“And you’re handing me everything I need to destroy him.”
“Yes.”
She grabs the folder and glares at me as she backs away toward the door. “I have this now. There’s no taking it back. Whatever happens… happens.”
Then she turns and leaves, and I don’t stop her.
Chapter 32
She Decides What to Do
POV:Evie
The garden has eight exits. I count them before I sit. French doors. Service gate. Greenhouse path. Iron-drive gate. Terrace steps. Kitchen passage. Low stone wall. Drainage arch beneath the west hedge.
Eight.
I sit on the edge of the dry fountain with Alessandro’s file in my lap and my father’s murder organized into paper. Very civilized. Men do love their folders. The file is heavier than it should be. Not physically. It’s only leather, paper, ink, signatures, dates. Manageable. Morally, it weighs approximately the same as a body.
My father’s, specifically.
The night air is cold, but I want it colder. Brutal. Honest. Something that bites without pretending it’s out of protection. The garden is too beautiful for what I know now. Neat hedges. Silver leaves. Stone paths. Cypress trees standing like dark, obedient witnesses. Everything trimmed into shape. Nothingallowed to grow wild unless someone has decided wildness would look tasteful from the terrace.
Very Vitale. Even grief would be pruned here if left unattended.
I open the file again. Because apparently once is never enough when ruining yourself.
Dante’s confession sits on the first page. He confronted Seane Brennan. He drew a weapon. He claimed my father moved first.
Liar.
My father did many things. He negotiated with dangerous men. He signed away his daughter for an alliance he believed would hold. He chose strategy over comfort and called it necessity.
But he wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t have reached first with Dante Vitale.
Dante has always been the sort of man who wanted provocation after the fact. A receipt for his violence.
I turn the page. Council vote. Marco recommended a tribunal. Salvatore abstained. Giulio voted for containment. Alessandro overruled a tribunal.
There it is. Again. The signature.
Alessandro Vitale.
Precise. Controlled. Final.
The hand that now knows every shape of my body. The hand that received my medical records before I knew privacy had been a fiction. The hand that gave me this file and said,Use it however you need.
Too late.
That’s the problem with useful things arriving too late. They’re still useful, which feels unfair.
I close the file. Then open it again. Apparently, I’m in the repetition stage of emotional collapse.
Everything is here. Enough to destroy Dante if used correctly. Not in a court, obviously. We’re not those sorts of people. Courts are for men with smaller crimes and better illusions. But inside the families? Inside the council? Inside the system that values code more than law?
Yes.
Dante confessed. Dante killed an alliance partner. Dante broke the structure. Dante’s return was based on a lie everyone politely stepped around because men with bloodlines are forgiven things men without them are buried for.
