Page 86 of Accidental Alliance

I will not be returning to the safehouse as the loyal underboss.

I can’t.

That man died the moment I recognized the bloodstain on the marble steps and read Amos’s final entry.

Or maybe he died eight years ago and has only now had the decency to show.

I look around the war room once more—at the maps pinned to the walls, the sagging strings connecting territories men have bled over, at the dust covering everything like the slow hand of judgment.

This room belonged to a dead man who saw the board clearly enough to understand the threat before it killed him and had been too late to stop it from happening.

Protect Isabella.

His words were not written to me, but they might as well have been. I failed her once. More than once. I failed her in the silence after her father’s death and when I let Alessio’s suspicion become an excuse to push her away. I failed her every year I let resentment take the place over wanting her because that would have required me to admit I still loved her.

And Matteo.

Christ.

Matteo.

He isn’t mine in any sense, but in some strange way, I still feel the ache of those seven years of his life all the same.

His mother spent all that time building a life with someone else because I was too stubborn to allow myself to claim her like we both wanted.

I cannot go back in time and convince her not to have a child with someone else, but I can be there for them both now without question.

For the first time in my life, that feels more than just a strategy detailed over a war table to punish my enemies.

It feels like penance for every hurt I’ve ever caused the one person I care about most in this world.

I gather the journal carefully and press the pages back together, slipping it into the inside pocket of my coat to keep safe.

It belongs to Isabella. She deserves to have the only piece of her father that is still left in this world.

I do not expect gratitude or forgiveness for returning the journal to her once I get back to the safehouse. She may still hate me, she has every right to, but I will tear the Conti syndicate apart from the inside before I let Alessio touch her or her son.

Once, the idea of destroying my family would have felt like treason. Now it feels like cutting rot from a wound before the infection reaches the heart.

Alessio has been the festering blight for years now, smiling at dinner tables while arranging our allies’ deaths and calling them opportunity.

My father may not have been the one to pull the trigger, but his silence built the gun Alessio fired from. His empire has always rewarded the kind of monster my brother became.

And I, the loyal son, obedient weapon, blind and ignorant underboss, helped keep it standing.

No more.

I am done putting family above the woman I love.

17

ISABELLA

Tonight is the night.

A routine supply drop is scheduled for 2:17 a.m., the conversation about it overheard from one careless sentence dropped while one of the guards was shutting the door to mine and Matteo’s room after a lunch drop-off.

“Supplies are being dropped in the morning. 2:17. Boss said all hands need to be ready to bring the crates in. There’s over fifty of them.”