Page 17 of Accidental Alliance

One hand drags back through my hair, pushing the thick waves away from my face as if the motion might somehow make any of this settle easier in my mind.

“What the hell happened?” I hiss.

There is the faint sound of movement on Alessio’s end, the sound of a door shutting.

When he speaks again, his voice is even flatter than before. “He was found dead outside his compound. Two shots in the back of the head. No one has answers right now.”

Two shots in the back of the head. An execution. Not the kind of death men like Amos meet by chance.

That is without a doubt a message, though to whom remains unclear. Whoever did it wanted certainty that the head of the Russo family would have no chance at survival.

Whatever disruption of the status quo they hoped for is exactly what they will be getting.

My brother’s tone alone is enough to tug uncomfortably at my gut. My brother is not a man to give in to dramatics. If anything, he’s spent half his life sounding bored by disaster.

So when his voice hardens on the next sentence, it surprises me.

“People are looking at his daughter being behind it.”

My heart gives a hard, brutal tug.

The reaction is so immediate, it feels like a fist closing around the actual organ beating inside my chest.

My head snaps toward the same hallway I’d just come from, so fast, the movement almost hurts.

The dark line of it stares back at me, the shut bedroom door at the end suddenly transforming into more than just the place where Isabella is sleeping blissfully unaware of what’s befallen her father.

Why in the world would Isabella be a suspect?

It makes no sense.

I stare out at the city again and see none of it.

My mind is already somewhere else entirely, circling the same ugly question and finding no answer that does not stink of opportunism.

Yes, powerful men’s daughters are easy targets for speculation, that much is obvious.

Girls like Isabella are born under expectations where they are watched, weighed, and discussed as though they are only assets and not people.

Every glance gets interpreted, every absence becomes suspicious and the target of gossip and speculation.

Every flash of temper or disobedience gets stored away for later use by people happy to weaponize it.

Family gossip latches onto women like her because it is easy. Daughters are expected to be beautiful, obedient, and useful, and the second they stop fitting neatly into any one of those categories is when the whispers start.

But murder?

Patricide?

To leap there this fast means someone is either desperate for an explanation because higher authorities are already breathing down their necks, demanding names before Amos’s blood is even dry on the pavement, or someone is far too eager to offer up a theory that serves them personally.

In my world, people do not rush toward the most dramatic conclusion unless that buys them something, be it protection, influence, or time.

Accusing a dead man’s daughter buys a great many people all three.

I force myself to breathe again. “Why is that the first conclusion?”

Alessio is quiet for a beat.