Chapter 381: Antonio Is Angry

Eve squeezed his hands.

"Then let’s understand it," Eve said simply. "Together."

Eve was still holding his hands when Dimitri’s phone began to ring.

He looked at the screen. The caller ID showed a private number, but Dimitri recognized it immediately. He’d seen that number rarely over the months. He’d spoken to that person even more rarely.

His father.

Antonio was calling.

Dimitri released Eve’s hands and picked up the phone.

"Father," Dimitri said,

Eve watched Dimitri’s face as he listened to whatever his father was saying on the other end of the line.

She watched his face from where she stood a few feet away, still processing the poison, still processing everything. She saw the shift in him immediately, the way his jaw set, the way his shoulders squared, the way every muscle in his body seemed to brace itself for something.

Antonio’s voice came through, flat and controlled, with no greeting attached to it.

"One of my people intercepted intelligence tonight," Antonio said. "The Covenant is at war with one of my sons."

Dimitri said nothing.

"I know it isn’t Enzo," Antonio continued. "Your brother is many things, but he isn’t bold enough to evoke the wrath of an operation like that. Which means it’s you."

Dimitri turned slightly away from Eve, his gaze fixing on the wall of windows, the city spread out below them indifferent to everything happening in this room.

"Say something," Antonio said.

"What do you want me to say?" Dimitri asked.

"I want you to tell me what you’ve done," Antonio said, "to bring an organization like that down on your head. To the point where they’re targeting the woman you’re keeping."

Dimitri’s hand tightened around the phone.

"Months ago," Antonio continued, before Dimitri could answer, "someone burned down a Covenant research facility in New York. Forty-seven dead. Years of research destroyed. I called you. I asked you if it was your work."

The memory surfaced with perfect clarity, that conversation, Dimitri’s careful denial, the practiced ease with which he’d lied to his father’s.

"You told me it wasn’t you," Antonio said. "I suspected otherwise. But I had no proof. So I let it go."

Dimitri said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t require explaining things he had no intention of ever explaining to his father.

"Was it you?" Antonio asked directly.

Dimitri opened his mouth, but Antonio didn’t wait for the answer.

"Don’t lie to me, boy," Antonio said, and something in his voice had changed, hardened into something that sounded almost like pleading disguised as command. "I am your father. I dealt with The Covenant before you were making decisions of your own. It cost me your mother’s life."

"You don’t get to say her name."

The words came out of Dimitri before he’d fully decided to say them, low and vicious, cutting through the line with a force that surprised even him.

Silence, on the other end.

"You don’t get to involve her," Dimitri continued, his voice shaking now with something he rarely let surface, "as if you were the one who lost something irreplaceable. As if your grief gives you the right to lecture me about protecting the people I love."

"Dimitri...."

"If you had fought harder," Dimitri said, each word deliberate, each word a blade he’d been sharpening for years without realizing it, "if you had protected her the way a husband is supposed to protect his wife, maybe she would still be alive. Maybe I would have grown up with a mother instead a step mother and a house full of staff and a father who buried himself in business instead of grief."

The silence that followed was different from the silence before. Heavier. Antonio didn’t respond immediately, and in that gap, Dimitri could almost hear something breaking on the other end of the line, something that had been holding steady for years finally giving way under the weight of a truth Antonio had perhaps told himself in the dark and never once out loud.

"Now I know," Antonio said finally, his voice quieter than before. "That massacre. It was you."

Dimitri didn’t confirm it. He didn’t need to. His silence and the venom of his last words had already told Antonio everything.

"Did you think they wouldn’t find out?" Antonio asked. "Did you think an organization like that, an organization with the reach to survive for decades, to embed itself in governments, to rebuild after every setback, did you think they wouldn’t investigate? Wouldn’t trace back who cost them their people, their facility, their years of research?"

"I knew the risk," Dimitri said.

"You knew nothing," Antonio snapped. "You knew the satisfaction of vengeance. You didn’t know the cost. You still don’t."

Dimitri’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

Antonio exhaled slowly on the other end, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something more measured, more calculating, the voice of a man doing math he didn’t want to do.

"I imagine the only reason they haven’t come for you directly," Antonio said, "is because they know what I would do to them if they did. They know I would burn every facility they have left to ash. They know the cost of touching my son directly would be a war they can’t survive."

He paused.

"But Eve isn’t my daughter," Antonio said. "She has no name that protects her. No blood that makes her untouchable. To them, she’s simply the easiest way to hurt you without provoking me."

Dimitri felt something cold and absolute settle into his chest.

"Let them try," Dimitri said.

"Dimitri..."

"I am not you," Dimitri said, and the words came from somewhere deep, somewhere that had been waiting years to be spoken aloud. "I will not sit in some office, buried in business, pretending the danger isn’t real, while they circle the woman I love. I will not do to Eve what you did to my mother. I don’t care what resources back them. I don’t care who they’ve bought