CHAPTER 74 — BLOOD AND LOYALTY

CHAPTER 74 — BLOOD AND LOYALTY
DONOVAN’S POV

The drive back to the house was a blur of red taillights and distant sirens we weren’t calling for help from. 
Violet sat beside me, staring out the window with her hands folded in her lap, not saying a single word the whole way. 
I wanted to reach for her and tell her we’d get through this mess somehow, but I knew words didn’t mean a damn thing right now. Not when we’d just watched good men die right in front of us.

When we pulled up to the main house, the place was an organized chaos, the kind you only see when a family like ours has been doing this for generations. Our medical team was already waiting in the driveway, rolling out stretchers and setting up IV lines to tend to the wounded guys we’d managed to pull out alive. 
Three were in bad shape, one with a bullet clean through his leg, another with shrapnel embedded in his side, a third was struggling to breathe with a collapsed lung. Alistair was already working on him, his suit splattered with blood.

“Get them inside now,” I said to the medics, putting a hand on Violet’s back to guide her toward the door. “Alistair, do whatever you have to do.”

“I’ll save who I can,” he said without looking up from the guy he was working on, his voice tight with exhaustion and anger. 
“But we lost good men tonight, Donovan. Good men who deserved better than to be shot in the back by people they thought were their brothers.”

Rosa met us at the front door, her face pale, but her shoulders straight. She’d been with the Einsteins long enough to know exactly how to hold it together when everything feels like it’s falling apart around you.

“Your father’s in the study,” she said, leading us through the quiet house, the only sound heard was our footsteps on the marble floors and the distant hum of generators powering extra security lights outside. 

The study door was closed but I could hear my father’s voice through the wood, I pushed the door open and stepped inside, Violet right behind me.

My father stood at his massive desk, phone pressed to his ear, staring down at a huge map of Milan spread out across the surface. Red pins marked every Einstein property in the city, ports, casinos, office buildings and warehouses. 
Blue pins dotted the map where Marco’s men had been spotted moving around.

“…yes, I want every single entry point locked down tight,” he was saying into the phone.
“And find out exactly who those traitors were, I want their full names and every detail about them on my desk by sunrise.”

He hung up and turned to face us, his face hard.
No sadness for the men we’d lost or anger at the betrayal. That’s how he has thought my brothers and I to survive, we don’t let emotion cloud our judgment when we’ve got work to do.

“Six dead,” I said, closing the door behind us so we could talk privately. 
“Carlo was one of them, you know how long he’d been with me.”

My father paused for just a second.  “He was a good man. His family will be taken care of for the rest of their lives. ”

“Taking care of them doesn’t bring him back,” Violet said, her voice quiet. I’d almost forgotten she was there, she’d been so still and quiet since we left the bridge. 

My father looked at her for the first time since we’d walked in, his eyes assessing her like he was trying to figure out exactly what kind of person she was. 
“No,” he said finally. “It doesn’t. Which is why we make sure their deaths mean something.”

He pulled out a thick folder from his desk drawer and slid it across to me. Inside were photos, they're clear shots of Marco’s men meeting with people I recognized from every corner of Milan’s power structure. City council members, big business owners, even some faces I’d seen at Gray Circle meetings.

“He’s been planning this for years,” my father continued, pointing to one of the photos, it's a shot of Violet mother talking to a guy who ran half the construction in the city. 
“Your mother wasn't just kidnapped by Marco from my mountain compound,  she’s been working with him every step of the way.” He said Violet.

I flipped through the photos, my jaw tight.
“How long have you known about this?”

“Long enough to prepare for it,” he said, pulling up a screen on his computer. Footage played across the monitor.
“I let them think they were winning so as to reveal every single person who’d betray us so we’d know exactly who to target when the time came.”

“At the cost of our men’s lives?” I said, my voice rising even though I knew better than to question him like this. 
“You let good men die just to find out who was loyal?”

“Loyalty is earned in blood, Donovan,” my father said.  
“Einsteins have run this city for generations because we understand that sometimes sacrifices have to be made. Those men knew exactly what they were signing up for when they joined our family, they knew the risks.”

Violet stepped forward then, her hands shaking.
“My mother, she knew about all this? About the attacks, about the men who’d get killed?”

“Your mother has always put the Lancasters first,” my father said, turning to look at her directly. 
“Just like we put the Einsteins first. Enemies don’t worry about collateral damage, Violet. They don’t lose sleep over who gets hurt. They only care about winning.”