Angelo Lagusa doesn't have love interests. Let's get that straight right now. When people search for angelo lagusa's love interests and relationships they're usually looking for something that isn't there, or they're hoping to find proof that he and Nero Vanetti were secretly dating. They're not. What they are is something way messier and way more interesting than a simple romance could ever be. Angelo is a hollowed-out shell of a human being who's been running on fumes of hatred for seven years, and the idea that he could hold a normal conversation with a woman, let alone fall in love, is almost laughable if it weren't so tragic.

The anime 91 Days isn't a romance. It's a revenge story set in Prohibition-era Lawless, and Angelo, also known as Avilio Bruno, is the weapon at its center. He doesn't have girlfriends. He doesn't have crushes. He has targets, assets, and one childhood friend he eventually has to murder. If you're looking for steamy scenes or romantic development, you're watching the wrong show. What you get instead is a study of how trauma and vengeance strip away every human capacity except survival and scheming. Angelo is cold, calculating, and disconnected from everyone around him by design. He killed his own heart so he could use it as bait.

Why Angelo Can't Love Anyone

Look at the guy. He watched his father, mother, and little brother get gunned down in their home when he was just a kid. He hid in a closet while the Vanetti family painted his living room with his family's blood. Then he spent seven years in hiding, stewing in that memory, letting it calcify into something hard and sharp. By the time he gets that letter from Ganzo, he isn't a person anymore. He's a walking revenge plot. People who go through that kind of trauma don't come out the other side ready to date. They come out broken, and Angelo is broken in a very specific way that makes attachment impossible.

He uses people. That's what he does. He uses Corteo for his brew and his connections. He uses Nero for access to the Vanetti family. He uses Fango to stir up chaos. Every smile, every friendly word, every moment of camaraderie is calculated. You can see it in his eyes, which never quite warm up even when he's laughing. He's playing a role, and the role doesn't include falling for anyone because that would compromise the mission. Love makes you vulnerable. Love makes you hesitate. And Angelo can't afford to hesitate for even a second.

The Nero Problem: Obsession Masquerading as Affection

Here's where it gets complicated. The relationship between Angelo and Nero Vanetti is the central bond of the entire series. It's intense, it's complicated, and it ends with them on a beach with a gun between them. Fans look at this and see romance because it looks like romance from the outside. There's loyalty, there's betrayal, there's that scene where they're running from the law together and Nero is cracking jokes while Angelo looks at him like he's trying to solve a math problem. But calling it a romance misses the point. It's an obsession. It's a predator circling its prey and getting weirdly attached to the chase.

Nero is one of the four men who killed Angelo's family. Angelo knows this from the start. He befriends Nero, saves his life, becomes his right hand, all while planning to destroy everything Nero loves. But something happens along the way. They develop a rhythm. They understand each other. Nero is loud, brash, loyal to a fault, everything Angelo pretends to be but isn't. And Angelo, in his own way, starts to care, not in a romantic sense, but in the way a collector cares about a rare specimen he plans to mount on his wall.

The beach scene at the end is what everyone points to. Angelo says he didn't kill Nero because he didn't want to. Nero shoots him. Or maybe he doesn't. The screen cuts to black. People read this as unrequited love or a tragic romance, but it's really about two men who have destroyed each other. Angelo has taken everything from Nero, and Nero has taken everything from Angelo, and in the end, they're just tired. The AO3 tag exists for a reason, sure, and you can read the subtext however you want, but canonically, it's about the hollowness of revenge. Angelo doesn't kiss Nero. He destroys him. That's not love. That's completion.

Corteo: The Only Real Friend and Why He Had to Die

Corteo is the closest thing Angelo has to a love interest in the traditional sense, and even that's a stretch. They're childhood friends. Corteo knows the real Angelo, or at least he knew the kid before the massacre. He notices things, like how Angelo has always liked sweet things, which is this weird, humanizing detail that sticks out because everything else about Angelo is so bitter. Corteo makes the liquor that Angelo uses to infiltrate the Vanetti family, and he follows Angelo into hell even though he knows it's going to kill him.

Their relationship is one-sided and doomed. Corteo loves Angelo like a brother, maybe more, and Angelo loves Corteo enough to ruin him. That's the tragedy. Angelo gets Corteo involved in the mafia world, knowing it's dangerous, knowing Corteo is soft and isn't built for this life. And when Corteo gets in too deep and betrays the Vanettis to save Angelo, Angelo has to kill him. It's the only way to maintain his cover and keep his revenge plot moving.

The scene where Angelo strangles Corteo is brutal because you can see it hurts Angelo. He cries. It's one of the only times he shows real emotion in the entire series. But he does it anyway because the mission comes first. It always comes first. If that's love, it's the most toxic kind imaginable, the kind that consumes the object of affection and leaves nothing behind. Corteo dies because he loved Angelo, and Angelo survives because he killed Corteo. That's the math of 91 Days. It doesn't add up to a healthy relationship.

The Women of Lawless: Fio, Lacrima, and Amy

People always ask about the women. Is there a female love interest? Does Angelo have a girlfriend? The answer is no, and the few women he interacts with are either obstacles, assets, or background noise to his main goal. Take Fio Vanetti, Nero's sister. She's beautiful, she's sharp, she's trapped in a political marriage to Ronaldo Galassia. Angelo interacts with her a handful of times. He uses her wedding as an opportunity to move pieces around the board. There's no spark, no attraction, just strategy.

Then there's Lacrima, Fango's mistress. She's a femme fatale type, the kind of character who might normally be a love interest in a noir story. But Angelo doesn't bite. He uses her to get to Fango, or he ignores her entirely. She's not on his radar as a romantic prospect because romance isn't on his radar. He doesn't have the time or the emotional bandwidth.

