Page 117 of Accidental Alliance

My eyes open. “Did you know Alessio met with Amos Russo privately weeks before the assassination? That he offered a deal to merge territories and threatened to remove Amos if he refused?”

The line goes so quiet, I can hear my own breathing. Then my father growls, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m asking you a question.”

“And I am telling you to get home. Now.”

The old instinct kicks once inside me, a phantom chain tightening around my throat that has slowly begun to slip from it. I cut him off before it can pull any harder. “I saw Amos’s private journal and the dated entries from that time period. He recorded everything.”

His voice grows hard. “Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters very much if you have placed yourself in the path of a war you do not understand.”

A laugh almost leaves me.

A dead ally… even now, he’s trying to save face despite the ghosts of his past coming back to haunt him and point the finger of judgment in his direction.

Has he always seen me as a fool? Or have I just been so complacent all my life that he’s never had to convince me to believe him?

“He wasn’t your ally at the end, though,” I say. “Was he?”

“Elio.”

“Did you know,” I bite back, “or did you not?”

“You’re letting that Russo woman poison you again.”

As if the only explanation for my sudden disobedience is her influence and not the fact that what I found in Italy is proof our family’s deception runs far deeper than I ever expected.

It is insulting that he believes my conscience is too weak to wake without a woman whispering treason in my ear.

That I am somehow still the boy he molded, incapable of seeing the rot hidden underneath unless someone else has poisoned me into seeing it.

“Come home. We will fix this together as a family. That is an order,” he says.

Family.

The word turns my stomach now.

For most of my life, family meant both the altar and execution block I would lay myself at the mercy of. I worshiped it, bled for it, sacrificed everything I loved because that is what was asked of me over and over.

My father spoke of family as if it were a sacred thing meant to be preserved, but he built it like a prison none of us were ever allowed to escape from.

“Did you know?” I snap.

My father says nothing, long enough for the last stupid, loyal piece of me to hope.

Maybe he didn’t.

Maybe Alessio lied to him too.

Maybe my father profited from the death unknowingly without ordering it and only found out after the fact when it was far too late to do anything. Perhaps he believed looking too closely at the fact would put not only his syndicate in jeopardy, but his son’s life as well. Maybe he could not bear the consequences that would come from putting my brother on trial.

However, when he finally answers, it is what I have always known and refused to believe until now. “Amos was getting in the way. He needed to be eliminated.”

For a moment, I cannot move.