I'm a Costello

(23) Kidnapped (part 2)

Please vote and comment!

[Third Person POV]

Hours later, the Costello estate felt less like a home and more like a war room as the extended family arrived.

Maria’s first instinct was to go to her son. She found Vincenzo standing like a statue, a man battling the gravity of his own grief. He was a pillar of the underworld, a man who had stared down death and emerged unscathed on many occasions, but this was a different kind of haunting. No amount of training or bloodshed had prepared him for the agonizing silence left behind by his daughter’s absence.

His beloved Valentina was gone, and for the first time in his life, his strength felt like a fragile mask.

Elisa, however, had already reached her breaking point. The crushing weight of the double blow—her son, Max, and her only niece, Valentina, being abducted in broad daylight—had been too much for her heart to bear. Her blood pressure had plummeted as quickly as the temperature on a Himalayan peak, forcing her to retreat to a bedroom to recover through the exhaustion.

Isabella and Maria remained at her bedside, a silent guard of mothers. They had assured their husbands and Francesco that Elisa would be cared for, though they all shared the same grim realisation that she would only truly wake from this nightmare when the children were back on Costello soil.

A shared, palpable fear had settled over the group of cousins who'd joined the twins and Matteo. A unique terror gripped the heart of each of them. Most were too young to have truly experienced the mafia's dangers, their knowledge limited to the grim stories shared by their seniors. That secondhand knowledge was a world away from the raw reality they now faced.

The older brothers kept a vigilant eye on the younger ones to keep them anchored, an attempt to ensure they were "okay"—whatever "okay" meant in their current, desperate circumstances.

Francesco was a ghost of himself. Like Vincenzo, he hadn't rested, his mind a frantic engine of "what-ifs." The two brothers weren't merely overthinking—they were calculating. They knew their enemy’s psyche with a terrifying intimacy.

Vladimir Ivanov was a name they were familiar with for decades. He wasn't necessarily the most tactical or powerful man in the business, but he was the most volatile. In their world, a calculated enemy was manageable; a reckless one was a catastrophe. Vladimir didn't play by the rules because he didn't believe in them. He was a man driven by impulse and a jagged ego.

The blood feud between the Ivanovs and the Costellos was no secret. It was a deep rift that ran through the heart of the underworld. However, there was a fundamental difference in how the two families viewed the rivalry.

For years, the Costellos had treated Vladimir like a nuisance rather than a threat—not out of cowardice, but out of a desire to not give him the attention he craves. He'd tried many ways to pick a fight with the Costello's over the years and they'd dealt with it by not reacting like he wanted them to. They knew very well Vladimir was a man with a pathological obsession with their legacy.

When Alessandro and Leonardo had ascended to the rank of Don, their fathers had left them with one warning: Vladimir is a parasite. One day, you may have to crush him, but only when there is no other choice.

In the mafia world, violence was a currency to be spent wisely. A true Don understood that a war started today could bleed out over generations. Power wasn't just about the ability to kill; it was the wisdom to know when to hold back.

But Vladimir was blinded by a different light. He despised Costellos because they represented everything he could never achieve: absolute, effortless influence. The fact that the Costello family controlled not one, but two of the most formidable empires in the world was a constant insult to his pride. He wanted to be the apex predator, yet he had spent his life in the shadow of giants.