Alessio's POV
The van door closed with a heavy thud, the lock snapping into place. Diana sat inside, her chin high, wrists bound, defiance stitched into every line of her body. But I saw the fear—small, sharp, buried under her stubborn silence.
My hand lingered on the handle longer than it should have. Too long. She's just another assignment, I told myself, the words bitter and hollow. Her eyes, wide and stormy, burned through that lie.
I forced myself to step back. Distance. Discipline. That was survival in my father's world. But I turned away before she could see the hesitation I fought to bury.
I told myself she'd still be there when I returned. I told myself I didn't care. Both felt like lies.
---
The house was thick with silence, the kind that smothers rather than soothes. Old wood, heavy curtains, and the faint smoke of the fireplace made the air feel as though it belonged to another century. My father's voice carried through the walls, smooth and sharp as glass, pulling me in like a hook in the ribs.
"Antonio," Giovanni said, "Do not insult me with your denial. Your brother refuses the inheritance, spits on everything men before him bled to build, and you claim not to know?"
I entered the parlor and stationed myself against the wall, the obedient shadow. Antonio stood near the fireplace, stiff and stern, his shoulders squared like a man used to bearing weight. Across from him, my father leaned on his cane, a predator in fine clothes, his gaze never loosening its grip.
"I know nothing of this," Antonio answered, clipped and controlled. "Victor is gone. Out of my life."
Gone. The word echoed. I knew the truth, the graveyard truth, but Giovanni clung to a different version—a dangerous one.
Giovanni smiled, and I hated that smile because I knew it too well. "Gone? No, Antonio. Victor is alive. Alive and arrogant enough to refuse what is his."
The air in the room shifted like a storm cloud blotting the sun.
A woman—middle-aged, though sickly; carrying herself with a quiet dignity—pressed a hand to her chest. Wife, I assumed, though she was a stranger to me. "Alive?" she whispered, voice trembling, breaking.
A younger man, not much older than twenty, stepped forward. His jaw was tight, fists clenched, fire in his eyes. The son. "We haven't seen him in years. If you know something, say it. Don't taunt us."
My father chuckled, low, deliberate, each note chosen to wound. "I do not taunt. I state fact. Graves do not always keep their dead. Some men crawl back out when it suits them."
The words slid like knives under skin. He wasn't after truth. He was after weakness. And he found it, as he always did.
---
The woman swayed, her face drained of color. "Alive…" she murmured again. Her knees buckled, and the boy caught her, lowering her into a chair with hands that shook despite his fury.
Giovanni's eyes glinted. He had struck deeper than Antonio this time—he had rattled the innocents.
The boy looked up then, and his fury burned hotter. But it wasn't Giovanni he fixed it on. It was me.
"You stand there like a dog at his heel," he spat, venom in every syllable. "Do you even think for yourself, or is obedience the only language you know?"
The words cut sharper than he could have guessed. My jaw tightened. I straightened, summoning the mask I had worn for years, the ice that kept me whole. "Careful," I said, my voice flat. "Rage makes you reckless."
His lips curled, contempt plain. "Reckless, perhaps. But at least I am not hollow. You—what are you, if not his shadow? A puppet too weak to cut his strings."
The urge to strike back, to silence him, flared hot in my chest. I could have crushed him with a single blow. But then—Diana's face rose in my mind, the memory of her silence, her defiance. Her refusal to break.
And it stilled me.
I said nothing.
---
My father's cane cracked against the floor. The sound carried like a gunshot. "Enough." His voice filled the room, drowning out the boy's ragged breathing. He turned back to Antonio, his eyes narrowing into slits.
"Your brother refuses what is his. And you will pay the price for his weakness."
Antonio's mask faltered for the briefest second, a flicker of pain, of fear. My father saw it. My father always saw it.
He leaned forward on the cane, his smile thin, cruel, merciless. "After all… a man always shows his true loyalty when his blood is in someone else's hands."
The words lingered, poisonous, curling through the room like smoke.
The boy's head snapped up, confusion flashing across his face. He didn't understand—yet. But the woman did. I saw it in her eyes. Her breath caught, sharp, and then her whole body went slack in the chair.
The boy shouted her name, frantic, but his mother did not stir. She had fainted clean away.
Still, Giovanni did not spare her so much as a glance. He simply adjusted his grip on the cane, as though nothing at all had happened. His words had done their work. They always did.
But I felt the weight of them heavier than anyone else. Because I knew what he meant.
The girl in the van. Diana.
His blood in someone else's hands.
The boy's eyes turned on me again, burning with suspicion now, not just fury. His chest rose and fell in quick, shallow breaths, and in them I saw the spark of realization. He didn't have the whole truth, not yet. But he would.
And when he did, I would be the one condemned by my silence.
The air seemed to press down on me, thick and suffocating. I could almost hear the van door closing again in my mind, the echo of it sealing more than just a prisoner inside. It had sealed my fate too.
And I knew, as my father's smile spread slow and satisfied, that the cost of obedience had only just begun.