Chapter 56 The Truth

Chapter 56 The Truth
Jasmine:

“Elena!” 

Dante’s voice sounded distant and muffled, as if I were underwater. The world around me had narrowed to a single shape: Nikolai. I held him against my chest, even with his heavy weight. His blood soaked my hands, soaked his shirt, and pooled on the floor beneath us. No. This was not supposed to happen. I had come to kill him… but I wasn’t going to. 

“Nikolai.” My voice broke. His eyes were half-open and unfocused, but they still found me, and for one fragile second the chaos around us dropped away. The screaming, the gunfire, the panic, none of it mattered. There was only him. Only us. Then a sound cut through the silence: a slow, deliberate clap. I snapped my head up and everything inside me froze.

Pietro stood a few feet away, beside him Valentina, calm and almost pleased. Pietro held a pistol loosely in his hand, with smoke drifting from the barrel. My stomach fell. I looked from Nikolai to Pietro and back to the weapon, and understanding hit me coldly. The fatal shot had not been mine. I had missed; Pietro had not.

“You…” I could barely force the word out. Pietro smiled, not the smile of a brother, but the smile of a man who had finally won. 

“You always were emotional,” he said. 

I forced myself to my feet with my hands trembling. “What did you do?” 

Valentina sighed like this was a pity rather than a crime. “As much as I would have preferred a cleaner ending, I suppose the truth no longer matters,” she said, and my heart pounded so loudly I thought it would lift me from the floor.

“No.” I shook my head. “No.” But inside, the pieces came together with a brutal clarity: the inconsistencies, the hurried moves, the questions Dante had raised. 

Pietro chuckled softly. “It was never supposed to be this difficult,” The ballroom was thinning; armed men, some Vorn soldiers, appeared at Pietro’s back. They were not Moretti’s men. I had believed they were my men. Now many of them stood with Pietro.

Dante stepped forward and moved his hand toward his weapon. Immediately several guns swung to aim at him. Valentina raised an eyebrow. 

“Careful, Dante,” she said. 

His jaw tightened, and I watched him hold himself steady as my pulse raced. “What are you talking about?” I demanded. 

Pietro laughed and then answered, his voice slow and cold. “Father. He was old,” Pietro went on. “He was sentimental.” 

Valentina added, “And weak.”

Weak. It felt as if the word reverberated through me. I felt a cold hollow open in my chest. 

“No…” I whispered. 

Pietro nodded. “Yes.” 

Suddenly everything made a terrible kind of sense: the rumours, the distractions, the urgency, the lies. “It was you,” I said, barely louder than a breath. Valentina smiled as if victory were finally complete. 

“Father gave me the family,” I managed. “He chose me.” 

Pietro’s answer was flat. “He chose wrong.”

The hall went very quiet. I looked at the brother I had grown up with and realised I had never really known him. “You killed him.” 

Pietro did not deny it, and that silence cut deeper than any confession could have. 

Valentina then stepped forward as though she were announcing a legal fact. “We did what was necessary,” she said. The words made bile rise in my throat. “He was becoming a liability,” she added. 

I could barely breathe. “You murdered him,” I said, voice small but fierce. 

Valentina’s face hardened. “He was supposed to leave everything to Pietro,” she said. “He was supposed to understand how this world works.”

My hands clenched so tightly my nails bit into my palms. 

“But no,” Valentina spat, and hatred burned behind her eyes. “He gave everything to you.” 

Tears blurred my vision, but they were not the soft kind of grief I had expected; they were hot with rage. “You forged the note,” I said. Neither of them answered. They did not have to. Their silence told me what I already knew: the note, the handwriting, the accusation, everything that had pushed me to war, had been made by them.

I looked down at the motionless body in my arms and a sound escaped me that was neither sob nor scream but something worse. 

Pietro watched me like a hunter watching his prey at last understand the trap. “You’re finally figuring it out,” he said. Anger flared inside me; I wanted to have a go at him, to tear him apart with my bare hands. Instead I stood shaking, because the cost of the truth lay bleeding on the floor.

Pietro’s expression darkened and he decided in that instant that I was a problem. Several weapons rose, aiming squarely at me. I froze. Dante stepped between me and the barrels without a second thought.

“No.” Pietro rolled his eyes. “Dante,” he said, as if naming him would make him obey. 

“Don’t,” Dante answered softly. Valentina watched, alert and unblinking.

Dante turned to them and, for the first time since I had known him, I heard desperation in his voice. “Let her go,” 

Pietro laughed. “Why?” 

Dante’s eyes did not leave Pietro. “Because she’s not your enemy,” he said. 

Pietro’s face closed like a door. “She is now,” he declared. 

Dante shook his head. “You already have what you wanted,” he said. His words hung in the charged air: the family, the power, the title, everything they had aimed for. Valentina then exchanged a glance with her son, silent and quick.

“We’ll leave,” Dante continued. 

Pietro narrowed his eyes at the word. “We?” he asked. 

Dante did not hesitate. “Both of us.” 

I stared at him in confusion. “What?” 

He ignored me and turned back to Pietro. “We’ll disappear.” 

Pietro looked skeptical. “You expect me to trust that?” he asked. 

“You don’t have to,” Dante said calmly. “You only have to believe that Elena will never come back to Italy.” 

The silence that followed was long, heavy, and dangerous.

Finally Valentina spoke. “Let them go,” she ordered. 

Pietro spun toward her. “Mother—” he began, but she cut him off with the same iron tone she used when she wanted obedience. 

“I said let them go.” Her voice allowed no argument. Slowly and with obvious reluctance, Pietro lowered his weapon. I was hit with relief so sharply it was almost pain. 

Dante moved to me immediately, his hand closing on my arm. “We need to leave,” he said, pulling me.

I did not move because Nikolai still lay there, bleeding, still because of me. Dante’s grip tightened and he said my name again. My eyes filled. “Nikolai…” I whispered, but Dante was already pulling me backward. The ballroom blurred, the noise faded, and everything receded except one terrible image: the man I had loved lying in a pool of blood, and the crushing truth that I had helped put him there.