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He lowers the binoculars and looks at me, and for the first time his eyes have something else behind them—not trust, not yet, but the grudging realization that I’m telling the truth.

It seems to hit him in unwelcome waves.

The agents load Matteo into a car. For one second, before the door shuts, he finds our hill and stares straight up at it. Even from here I can read what’s on his face. He knows it was me.

Good. I wanted him to know.

Allegra comes out behind her brother.

Not in cuffs. She storms out onto the drive, shouting at the agents cuffing Matteo, gesturing, magnificent and furious even from this distance. She is a woman watching her family collapse and refusing to accept the gravity of it. The agents ignore her, load Matteo, and pull out.

In the sudden quiet of the emptying drive, she stops moving. And she looks up the hill.

“She sees us,” Veda says.

“Yes. She does. She’s Allegra.” I lower the binoculars. “And she’s on her way here.”

“Should we be worried?” Mark asks.

“When it comes to Allegra Brancati, it would be a mistake to underestimate her. That’s why I have two men with laser scopes on her in the trees.”

Mark smirks. “I like your version of insurance.”

It takes Allegra ten minutes on foot in shoes not built for it, and she arrives barely winded, because rage is her chosen cardio. She walks past Mark and past Veda as if they’re landscape and stops in front of me.

“Twenty years,” she says first.

“Twenty years,” I agree.

“You did this.” Not a question. “You burned your own life to take me down.”

“I did.”

“Do you have any idea what you’ve thrown away? The lanes. The name. A hundred years of alliance between our families!”

I shrug. “I didn’t throw anything away. Matteo did that when he packed his crates with chalk.”

“The truce is broken. My brother is gone. My family is finished.” If a voice could boil, hers is boiling. The heat in it has nothing to do with lust or want. It is pure fury.

Then she does the thing I knew she’d do, because it’s the only move she has left, and it requires her to shift gears, which takes her two full breaths.

“But my offer stands, Lupo. It always stands, so long as we’re alive. Come back to me. End this farce properly. I can still make the rest of it disappear—the charges, the story, all of it, if you and I⁠—”

“You know better than to negotiate from a weak position, Allegra.”

“You love me.” Her voice cracks, the first honest sound I’ve heard from her in a very long time. “You proposed to me twice. We have had decades together, Lupo. How can you stand here and do this to me?”

“How could you let Matteo poison children, Allegra?”

She rolls her eyes and pouts. “Our love lasts beyond their useless lifetimes. Other people, they are nothing to us. You’ve forgotten that, but I remember for both of us. That is our love story. It’s brutal and hurtful, because what we have is too big for us to contain. We⁠—”

“There is no we, Allegra,” I cut in, because otherwise we’d be here all day. “There will never be a we. Because even when there was one, it wasn’t real.”

Her whole face tightens. My words hit something inside of her. Her heart facsimile?

She declares, “What we had was the realest thing that ever existed.”

“No. It was the closest thing you will ever have to something real, and if you weren’t culpable for what has been going on, I might feel sorry for you on that score.”