Alessio’s POV
The house was too quiet.
I noticed it the moment her car disappeared beyond the gates.
Silence had never bothered me before. I had built my empire inside silence. Negotiated in it. Killed in it.
But this was different.
This silence had her absence in it.
I returned to my office and closed the door without a word to the guards. No one dared speak to me anyway. They could feel it. The shift.
When a man sacrifices something important, the air changes around him.
I poured myself a drink and did not touch it.
Weakness.
That was what the council believed she was.
They were wrong.
She was not weakness.
She was restraint.
And without her here, restraint was becoming optional.
There was a knock at the door.
“Enter.”
Marco stepped in, cautious. “The Moretti men moved t
