Page 106 of Accidental Alliance

Elio’s mouth pulls down into a faint frown. “I traveled back to Italy a few days ago.”

My brows furrow.

I have spent years avoiding even thinking about that place too deeply, as if the country itself could send its ghosts to collect me even from hundreds of miles of ocean separating us. Sometimes, the nostalgia for that time in my life hits me in waves, pieces of my life before all of it crumbled flashing through my mind without warning.

My family’s estate glowing gold in the afternoon, the cypress trees outside. My mother’s perfume hovering faintly in every hallway, the sound of the sea in the distance. Home before it became a crime scene.

Elio continues. “Your uncle told me about a ledger your father had been writing in at the time of his death. I wanted to go back to your family’s estate to see it for myself.”

I blink.

For a second, surprise cuts through every other emotion.

It is not the first time I have heard of it, nor have I been unaware of my father’s habits. Amos Russo recorded everything. He believed memory was only as useful as the records it derived from.

Every deal and promise ever made with a handshake, every lie disguised as respect was written and recorded in neat, disciplined script and stored like weapons.

As a child, I thought the ledgers were boring. Thick books with leather covers, locked away in cabinets I was not supposed to open.

I used to watch my father write in them late at night, his cigar burning low in the ashtray, his face half-lit by the lamp on his desk.

Sometimes, he would notice me standing in the doorway and sigh as if I were a nuisance, but he never sent me away.

Come here, Stellina. If you insist on haunting doorways, at least learn something useful, is what he would always say to me.

I would sit beside him, my legs dangling above the floor, while he explained things no girl my age should have understood.

I should have thought of those ledgers after his death. I should have searched his study and taken whatever pieces of him I could. But back then, I was not thinking like my father’s daughter.

I was nineteen and hollowed out by shock. I was grieving, terrified and unknowingly pregnant, betrayed by the man I loved so thoroughly that my own life felt unsafe in the only country I knew.

Before I left Italy for the States, I did not think about going through my father’s belongings and finding evidence of some hidden truth.

I thought only of survival, and then, once Matteo began growing inside me, I thought only of him.

My voice comes quietly. “What was in it?”

Elio inhales slowly. “Amos wrote about everything leading up to his assassination. Alessio…” He stops, eyes falling again. The complicated look that tightens his expression is almost painful to witness. Love, loyalty, disgust, grief, all of it braided together into something harsh and ugly. “My brother approached him months before, offered your father a private deal to consolidate Russo territory with ours.”

My entire body goes cold at the words.

“When your father refused,” Elio continues, voice lower now, a little rougher, “Alessio threatened to kill him.”

My eyes widen. “What?”

Elio’s expression does not change much, but something in his eyes flinches. “I’m sure… you can connect the dots from there.”

My stomach twists.

I remember those late nights with my father leading up to his death, him teaching me how to read people, to see the moves three steps ahead, drilling it into me over and over until it felt almost desperate. I remember the night of the gala when he was parading me around to the others in attendance under the guise of presenting me to find a husband. All the while, he had been whispering tests in my ear to see if I could read the room around us in the way he’d taught me.

At the time, I had been annoyed and thought he was preparing me for marriage in the only way someone like him knew how.

As if a husband were another rival to negotiate with, another threat to assess across a table. Maybe in a way, he was.

But now I see something else.

Desperation.