wash of early morning.

Fog still clings thickly over the road, making it almost impossible to see through even with the car’s lights cutting through it.

The closer I get to the Russos’ former territory, the more the landscape seems to withdraw into itself.

I remember coming here with my father years before its downfall and finding myself bored by the beauty because I was young and stupid enough to think it resembled exactly what I had at home.

I remember Isabella walking ahead of me through one of the gardens at the estate while her father guided us on a tour of the property, finding myself drawn to her with no reasons as to why.