CHAPTER FOUR

Chapter Four

Matteo POV

She had grit. I'd give her that.

Most people, when cornered, either fell into one of two categories — hysteria or submission.

Alessia DeLuca had done neither.

She had sat on that bed with my hand wrapped around her throat as she glared straight at me.

She wasn't going to beg me either.

I turned to face the door, my mind running over the thousand details from the story this DeLuca sister had spun.

I didn't trust her. That hadn't changed.

But I could respect what she'd done, even while I turned it over in my head, looking for the weak link in all the plotting.

She was right about the war.

That was the part I couldn't argue away, no matter how many angles I approached it from. I had spent what felt like an hour standing at the dresser after she finished speaking.

I tried thinking of how exactly I could escape this. If I sent her away, then I would be disrespecting the Mafia king who had set up this alliance.

An alliance that had been three years in the making. It had cost blood and money and the kind of painstaking diplomacy that men in my world were not naturally built for.

After much concession, the wedding had been set for today, and every significant figure in the northern syndicate had attended it.

These men would rather be caught dead than find themselves at a wedding, which went to show how important this event was.

If I walked into that room and announced the bride was dead and the woman standing beside me was her twin sister, there would be no recovering the evening.

There would be no quiet conversation, no managed disclosure. There would be accusations, and then there would be no stopping the men and weapons that would flood the city with blood.

I could not afford that war. Not now. Not while my own position was still — carefully, quietly — in the process of becoming permanent.

The current Mafia king was not a man you defied publicly.

You manoeuvred around him, kept your face pleasant and your ambitions invisible, and waited, the way I had been waiting for two years, for the precise moment when the ground shifted in my favour.

Causing a war tonight would not just cost lives — it would cost me the political capital I had spent years accumulating, and I would lose the Mafia king's backing at the exact moment I needed it most.

So I looked at the woman sitting on the edge of the bed, and I made the only decision available to a man who intended to survive.

"We let it stand," I said.

She didn't look relieved, just nodded, like she had expected that answer and was already moving past it to the next problem.

"My sister?" she asked.

I shrugged.

"Stay in the suite. Don't speak to anyone until I know what's going on. I will take care of it."

There was a dead body in my house.

A house filled with security, and my men posted at every entrance and corridor — yet somewhere in the east wing, Isabella DeLuca was lying on the floor of the bridal suite.

Dead.

And not a single person had raised an alarm or knocked on that door. No one had noticed that the woman who walked down the aisle that afternoon was not the woman who had arrived the previous evening.

Which meant someone inside my organisation had either done this, or known about it, or both.

I went downstairs.

The main hall was still half-lit, a few of the older captains lingering over the last of the wine, reluctant to surrender the occasion.

I shook hands and accepted a few congratulations, doing my best not to draw attention to the fact that something was wrong.

I watched every face with the specific attention of a man who was no longer sure which of them belonged to a friend.

Carmine found me near the south terrace.

He walked in without announcing himself, but I could tell by his footsteps who it was. The man had never needed to announce himself because I knew exactly when he entered a room.

Carmine Voss had been beside me for eleven years. He had attended the funerals of my father and my brother and sat across from me in the worst hours of the war with the DeLucas and helped me make decisions I would spend the rest of my life carrying.

If there was a man alive I trusted without reservation, it was the one standing in front of me now with a glass of Barolo and a genuine smile.

"Congratulations," he said, and clapped me on the shoulder the way only he could — hard enough to mean it.

"How is she?"

"Settling in," I said.

"Nervous?"

"Aren't they always?"

He laughed warmly, the familiar sound setting me at ease.

I watched his eyes instead of his smile. They didn't match.

"She's quieter than I expected," he said. "I tried to speak with her during the reception. Barely got two words." He tilted his head, studying me curiously.

"Everything all right?"

"She's had a long day."

"Haven't we all." He swirled his glass.

"So what does she look like under that veil she wore all evening?" he grinned.

"Not bad," I mumbled.

He huffed, and something moved behind his eyes that I couldn't place.

"That's fine then," he said.

"Have fun on your wedding night," he laughed, clapping his palm over my shoulder.

I laughed at the right moments.

I didn't tell him about the situation with the murder.

I had no proof, just suspicions that I couldn't act on yet.

I said goodnight, shook his hand, watching him cross the hall and disappear through the far door, and I stood alone in the half-dark of the terrace

and thought about what it would mean if any of the men I trusted most had been part of this all along.

Above me, somewhere in the east wing, my dead fiancee lay waiting to be found.

And sitting in the bridal suite was the woman I had just agreed to protect instead.

"Fucking hell" I swore.