Page 19 of Accidental Alliance

I know how murder changes people no matter what form it comes in, whether that be from hands that get personally stained or through a proxy’s.

Tonight, when she was next to Amos, I saw many things reflected in those honey-gold eyes of hers. Weariness, calculation, restraint, but no intent to kill.

I wouldn’t have missed something like that.

“Elio.” My brother’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “Did you hear me? You need to come back home. Now. Father is already convening in the war room.”

I breathe out slowly, forcing my shoulders to relax. “I’ll be there in twenty.”

4

ELIO

I drive from my apartment to my family’s estate with the taste of Isabella still on my tongue and the echo of Alessio’s words ringing in my skull like a death knell.

The city is half-dead at this hour. Streetlights cast long, jaundiced streaks across the windshield as I cut through empty intersections and sleeping neighborhoods.

Usually I find comfort during the stretch of night when the city sleeps, but now it merely serves as a catalyst of what I know will be coming.

My hands tighten on the steering wheel until the leather creaks under my grip.

Thirty-three years of conditioning scream at me to compartmentalize, to lock the memory of her body beneath mine into a steel box and throw away the key because there are more important things to worry about right now.

Bury the distraction before it can be used against me.

This is the exact situation I was molded for. To manage the crisis and turn it into strategy, force the chaos into something more manageable to deal with.

I know how to be that man.

I have spent my whole life becoming him.

Yet every mile I put between Isabella and me feels like another fracture in the foundations I spent all these years building and reinforcing.

I hate that some part of me keeps tracking backward, imagining her waking to an empty bed, to my missing warmth and a silence she will not understand until she reaches for her phone and finds whatever hell will be waiting for her to answer on the other line.

I picture her face when she learns what happened with perfect clarity, disbelief at first, then the careful composure she wears like a second skin smoothing out her features.

And beneath that, the hurt she will hide because women like Isabella learned young that grief in our circles is safest when disguised as poise.

Hours ago, I had been ready to abandon all of this for her. I had looked straight at the life that had been built for me and seen, for the first time, an exit. I had imagined leaving, walking away from the syndicate, my father’s plans, the title that has sat on my shoulders since the day I turned twenty-one.

Yet the second my brother’s call summoned me back home, I’m hesitating. The fact that I am going back at all, leaving Isabella alone back at my apartment while the machine that built me starts turning once more, feels wrong.

I can already feel the gravity of her trying to pull me backward. All the weak points she exposed in me tonight are now bleeding and festering.

Underbosses are not supposed to hesitate like this.

They are not supposed to ache for a woman accused of murder, no matter how ridiculous the theory may be or how transparently convenient the accusation already sounds even to an outsider.

My laugh, when it comes, is short and humorless.

This is what weakness feels like, then.

How horrific.

The Conti family estate looms ahead as soon as my car cuts down the long, private road.

Its floodlights carve crisp white beams through the pre-dawn dark, bleaching the drive and the high iron gates in a cold, surgical glow.