Chapter 7 - Blood on the Marble
The gunshot did not come from inside the room.
It punched straight through the heavy oak wall behind Isabelle, a massive .50-caliber round from a tactical Desert Eagle that tore through the plaster in an explosion of white chalk and splintered lath.
The bullet caught Isabelle’s raised right forearm, shattering the radius and ulna in a spray of bone and dark arterial blood.
The hunting knife flew from her severed grip, clattering across the floor.
Isabelle shrieked—a high, animalistic howl of sheer agony—falling backward off Elena, clutching the bloody, dangling ruin of her arm.
A shadow filled the shattered doorway.
Damian Moretti stepped through the drywall.
He was bleeding from a deep shrapnel graze along his left temple, his black shirt torn and coated in soot and drywall dust. His eyes were wide, pitch-black, and burned with an unholy, primeval fury that made the room vibrate.
Behind him, two of Isabelle’s mercenaries lay lifeless in the hallway, their necks broken at unnatural angles.
Damian didn't look at Isabelle.
He crossed the room in two strides, dropped to his knees beside Elena, and hauled her into his chest. His hands moved frantically over her face, her neck, her torso, checking for wounds, his breathing ragged and wild.
“Elena,” he rasped, his voice trembling with an emotion she had never heard from him before—pure, unadulterated terror. “Are you hit? Did she cut you?”
“I’m okay,” Elena gasped, wrapping her trembling arms around his neck, burying her face in the curve of his collarbone, smelling the sulfur, blood, and rain on his skin. “I’m okay, Damian. The basement—she said you were burning—”
“The basement was cleared twenty minutes ago,” Damian murmured against her hair, his arms locking around her like bands of forged steel. “They sent eight men to the incinerator shafts. They died in thirty seconds.”
On the floor beside the bed, Isabelle was crawling toward the balcony doors, leaving a thick, smeared trail of crimson across the cream-colored carpet.
“Damian… please…” Isabelle whimpered, her voice cracking as shock began to settle in. “My arm… call an ambulance… please…”
Damian slowly released Elena.
He stood up.
The vulnerable, terrified lover vanished. The sovereign of Chicago returned, his face setting into cold, merciless granite.
He picked up the heavy hunting knife from the floor, testing the serrated edge against his thumb.
“You came into my house, Isabelle,” Damian said softly, walking toward the crawling woman with slow, measured steps. “You put a knife to the throat of the Donna of the Moretti family.”
“My father… my father forced me!” Isabelle wept, turning onto her back, pressing herself against the glass doors. “He said if I didn't kill her, the Russian syndicate would execute our entire family in the Bahamas! Please, Damian! We grew up together! We were engaged!”
Damian stopped three feet from her. He looked down at her with the absolute, chilling detachment of a man watching an insect drown in a glass of water.
“You were never my fiancée, Isabelle,” Damian whispered. “You were a placeholder until I could find the queen my father promised me.”
He raised the weapon.
“Damian, wait.”
Elena’s voice cut through the room, soft but firm.
Damian paused. He did not lower the knife, but his eyes flicked toward Elena, who was standing beside the bed, holding a sheet around her shoulders.
“Do not kill her here,” Elena said quietly, stepping forward until she stood beside him. “Her father wants a war. If you execute his daughter in your bedroom, the Commission will be forced to intervene on the grounds of blood feud. But if she lives… she becomes the state’s primary witness.”
Damian frowned. “The state? We do not deal with the police, Elena.”
“We do not need the police, Damian,” Elena countered, her hazel eyes gleaming with cold, calculated strategy. “We need the Department of Justice. Isabelle used Russian mercenaries paid through federal escrow accounts stolen from the Bellini logistics trust. That is high treason and international terrorism.”
She looked down at Isabelle, who was shivering violently on the floor.
“Vincent Bellini thought he could use the mob to take our empire,” Elena said, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper. “Let him spend the rest of his miserable life in ADX Florence watching federal marshals auction off his family’s assets to fund my mother’s hospital foundation.”
Damian stared at Elena for three long heartbeats.
A slow, breathtaking smile of absolute, boundless admiration curved his lips.
He tossed the hunting knife onto the nightstand.
“Marco,” Damian commanded toward the hallway.
Marco appeared at the door, clutching a bandaged shoulder, two armed men behind him. “Boss.”
“Call Federal Prosecutor Vance,” Damian said. “Tell him we have an anonymous tip and a delivery for the federal detention center. And have the medical detail patch this creature up so she doesn't bleed out on my carpets.”
“Yes, Don Damian.”
The guards dragged the weeping, broken Isabelle out of the room.
Silence fell over the shattered master suite, save for the rain drumming against the balcony glass.
Damian turned back to Elena.
He reached out, his soot-stained hand gently cupping the side of her neck where her hair had been cut two weeks ago. His thumb brushed the tiny drop of blood on her cheek, wiping it clean.
“You are more ruthless than my father ever was, Elena,” he murmured, his dark eyes blazing with an intoxicating mixture of love and reverence.
May you like
“I am a Vasquez, Damian,” she whispered, leaning into his touch. “We don't just survive. We win.”
He pulled her into his arms, lifting her off her feet, his mouth crashing down on hers in the ruins of the bedroom as the dawn finally broke over Lake Michigan.
