Page 111 of Devoted

Severin nodded once. “Then let’s plan a war.”

I did not look back before I dematerialized.

The weight of what happened here would always stay with me, that I knew. A stain on my soul I’d never scrub out, no matter how many lives I saved or how many deaths I prevented.

Soon, I would tell Valeria as little as possible. Watch her collapse when I could only give her meaningless words in return for her sorrow.

I would tell Emberline everything because I couldn’t keep secrets from her. She would tell me I’d done everything I could, when we both knew that wasn’t true.

Then I’d find somewhere quiet to fall apart, and when I was finished feeling sorry for myself, Dante, Nico, and I would construct a plan to destroy Giovanni and everything he’d ever touched.

Giovanni had sent me that message and hoped we’d break. That having Dynasty blood on my hands would force me to crawl out of hiding and prostrate myself at his feet.

He had miscalculated.

There would be no more caution. No more hedging. No more picking our battles carefully.

We were going to wage all-out war.

The kind of war that levels cities and could cost us everything—our lives, the people we loved, the future we’d dreamed of—because some things are worth dying for.

Somewhere deep inside, I had always known it would come down to this.

That wearing the crown came with a price, and that price was my life, either in servitude or in blood, and either way, the Dynasty would own me for life. I suddenly felt lighter, because that choice wasn’t being forced upon me… I was choosing this for myself.

Because I was the Don.

And the Don did not get to walk away.

41

EMBERLINE

The villa’s opulent living room wasn’t designed with military strategy in mind.

Valeria’s decorator—or whoever furnished this place—had gone for luxurious, not functional design, which meant the maps and papers kept sliding off the too-low coffee table, no matter how many times Severin rearranged them or how colorfully he swore.

The couch was too soft, and the chairs were too small, and everyone was grumpy, crammed in together, elbows jostling, knees bumping, in a too-small room where tempers were unraveling faster than the plan in front of us. Gabriel sat beside me on the very edge of the couch, a folded map balanced on his knee as he sketched the corridors leading to the council chamber, which we’d use as a funnel to trap the Drax.

We’d settled on a two-pronged approach. One advance team to go in quietly and take out as many hostiles as possible. Then a full assault on the weakened security forces before Giovanni knew what hit him.

Emilia was working on her own plan—not that she’d share the details—to get Blackwood out of the city in the next two days, removing him from the equation completely.

Not a perfect plan but the beginning of one.

Valeria sat cross-legged on the floor, her gaze empty as she stared off into the afternoon sun, as if she’d forgotten we were here.

Gabriel had returned from the countryside, face as grim as I’d ever seen it, a new resolve to him. He’d quietly explained what he’d found to Valeria, held her while she’d cried, then sat down and begun planning my uncle’s demise.

I tucked my feet under me, debating what to say. Not that there were any words to fix the damage Giovanni had done.

In the months since my father died, my uncle had gone from trusted mentor to enemy, but now, he was something else. Something to be stamped out and erased from the world, then the stain washed clean so there was no residue left behind.

“The city is the real problem.” Gabriel tapped his pen against the margin of the map, showing the wide perimeter around the target building. “Even with twice the manpower, we cannot fight Giovanni in Venice. The canals limit our approach vectors, the density of the buildings means fire is catastrophic, and the humans⁠—”

“Are everywhere,” Dante finished from the armchair. “Yes, you’ve said. Several times, now.”

His brother pinched his lips together. “It bears repeating, asshole. We can’t take the chance of mass casualties. Which means Giovanni has to leave Venice.”