Page 25 of Accidental Alliance

For the first time in my life, the path laid out for me since birth feels less like destiny and more like a cage. In her arms I saw a different life, one without war rooms and replaced by quiet mornings spent learning how to take care of something fragile instead of breaking it.

In that moment, lying there with her tucked against my side, I truly believed I would give all of this up.

The syndicate.

The power.

The name.

I believed it with a clarity that still frightens me now.

If I had never known Isabella, I could have gone on as I always have. I know the terrain of my family’s business better than I know my own reflection. It is ugly, but it is fluent to me.

I know how to become the version of myself this world demands from me without hesitation, and it reminds me how easy it would be to stay.

I can protect Isabella better from inside the machine than by abandoning it. But is that enough to justify the cage trapping me by calling it necessary?

It is easy to convince myself that walking away can wait until this crisis passes, until the next threat is buried, until the next war cools, until the next excuse arrives dressed up as responsibility I can’t afford to refuse.

Until later becomes a whole life spent serving something that never intended to let me go in the first place.

So what is the alternative now that I have had a taste of what I never knew I wanted?

Because tasting it has changed everything.

Now I know what peace felt like for a few stolen hours and to want not just a woman’s body, but her mornings, her trust, her future, her hand over my heart while I confessed the most dangerously vulnerable things to her I have ever said out loud.

Can I go back to living my life as Elio, the Conti family’s underboss now that I know there is another life somewhere beyond the walls of this one?

I do not know.

Maybe I have been tainted by something far more dangerous than weakness…

Maybe it is by the slow, unbearable awareness that life might have held more for me than blood and blind obedience if I had only been born elsewhere to softer people under a kinder name.

My father’s voice breaks through my thoughts. “We will need to locate Isabella as soon as possible.

She needs to be questioned before any more of this gets out to the other syndicates.”

I pull in a slow breath. “I’ll look for her.”

I don’t miss the look my brother eyes me with.

Making me hesitate where once I would have acted without blinking. If that is what Isabella Russo has done to me, then it is the most exquisite ruin I have ever known.

And maybe the real truth is that I’m not sure I want to be cured of it.

5

ELIO

The meeting drags on for hours.

Through it all, I feel a fracture widening inside me.

Every time someone mentions the Russo name, my mind flashes to chestnut hair spilled across white sheets, to freckles dusting over olive skin, to the way Isabella challenged me with that brilliant, fearless mind even while I was buried deep inside her.

My father remains at the head of the table saying little and missing nothing. Beside him, the rest of our administration posture and circle and scheme, each man continuing to calculate what Amos Russo’s death means for our family’s power.