This file can make Dante untouchable in the other direction. A son who murdered an alliance patriarch and was hidden by his father. A liability too public to reintegrate. A succession risk. A political wound.
I can destroy him.
I should feel triumph. I feel like I’ve swallowed broken glass. Because the question isn’t whether the file is enough. The question is whether enough matters.
If Dante falls, my father stays dead.
If Dante is exiled, named, stripped, punished, removed from every room and every ledger and every future, my father stays dead.
If Dante is shot in an alley and the pavement drinks him down like every other stupid, violent man who thought consequence was optional, my father stays dead.
And Alessandro still chose silence.
There’s no punishment in this file that changes that.
I hate that. I hate that revenge has limits. No one tells you that when grief is fresh. People talk about justice as if it’s a clean blade. As if the right cut can separate the living from the dead and restore the room to its proper arrangement.
It can’t.
Justice isn’t a resurrection. It’s only what remains after a collapse.
I press one hand against my stomach. The twins are quiet. They’re always quiet, technically, being too small yet for the dramatic commentary their parentage suggests they’ll eventually develop. Still, I think of them as listening. Which is absurd.
But then, so is everything else.
Like being almost six months pregnant with the twin children of the man who concealed my father’s murder.
I look toward the house. Somewhere inside, Alessandro is awake. I know this without any evidence, which annoys me. I know it because men like Alessandro don’t sleep after handing over power. They sit in rooms and calculate what they’ve released.
He gave me leverage. Real leverage. He placed his own son in my hands.
That doesn’t absolve him. It doesn’t clear the debt. It doesn’t make his original choice smaller.
He knew what Dante did. He chose silence. He chose Dante over my father. Over me. Over the truth I had a right to hold before I made any of the choices that brought me here. Before I refused Rory’s exit. Before I went to Alessandro’s rooms. Before I let the line between strategy and want become something I couldn’t examine without bleeding. Before the twins. Before permanence.
Alessandro stole the timing. That’s the part I keep returning to. Not only truth. The timing. Truth late enough to trap is a different kind of lie.
I could have left. Maybe.
I could have gone with Rory and obtained the file another way. Maybe.
I could have refused Alessandro’s protection and taken my chances with Irish guns and Italian consequences. Maybe.
Maybe I would still have ended up here. Maybe not.
The maybes are useless and unbearable.
I shut the file hard. A bird startles somewhere in the hedge. Good. Something else can be startled for once.
I stand and begin walking the path around the fountain. Slowly. My body has become a negotiation with exterior forces. If I stand too fast, the world tilts. If I walk too long, my back reminds me that twins are not merely a poetic conjunction. If I don’t eat, Teresa appears with food and the expression of a woman preparing to commit justified assault with soup.
I’ve become a logistical project. A person should resent that.
And I do.
“Your father is a criminal,” I tell the twins quietly. Then, after a pause, “So am I, apparently.”
That feels fair.
