Page 21 of Accidental Alliance

I shrug off my coat as I walk and hand it to the first attendant quick enough to materialize at my side.

“Where is he?” I ask.

I do not need to specify exactly whom I’m referring to. In this house, when the situation is this ugly, there is only ever one man everyone turns to for direction.

“My lord is in the west study, sir,” the attendant says immediately. “With your brother.”

Not the war room, then.

That’s unusual.

The west study is where my father conducts the business he does not want overheard in the formal room downstairs.

It is a place designed for pressure rather than strategic moving, for men to walk in believing they have options and soon find themselves quickly in over their heads.

Hearing that Alessio is already with him sends a fresh pulse of tension running through me.

While I doubt my brother has any idea where I’ve been since the banquet, it also doesn't escape me that there is a very real possibility that his speculations surrounding my absence have already been brought to my father’s attention.

Or discussed in length.

I give one short nod and keep moving.

The corridor toward the west wing seems endless tonight. The portraits lining the walls of stern dead men in gilt frames watch with their usual painted severity as I pass.

Generations of Contis, all men who bled and schemed and murdered their way into permanence on our family tree.

The version of me this house expects, the one perfectly in line with the men whose portraits I now pass, has already begun settling over my skin again without thought.

It is easy to push away the memory of Isabella asleep in my bed now that this house is in full crisis mode.

As I near the west study, two armed guards stand outside the door. They aren’t the younger ones pulled hastily from rotations and scattered throughout the property but older men, trusted.

Ones my father has always placed at the threshold of his door whenever whatever is being discussed on the other side has the power to change the entire landscape of the city.

They step aside the second they see me, one of them opening the door without a word.

The light from inside spills across the hall, bleeding over my shoes in a long amber strip.

I pause only for the span of a single breath before stepping through it.

The west study always feels smaller when there is blood in the air. Not physically.

The room itself is vast by any reasonable standard with its coffered ceilings, dark walnut paneling, shelves lined in old tomes far exceeding my lifespan with even older secrets.

However, tonight, the space feels compressed by grief forced into motion as one singular death has changed the course of many things.

Maps are spread across the long mahogany table in the center of the room. Detailed territory layouts are marked with shipping routes, warehouses, safehouses, political districts, and known syndicates not allied with our own.

Red pins mark Russo territory, black pins mark ours. The colors look contradictory scattered across neighborhoods and docks, none of them intersecting.

I do not miss the fresh spaces already marked among the red. Nor the fact that more pins than usual have already been shifted on our side.

Things are moving fast, as they always do after a patriarch drops.

My father, Vittorio, stands at the head of the table. Sixty-two years old and still built like the fighter he once was, age has not softened him in the slightest.

The raw and reckless violence of his youth has long since been traded for a colder kind of discipline.