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“Unfortunately, playing the game often gets you burned,” Isabella murmured.
We sat for a moment, and I considered what to do next. If Isabella wasn’t going to be an asset…well, this meeting may have just put us in more hot water.
But I had to believe she still cared.
Sebastian was her grandson, after all.
“Care to explain what that means?” I finally said. “Honestly…I was surprised how everything went down. You practically dropped off the map. Never expected that from you.”
She nodded, her grip tightening on the stem of her wine glass.
"I worked hard to escape my ex-husband," Isabella started, a tendril of wispy black hair falling in front of her face as she spoke. "I kept my head down, changed my name. I lost contact with my daughter for a number of years, thinking that was the best thing for all of them. My daughter was innocent in this. My ex-husband...he wanted another child, but I wasn't able to give him one. He wasn't happy about it. He became more brutal, more obsessed with power. After one particularly violent episode, I left."
Her voice broke, an echo of pain surfacing in her eyes. The air grew heavier, bearing the weight of her past. A silence fell on us—a respectful pause before she continued.
"I thought about taking Alicia with me. Maybe that would have been better. But she needed...money. She loved her father."
I took a swig of my water. "I get it."
She picked her head up, her eyes narrowing. "Do you, young man?"
"Yes," I murmured, meeting her gaze square on. My hands tightened around the water glass. "More than you know."
Hassan, ever watchful, shifted slightly in his seat.
Isabella put her wine down. "I have no reason to trust you."
I cleared my throat. "When I was ten years old, my father raped my mother in front of my brother and I," I said. "Then he killed her. When he was done, he had us take care of her body."
Isabella’s eyes widened, and for a moment, her carefully constructed façade crumbled, revealing the woman beneath—mother, victim, fighter.
Her gaze softened, and she reached across the table, placing her hand gently on mine. The icy touch of her hands sent shivers through me. It felt like the cold touch of death, a memory from my past that I wished to forget but served as a constant reminder of who I was. Who we all were in this room.
"What happened to your brother?" she asked.
"Jez?" My mouth was dry despite the water I'd just sipped on. "When he was an adult, he became my dad's right-hand man. Then one of my men killed him."
Isabella's eyes held mine in a gaze that was both questioning and understanding. "And how do you feel about that?"
I swallowed hard, my mind reeling back to the fateful day when Zane had pulled the trigger, extinguishing Jez's life and a part of my soul with it. I could feel Hassan’s eyes on me, watching, waiting for what I would say. I knew I still had a lot of work to do to make things up to Hassan–to acknowledge Jez as the villain in his story, and in mine.
"Relieved," I admitted, the word leaving a bitter taste on my tongue. "But also guilty."
She nodded slowly, her grip on my hand tightening for a moment before withdrawing. Those few seconds were the closest thing to a mother's comfort I'd felt in years. "Guilty because..."
"Because I loved him," I said. "But I should have killed him long before he and your daughter were running the Devils."
Without missing a beat, she retorted, "You loved him because he was your brother. The heart isn't rational, Bash. It doesn't pick and choose who to care about based on their sins."
"Yeah," I muttered, "I've noticed."
Isabella fell silent once again, her eyes taking on a faraway look as if she were traversing paths in her mind no one else could see. I cleared my throat. "Anyway. I'm not here for therapy. You said you could help me protect my nephew."
She snapped back to the present, her eyes meeting mine with a renewed vigor. "Yes, I did," she confirmed, her tone steeling with determination. "But let's be clear about something, Bash. I'm not doing this for you or your alliances. I'm doing this for Sebastian."
I watched her, trying to decipher what lay behind those steel-lined eyes. It was an irony—an echo of my own mother's plight—that it was a woman who might hold the key to their salvation—a woman whose life had been scarred by the very men we opposed.
I nodded. "That's the only reason any of us are here."
