A Scandal in the Headlines(61)

Elena needed to face up to what she’d done. She needed to beg for her parents’ forgiveness—not for calling off one wedding, not for marrying yet another man who might very well ruin everything, but for not trusting them enough. For not staying and fighting the lies Niccolo had told. For not believing that they could love her enough to overcome their disappointment in her. For running away instead.

It had solved nothing. It had been a selfish, scared act. It had hurt the people who loved her. And it had broken her heart.

The land was out of her hands, she thought now, her eyes easing closed as she accepted that bitter reality. As she acknowledged her own failure. In the end, it was only land. Dirt and stones and trees. It wasn’t worth all of this suffering.

Elena had to believe that.

She closed the window shade beside her so she wouldn’t give in to the temptation to look back, shut her eyes tight and prayed she’d make it home in time.





CHAPTER ELEVEN



ALESSANDRO SAT ALONE in his office on the executive floor of the Corretti Media tower. His mobile beeped insistently at him, but he ignored it. Just as he ignored the new proposal Giovanni had drafted for him, comprising Alessandro’s bid for the cursed docklands regeneration project. All he needed to do was sign it.

And then, of course, persuade Alessia Battaglia’s grasping, two-faced father to honor the commitment he’d made back when Alessandro and Alessia had agreed to marry.

But instead he’d cleared his office.

The proposal was one more gauntlet thrown down in this same old war. It cut out his cousins completely, following right along in Carlo’s footsteps, adhering to the same script his father and uncle had written in their blood decades back.

Alessandro pushed back from his desk and roamed restlessly around his great office, a suitable corporate celebration of a man of his wealth, power and position. It was a space meant to intimidate. To assert in no uncertain terms the full weight and heft of Corretti authority.

That goddamned name.

He walked to the windows, and looked out over the city of his birth. Palermo basked before him in the summer sun, corrupt and decaying, beautiful and serene. A mass of contradictions imprinted with the fingerprints of history, this place; streets marked with violence surrounding ancient green squares of breathtaking loveliness. Byzantine churches, leftover city walls, influences ranging from the Phoenicians to the Mafia. And it was inside of him. It was home. Unlike his brother, he had never wanted to live abroad. Sicily sang in his blood. Palermo was the key to who he was.

And who he was, who he had always been, was a Corretti.

But he was no longer sure what that meant.

He could have become his father at any time in all these years. He could have stepped all too easily into Carlo’s shoes today. He’d finally felt what that would mean. He’d wanted it. He’d even thought Niccolo Falco deserved it.

But the woman who’d told him that he deserved what was right, whatever that was, deserved better than a violent criminal as her husband. And it made him question not only himself, but this whole notion of who the Correttis were. If it was a curse, this name—or it was merely one more choice they all kept making.

Today Alessandro had chosen not to take the easy way, the corrupt and criminal way. His father’s way. He’d spent his life believing he did what was right, that he did his duty.

Now it was time to prove it.

He walked back over to his desk and shoved the proposal out of his way, picking up his mobile to make two calls he should have made years ago. To offer, if not an olive branch, a start. A fresh, clean start.

His duty to his family should be about the living, not the dead. The Corretti name should not be forever synonymous with the actions of those long buried.

Because the past didn’t matter. What mattered were the choices they made now. He, his half-brother, Angelo, and his cousin Matteo shouldn’t have to follow along in the footsteps of monsters, simply because those monsters were their fathers. And they certainly didn’t have to become them.

Surely, he told himself, they could simply … stop this.

His cousin Matteo picked up the phone, and Alessandro braced himself for a necessary, if excruciatingly awkward, conversation.

It was only as dark as they allowed it to be, he thought. And it was long past time for the light.


Elena let herself out of her parents’ house high up on the rocky hillside, and pulled the door closed behind her quietly, so as not to disturb her father’s rest. It was a gray, foggy morning, the air thick and cool against her skin. She pulled her old jacket tighter around her, and set off down the slanting street.