There's also Amy, a girl Angelo meets briefly during his time on the run with Nero. She's a civilian, a normal person living a normal life, and for a second, you can see Angelo looking at her like she's an alien. She represents the life he could have had if the Vanettis hadn't murdered his family. But he doesn't pursue her. He doesn't even flirt. He just observes, maybe feels a twinge of something that might be regret, and then moves on. She's a ghost of a possibility, not a love interest.

The Ghosts: Testa, Elena, and Luce Lagusa

The only people Angelo ever truly loved are dead. His father Testa, his mother Elena, his little brother Luce. They haunt him. Everything he does is for them. He keeps their memory alive not through healthy mourning but through a blood oath that has consumed his entire identity. When you look at angelo lagusa's love interests and relationships, you have to start with the fact that his heart is still in that burning house with his family.

He doesn't want to move on. Moving on would be betrayal. So he carries them like a weight, and that weight crushes any possibility of new attachments. Every time he looks at Nero, he's seeing the man who took his brother away. Every time he looks in the mirror, he's seeing someone who failed to protect his parents. There's no room in that crowded, haunted skull for a girlfriend or a boyfriend or any kind of partner. The Lagusa family is the only relationship that matters to him, and they're dead.

What the Fans See vs. What Is There

If you go to Archive of Our Own or Reddit or any fan community, you'll find thousands of words about Angelo and Nero. The ship is massive. And I get it. There's tension there. The way Angelo looks at Nero sometimes, like he's memorizing his face for the kill. The way Nero trusts Angelo even when he shouldn't. The intimacy of their partnership. It's easy to read romance into that because it's coded like romance. The show puts them in situations that mirror romantic dramas. The running away together, the quiet moments in motel rooms, the final confrontation on the beach.

But 91 Days is subverting that. It's giving you all the beats of a romance and then reminding you that one of them is a murderer and the other is planning a massacre. It's showing you what happens when you mistake trauma bonding for affection. The fans who write the fanfiction are fixing the story, giving Angelo the emotional capacity he doesn't have in canon, and that's fine. That's what fanfiction is for. But if you're looking for the text itself to confirm a romance, you'll be disappointed. The text confirms a mutual destruction pact.

The Psychology of a Revenge Machine

Angelo is what happens when grief turns into something mechanical. He studies people. He learns their weaknesses. He becomes whatever they need him to be. To Nero, he's a loyal soldier. To Corteo, he's a childhood friend in need. To Fango, he's a useful psychopath. He's a shapeshifter, and shapeshifters don't have true forms, let alone true loves.

The show understands this. It doesn't try to give him a redemption arc where he falls in love and learns to live again. That would be cheap. Instead, it lets him succeed in his revenge and then shows us the emptiness of that victory. He kills everyone responsible. He destroys the Vanetti family. And then he's got nothing. No love waiting for him. No home to go back to. Just a beach and a gun and the man he couldn't bring himself to kill for reasons he probably doesn't even understand.

Every Bridge Burned

Look at the body count of relationships Angelo leaves behind. He betrays Nero's trust completely. He kills Corteo with his own hands. He manipulates Fango into a position where he gets murdered. He uses Barbero until Barbero figures him out and then watches him die. He even destroys the Orco family and the Galassia connections, not because he cares about the power dynamics, but because it serves his plot. He's a walking relationship apocalypse.

By the end of the 91 days, everyone who cared about Angelo is either dead or wishes they were. Nero drives away with a can of pineapple slices, which is this weird callback to a moment they shared, and he smiles. Some people think that means Angelo survived the shooting and they're going to run away together. I think it means Nero finally understands the weight of what they've done, and he's smiling because he's broken too. Either way, it's not a happy ending. It's not a romance. It's a tragedy with good cinematography.

Why It Works Better Without Romance

If 91 Days had given Angelo a girlfriend, or if it had made the Nero relationship explicitly romantic, it would have ruined the point. The show is about how revenge consumes everything, including the possibility of love. Angelo isn't a bad boy who needs the right person to fix him. He's a dead man walking who happens to be breathing. Adding a romance would have softened the edges, given him something to live for, and the story refuses to do that because it wants to be honest about what revenge costs.

It costs everything. It costs your humanity. It costs your friends. It costs your future. Angelo Lagusa stands at the end of that beach with nothing because that's what he chose. He chose the gun over the girl, the knife over the kiss, the blood over the bouquet. And that's why people remember him. Not because he had a great love story, but because he couldn't have one. Because he gave it up for a chance to put bullets in the men who took his world away.

The Aftermath

If Angelo survived that final gunshot, and that's a big if, he's not going to settle down and start a family. He's not going to find peace. He'll keep drifting, keep wearing that dead-eyed stare, keep eating sweet things because Corteo noticed he liked them and that's the only connection to his past he has left. He might run into Nero again in some other town, some other bar, and they'll nod at each other like veterans of a war nobody else fought. They won't hug. They won't kiss. They'll just acknowledge that they destroyed each other's lives and move on.

That's the relationship. That's the love story. It's two hollowed-out men who recognized something broken in each other and then broke it further. It's not romantic. It's not healthy. But it's real in a way that fanfiction romance never could be. It's the truth of what happens when you let hate steer your life for ninety-one days straight. You end up alone on a beach with sand in your shoes and blood on your hands and the only person who ever understood you is driving away with a can of pineapple and a broken heart.

So no, Angelo Lagusa doesn't have love interests. He has casualties. And the biggest casualty of all is himself.