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“I couldn’t,” she said. “I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone.”

Dragging his fingers through his hair, he took a deep breath, trying to fill his head with oxygen.

Family came first. That’s what had been drilled into him from his first breath. Family first. One for all and all for one…

Unless an inconvenient assault happened, perpetrated by your most loyal soldier against your fourteen-year-old daughter.

Elvira had called Stefano a creep, he remembered hazily. She’d said he would have found her ovaries if he’d been the one to search her when they’d arrived at this apartment.

He’d thought she’d been needling him about Stefano for the hell of it, but the creep she’d been so scathing about had sexually assaulted Mattia’s baby sister, and he’d not known a damned thing about it.

Blinking to clear his vision, he met Elio’s silver eyes. He had the dimmest of thoughts that the shade wasn’t exactly the shade of Elvira’s, that Elvira’s were as uniquely hers as everything else about her.

The silver eyes he was staring into belonged to the man who’d taken everything from him. Taken his birthright. Taken his wealth. Taken his future. He’d lied to take it all, tricked Siena into a marriage she’d never wanted, and now he’d taken vengeance for an assault Mattia’s mother had swept under the carpet over twenty years ago.

It hit him like a fresh punch that his sister had been assaulted at the same age Mattia had been when his father, with his mother’s full knowledge, had ordered Mattia to ensure a paedophile could never enjoy any form of sex life again.

His mother had allowed her fourteen-year-old son to shoot a paedophile’s cock off, then a few years later hushed up her fourteen-year-old daughter’s assault.

He was born from monsters, he thought starkly. He’d always known it, had felt the notion grow stronger through all the long hours he’d spent with Elvira, but now he felt it like another of his sister’s sucker-punches.

The loyalty drilled into him from birth was as big a lie as the origins of the war with the Ranieris.

That loyalty had never existed, and he should have realised that when he’d learned his father had shot Fabio Romano all those years ago. A lifelong close friendship and loyalty discarded with a bullet in the head to start a war. And three of the people in this room had been left orphaned by it.

All that had ever mattered to his parents was money and power.

Sinking onto the sofa behind him, he covered his face with his hands. He felt suddenly exhausted, like he could lie down and sleep forever.

He didn’t see how he would ever sleep again.

After a long moment, he rubbed his fingers down his face and lifted his weary eyes to Elio. “What do you propose?” he asked heavily.

“To bring an end to all the lies and violence between our families and start over,” Elio answered.

“How?”

“By becoming business partners. The shadowed world belongs to me and Siena now. There’s no way back for you in that world, but there is with the Esposito Group. I can’t give it to you as you want – I will not let my parents’ deaths be for nothing – but I am willing to make it a joint family enterprise. We turn it into the Ranieri Esposito Group. Gino Viccario keeps his shares; the rest we divide equally between our two families, and give you overall control in the running of it.”

“You’re offering a truce?” The shouted question came from Elvira. “A truce? Are you insane?”

Chapter Seventeen

Elvira had listened to Elio’s proposal with utter disbelief. Of everything she’d prepared herself for, a truce hadn’t even been in her orbit.

“A truce is the only way,” Elio said, his voice and stance implacable.

“It damned well isn’t! How can you even think this is the right way forward?”

She absolutely didn’t want Mattia to die, couldn’t even imagine him mildly injured, but this?

No, this was too much. After everything her family had done and everything they’d been through, to call a truce at the eleventh hour was just too much to take.

She whipped her stare to Bruno. “Don’t tell me you agree with this? Our parents will be turning in their graves!”

Bruno was as implacable as Elio. “We don’t know that.”

“We do! Everything we’ve done has been to avenge them! Our grandmother knew that was our path in life! Don’t tell me she won’t be turning in her grave to see us reduced to this. Making a truce with the blood of Lorenzo and Valeria Esposito when that bitch is still alive and not even living in penury? Giving back all we worked so hard to take? Keeping his legacy alive? What is wrong with you all?”