Page 80 of Accidental Alliance

I still am.

And yet, I still want to be her shield.

What a grotesque kind of arrogance.

I step out and lock the door behind me. For a moment, I stand in the hallway with my hand still on the knob while the safehouse moves around me.

Men murmur somewhere down the corridor while a radio crackles. Boots move across the hardwood in steady increments.

Life continues on in the belly of the monster as if nothing fundamental has changed at all. Inside me, an old allegiance has cracked, however. I can no longer ignore what is blatantly standing right in front of me.

By the time I reach the end of the hallway, I know one thing with absolute clarity. I need to find that ledger.

16

ELIO

I fly back to Italy under the cover of a business trip alone and without an entourage.

That alone has made half my men nervous the moment my announcement made it through the chains of command. Underbosses do not travel without their shadows.

It’s considered dangerous for men like me to move through the world unguarded.

Oftentimes, when going on business trips similar to this one, we turn hotels into temporary fortresses and restaurant reservations into perimeter checks.

Every public step is measured, every private one documented by someone loyal or too afraid of the repercussions to not keep us breathing.

For the next two days, though, it will just be me, a forged itinerary, a private jet logged for a meeting with investors in Milan, and a dark suspicion sitting heavily in my chest.

The flight there feels endless.

Outside the window, the sky stretches on endlessly. I sit in the cabin with one glass of whiskey untouched on the table in front of me and my phone lying face down beside it, silent except for one encrypted message sent to my brother and father detailing the takeoff.

The long hours stretch on, giving me time to get lost in my own thoughts, though I try to stay away from thinking about Isabella left behind in that room. I’m sure she’d be elated to know I’m gone, far enough away from her that I can no longer reach her or her son.

Her hatred I can understand. I can carry it because it is well deserved, much like most of the vitriol and insults she’s hurled at me thus far.

It keeps distance between us even if I hate it, reminding me once again that I am the one who stormed into her life and dragged her back into this darkness.

What I never expected was for Isabella Russo to thank me.

I wasn’t looking for anything to come from reuniting her with her son, least of all that.

I gave Matteo back because keeping him from her had become unbearable to watch.

For years I let myself imagine she disappeared because she wanted to punish me. Because she found a life better than the one I refused to choose and maybe, somewhere far away from me, she had learned to breathe easier without me.

I had held onto that resentment and anger for years, allowing it to excuse the hurt I continued to inflict on her the longer I kept her separated from her son.

Yet every hour I kept them apart, something in me tightened.

Watching her pace that room, her eyes lifting every time to the camera like she knew I was there witnessing her impending breakdown, felt the claws dragging down my chest and splitting me open.

I told myself giving him back was the only logical conclusion. It was a way to calm her and stabilize an already toxic situation from becoming worse than it already had turned into.

I could not keep watching her suffer and still pretend I was anything other than my father’s son.

That should have been the end of it, a wrong made slightly less wrong though never quite undone. I expected relief from her and maybe rage once she realized the gesture did not mean freedom.