Page 52 of Accidental Alliance

He turns fully then, abandoning the monitor to face me, and I can already see where this conversation is going before he opens his mouth again. He thinks I am compromised in some way.

Maybe not irreparably, not yet, but enough that he has started circling it like a hound scenting weakness on the wind.

He sets the mug down on the console table beneath the screens, leaning back against it and crossing his legs at the ankles. “She didn’t just vanish into obscurity because she got tired of syndicate life. She vanished to keep herself from being dragged down with the rest of her family. That alone should tell you something, Brother. Women in her position do not disappear that effectively without help. Now Bianchi turns up on her porch unannounced and we’re supposed to believe she’s some innocent bystander? It is obvious he is the one who helped her out of her own mess eight years ago.”

I lean back into the couch and keep my expression blank, though my molars are grinding hard enough to ache. “She said no to him. Whatever favor he came knocking at her door to cash in obviously failed.”

“She said she said no to him,” Alessio corrects, spreading his hands in the air, the motion almost lazy. “How are we to know that is the actual truth? She has every reason to lie to us.”

Unfortunately, he is not entirely wrong. That is the problem.

Davide making contact with Isabella does look bad. The timing of our cold war turning hot makes it look even worse.

If I were looking at this from an outside perspective with no past attachment, and Isabella were just another daughter from a bloodline that is now gone, I would be asking the same questions.

Maybe harsher ones.

I know she was terrified when we took her. She fought like hell when she saw us taking her son away, not because she thought a scene might buy her sympathy.

That had nothing to do with theatrics and everything to do with real fear.

What happened in that house was absolutely not acting. There is no faking that kind of motherly rage, even if it’s to save your own skin from being questioned by an ally’s enemy.

I lift my eyes to Alessio. “She’s been out of our world for a long time. What would give her a reason to step back into it?”

He lifts a shoulder, the gesture casual. “Revenge, for one.”

It is the easiest answer. Revenge moves people to do irrational things all the time, turning patience into virtue and obsession into purpose. It keeps wounds fresh long after they should have scarred over and deems that righteousness.

Still, I hear myself say, “Eight years later?”

“When has revenge ever had a statute of limitation?” he counters, one brow lifting.

We have wars in our family records that outlived the men who started them.

Feuds that passed from father to son like heirlooms, grudges preserved longer than alliances.

Revenge does not rot in our world. It ferments and grows more potent with time, not less. Some need only a single reason to finish what’s already been started.

I drag a hand over my mouth and hold it there for a second, breathing through my nose while the thought settles where I do not want it.

I hate that it makes sense.

I can look at Isabella Russo, brilliant and angry, vanished for years, and imagine exactly how revenge might have helped her bide her time.

Waiting for the right opening, the right reason to step back onto the board where she could finally make old ghosts answer for what they cost her.

If revenge remains on the table as motive and there is even a chance she stepped back into this world through Davide for reasons that trace all the way back to us, then we cannot afford any kind of sentiment.

We cannot assume that because she built a softer life, she stopped being capable of hard choices.

She is still a Russo, after all.

Alessio straightens from where he has been leaning against the console table, lazy elegance draining out of him within the blink of an eye. What replaces it is colder, more final. “We will need to kill them both before Davide realizes we have his precious strategist. We cannot afford to hesitate on this.”

I say nothing.

I keep my eyes fixed on the monitor behind him, on the driveway feed. A squirrel bounds up one of the tree trunks at the edge of the frame, its tiny body moving in frantic jerks that look almost comical against the hard geometry of the rest of the world around it.