CHAPTER 2

Leonardo’s POV;

The jet’s door swallowed us and the cabin went quiet except for the hush of the engines. The flight smelled like leather and something metallic, expensive, and exact.

She moved like someone who didn’t belong in this world: small, awkward in the fabric, the dress loose at the shoulders as if it had been chosen because it looked pretty under lights, not because it fit. Up close she was younger than I’d expected. Twenty at most. Her skin had that pale, stubborn quality that held heat in the neck; her hair was pinned back in a messy compromise between ceremony and haste.

Getting married had never been on my top one hundred things to do. I had no desire for vows or a parade of faces. But this was not about desires. This was about the house, the name, the balance of power, and the debt. Marriages were tools. They sealed alliances, quieted disputes, and kept enemies honest. In my world, there was no room for sentiment when the cost was an entire family’s livelihood.

There was something about her that tugged at things I had buried. Not softness; not exactly. She had a calm that was edged, like a quiet storm waiting for a reason to break. Her hands fidgeted at the hem of the dress as if she were trying to fold herself into something smaller. When she looked up, the expression was a dangerous blend of defiance and confusion, worse than a headlong surrender. Habit made me catalog her: how she breathed, how she reacted to space, where a hand might find purchase. Watching was control.

“Check the changing room,” I said. My voice was flat. “You’ll find something more comfortable.”

She moved with the hurried economy of someone who wanted to be anywhere but here. Luca guided her, careful and silent. She didn’t fight. She simply retreated, taking the little of herself she could carry and disappearing into the private corridor.

I watched her go because watching was what I did. It was how I kept things from unraveling. I watched until the cabin door closed and the tiny reading light over the aisle winked out.

Air travel is always a small, honest theater. You see people pared down to what they are. I saw a bride reconciling with the fact that her life had been taken. It annoyed me, the helplessness in the cabin. It annoyed me the way her hands trembled when she folded a napkin, the way anger rose in me at the thought that my family’s name was now tied to her. It annoyed me and at the same time, something else… an ugly, possessive calculation rose like bile. Anyone who tried to hurt her because of misplaced pity would have my men to answer to.

I poured a glass of scotch in the galley. The burn calmed the rhythm in my chest. Tiago and Dante were on the line, waiting for orders. Duty first. Everything else could wait.

I made a show of walking to the cabin. Heads bowed, eyes averted when I passed. Loyalty is currency; gestures are assurances. A nod to Luca, a brief look for Tiago, a soft acknowledgment to Dante.

Within a few hours, we arrived at our destination. My chief driver Franco was already waiting for us with the convoy. So we got into the SUV and headed to Villa Mancini

Getting to the villa, I got down and instructed Luca to wait with Nora until I ask them to come in.

The first place I went to was my mother’s chambers.

My mother sat where she always sat, by the window of her suite, hands folded the way they had when we were small. For a long while she had been a presence that warmed rooms. After the incident, she became a glass figure preserved against decay. Her face had the waxed look of someone who had been kept from shattering. It hurt more than any bullet.

I sat opposite my mother. The room felt hollow, a museum of what used to be. I smoothed the edge of the chair with my fingers, a tiny, pointless habit. She looked toward the wall and smiled like she had found a memory to hold. Once, she had kissed me at the school gates, laughing when I got things wrong. Now she blinked slowly, as if remembering how to look at the world. She wasn’t mute just barely talks lately and it breaks me.

“Mom,” I said low enough so only she and Gianni heard, “I got the bride you wanted.”

Her smile was small, practiced. No warmth. No surprise.

I can’t understand why she loved him so much all he ever did was break her, hitting her at any slightest mistake yet the day he was confirmed dead she broke down screaming her lungs out as tears fell down her cheeks shaking him profusely as though it would bring him back to life

Making me wonder did love really have to hurt that much? Did it gave to inflict so much pain? If love was painful then u don’t want to experience it and ever hurt a woman the way my mother was hurt.

I left her then because other matters needed my attention. Dante’s voice outside the door told me there was someone in the basement.

The basement has its own geometry: narrow corridors that smell of damp concrete and oil, where secrets are dragged out into the light. It is where things that people hide upstairs get solved downstairs.

The maid was tied in a concrete cell, a thin thing that looked too slight for the accusations leveled against her. Blood dotted the floor; a tray lay overturned, cutlery scattered like punctuation marks. She looked up when I entered, eyes wild and pleading, searching for a mercy I do not hand out.

“Why did you kill him?” I asked. Loyalty costs. Anything that touches that cost must be accounted for.

“Don, I swear I didn’t kill him,” she cried. Her voice was brittle with terror. “Please. I don’t know how the poison…”

I have heard that cadence before. Panic smells like perfume and regret. I stepped closer and let the blade I picked up catch the light. I did not want theater; I wanted answers. The knife grazed her throat, a thin line that bled warm and quick. Fear reshaped her into something smaller and honest.

“Then tell me who sent you,” I said. “Who do you work for?”

She babbled names and places in fragments, pleas woven between nonsense. I could have kept her alive, dragged out each name, followed leads, but liars choose a path for themselves when they decide on falsehoods. I have no patience for performances.

She kept denying it when her voice broke. It was a charade. I pushed past it. I slit her throat. It was swift, brutal, and final. Dante moved at my signal and cleaned with the methodical calm of men who understand how to tidy consequence.

I do not enjoy killing. I do not romanticize it. Killing is a tool, necessary like the books my father read. Use it wrong and the family bleeds.

When the basin was cleared and the cell shuttered, the house felt colder. I walked back into the quieter rooms where my mother sat watching light leave the day. I felt the double weight of duty and what had just been done. I called for Luca.

Nora was still in the SUV

Then I ordered him to bring her in

“Take her to my room,” I said. “Do not let her out of your sight. If she leaves, it will be your head.”

Luca’s nod was immediate and iron-true. He moved toward the stairs with Nora at his side. I followed only far enough to see her retreating figure, then turned away. Rules are the scaffold of power. Even if a storm were gathering in the place where another thing might grow, there was no room at the seat of a crown for softness.