The Rival Heiress

Chapter 5 — Choosing a Side

By the time they got back to the estate, Nico was already waiting in the foyer with a gun still in his hand and blood on his knuckles from putting his fist through a wall somewhere between the restaurant and home.

"We go to war," he said, before Elena had even taken off her coat. "Tonight. I don't care whose bullets those were, I don't care about some mystery stamp nobody's ever seen — somebody shot up a room with our family in it, and we answer that or we look weak enough to shoot at twice."

"Nico—"

"No." He rounded on her, and for a second she barely recognized her own brother, the fear underneath the fury so raw it had curdled into something uglier. "You almost died tonight. Papa almost died. And you're standing here holding a bullet casing like it's a science project instead of telling me who to kill."

"Because I don't know who to kill," Elena said. "Neither do you. That's the problem, Nico — you want a war so badly you don't even care if it's the right one."

"It's the only one we've got."

"It's the only one you know how to fight." She hadn't meant to say it that sharply, but she didn't take it back either. "You want to send men into Rossi territory over shells that didn't even come from Rossi guns. You'd be starting a war for someone else, handing them exactly what they wanted, and you don't even know their name yet."

Salvatore came in behind them, moving slower than he had an hour ago, the night finally showing on him in a way Elena hadn't let herself notice until now. "Enough."

"Papa, tell her—"

"I said enough." Salvatore's voice cut through the foyer with the particular quiet that had ended more arguments in this house than shouting ever had. "There is no war tonight. There is no war until we know who fired those shots, and there will be no war against the Rossis at all, because the Rossis didn't do this."

"You don't know that."

"I know it," Salvatore said, "because their don's son threw his own body over my daughter's the second the first shot landed, and a man doesn't do that for someone his family just tried to have killed."

Nico's jaw worked. He looked at Elena like he wanted her to argue, to take his side the way she always had when they were kids and it was the two of them against every rule their father made. She didn't. She stood beside her father instead, still, deliberate, the first time in her life she could remember choosing that side out loud, in front of witnesses, knowing exactly what it would cost her with her brother.

"She's right," Elena said quietly. "Whoever did this wanted us at war with the Rossis by morning. If we give them that, we're not avenging anything. We're just doing their job for them."

Something closed off behind Nico's eyes — not agreement, just retreat, the kind that meant this conversation wasn't over so much as postponed. "Fine," he said. "Marry your Rossi. Play house in enemy territory. Just don't come crying to me when it gets you killed instead of them."

He left without waiting for a response. Salvatore watched him go, something heavy and old moving across his face, and then he looked at Elena with an expression she hadn't seen from him since she was a child — something close to pride, close to grief, hard to tell apart.

"Go rest," he said. "Tomorrow will be worse than tonight, one way or another."

He was more right than either of them knew.

Damian found her twenty minutes later, on the terrace, still holding the same shell casing she'd carried out of the restaurant like she couldn't put it down. He'd changed out of his ruined jacket into something plainer, and for a moment, without the tailored armor of the dinner, he looked less like a Rossi and more like a man who'd nearly watched someone die in front of him three hours ago.

"You didn't have to defend me in there," she said, before he could speak. "To your father, I mean. Earlier."

"I didn't defend you. I told the truth." He came to stand beside her at the rail, careful distance between them, the kind two people keep when neither trusts what closing it might mean. "Your family staged nothing tonight. I've seen how Marchetti operations move. That wasn't it."

"How generous."

"I'm not being generous. I'm being accurate." He turned the same particular focus on her that he'd had at dinner, before the world exploded. "Which is more than I can say for whatever conversation you had on Rush Street two nights ago."

Elena's stomach tightened. "We're back to that."

"We never left it. I just had better things to survive first." He studied her, and something in his voice sharpened, quiet and cold. "A man doesn't shoot up a restaurant to send a message unless he already has your attention some other way. So I have to ask myself, Elena — is it possible whoever did this already had a reason to know exactly where you'd be tonight? Because your family didn't announce this dinner publicly. Mine didn't either."

Elena went very still.

"Which means," Damian said, "someone close to one of us told them."

He let that sit in the space between them, the accusation unspoken but unmistakable, and for the first time all night, Elena felt real fear — not for her body, which had survived, but for the truth she was still hiding from him about a night on Rush Street that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with a secret her own father didn't even know she was keeping.

"If that's true," she said carefully, "then we both need to start wondering who we actually trust in our own houses."

Damian's eyes didn't leave hers. "I already started."

Somewhere behind them, deep in the house, a phone began to ring — too late for anything good, at an hour reserved for the kind of news that changes everything by morning.