Page 85 of Accidental Alliance

My throat burns as I flip to the final entry. It is dated the night Amos died.

The handwriting is still neat as it always is, but there is tension in every stroke, a pressure that nearly tears through the page with each curled letter.

Alessio called. Said it was time to choose sides. I chose my daughter and our family. I chose what my ancestors built. May God forgive me for what comes next.

I stare down at the cold, irrefutable proof that my family—no, Alessio—orchestrated Amos Russo’s assassination.

My brother.

The boy I grew up beside.

The heir who smiled at dinners across from Amos while plotting to remove him from the board because he was inconveniently getting in the way.

None of this had been for the syndicate or because our family had been facing a catastrophic end and had been backed into a corner with nowhere else to go.

This has all been for his own personal ambition to monopolize the market. To take power he could not wait to inherit and expand it further.

And he let my father believe what?

That Amos had become unstable and needed to be taken out?

That Bianchi was involved and that is why we have spent the last six years trying to eradicate his syndicate from existence?

Or perhaps my father never knew, only discovering the truth afterward and choosing silence because the outcome had served him better.

That thought sits in me like poison.

My own brother had tried to warp me into believing Isabella had been the one playing me, that she had been the hand behind the knife all along.

All the while, he murdered her father and forced me to choose the same family that had already destroyed hers.

My brother stole not just Amos’s life, but Isabella’s innocence, her inheritance, safety, trust, and her future with me.

I helped him by not seeing clearly.

By obeying the rules I have always known and believing what was easiest because I have never had to question otherwise.

I had thought cowardice looked like running.

Like hiding under another name and disappearing from the world to start a life with someone else far away from the one that had molded you.

Now I understand cowardice can wear a suit and stand in war rooms. It can follow orders and call it honor.

It can look the woman you love in the eyes and tell her how things must end because fighting the inevitable seems foolish.

Because duty has already built the road.

Because family has already chosen the direction of the compass.

Because standing against your own blood feels like stepping off a roof and expecting the ground below to save you.

I told myself leaving Isabella alone was mercy. I believed it because I needed to. The alternative was looking directly at the truth and admitting that fighting for her would have required me to become someone I was not brave enough to be. It was easier to stand beside Alessio and my father and pretend the world had arranged itself beyond my control.

But there is nothing noble in surrendering someone else’s heart because yours is too afraid to revolt.

I press the heel of my hand against my sternum as if I can force the pain back. It sits there immovable, lodged beneath muscle and bone.

It’s guilt with a pulse, rage with nowhere to go, shame so deep, it feels inherited, as if the Conti name has stopped being armor to protect myself with and finally revealed itself as the very chains locked around my throat.