Chapter 6
I had told myself it was an instinctive contingency. But every time my chin brushed the blistered collar of my shirt, I knew the ugly truth: the dog had begun gnawing on his own leash.
The house was suffocatingly quiet. The exterior patrols had been shifted to the perimeter gates by automated orders from the terminal, leaving the residential corridors deserted. Only the rhythmic, metallic sweep of the surveillance lenses in the high cornices tracked my movements.
Then I heard the click of heels on marble.
Not cautious steps. Not the muffled tread of a prisoner trying to slip through the shadows.
It was sharp, loud, deliberate.
I turned around, hand dropping instinctively toward my hip.
Elena was walking up the central staircase toward the third-floor landing—the forbidden sector. The Don’s floor.
She wasn't wearing the mourning black from yesterday, nor the torn slip. She had put on the bridal gown.
It was an antique monstrosity of heavy ivory satin and stiff French lace, with a skirt that rustled like dry leaves against the mahogany balustrade. But she had taken a pair of shears to it. The high Victorian collar had been hacked away, leaving the neckline raw and frayed, exposing the pale hollow of her throat and the sharp angle of her shoulders. Her dark hair fell wild around her waist, completely unbound, and in her right hand she carried an open bottle of vintage Barolo by the neck.
"Elena," I barked in a harsh whisper, taking the stairs three at a time. "Get back to your quarters. Now."
She didn't stop. She reached the landing, stepping directly onto the dark crimson runner that led to the reinforced blast door—the impenetrable four-ton slab of cold-rolled steel behind which Don Bellandi had lived in total isolation for three years.
Above the vault door, a brass intercom speaker flared to life with a deafening screech that cut through the rumble of thunder outside.
"Elena."
The synthesized rasp was louder than I had ever heard it, saturated with digital distortion.
"You are fifty feet beyond your designated zone," the machine ground out. "The sensor grid is armed. One more step across the bronze threshold triggers the floor charges."
Elena stopped. She didn't look at the speaker. She turned slowly to face me as I reached the top of the stairs, her green eyes blazing with a feral, terrifying brilliance under the gallery sconces.
She lifted the wine bottle to her lips, took a slow, deliberate swallow, and let a dark red drop run down her chin, trickling over her collarbone and soaking into the ruined lace of the wedding dress like fresh blood.
"Hear that, Dante?" she said, her voice clear and bell-like over the sixty-hertz hum of the wiretaps. "He's going to blow us up. He’s going to turn his little bird and his prize hound into minced meat on his welcome mat."
"Elena, back away," I pleaded, keeping my palms open at waist height, closing the distance carefully. Every instinct in my body screamed that the pressure plates beneath our boots were live. "Walk toward me. Nice and slow. Don't make him do this."
"Make him?" She laughed—a high, fractured sound that broke against the stone walls. "He's already sold me to a butcher, Dante! What else is he going to do? Put me in a prettier coffin?"
She swung her arm.
The heavy glass bottle crashed against the face of the steel blast door, shattering into a spray of dark glass and crimson liquid that dripped down the gray metal like an arterial wound.
*Click-clack.*
The ceiling vents above the landing slid open with a sharp pneumatic hiss. A red emergency strobe flared to life, bathing the entire corridor in a sickening, rhythmic blood-light.
"Treason," the synthesized voice grated. The cadence was irregular now, skipping slightly, vibrating with an intolerable frequency. "Open defiance of the bloodline head. Sacrilege against the house. Dante."
I froze, my spine rigid. "Yes, Don Bellandi."
"Draw your weapon."
The air in my chest turned to lead.
"Boss—"
"Draw your Kimber," the machine ordered, ruthless, flat, devoid of a shred of human mercy. "You swore an oath on the blood of Saint Michael. Your life belongs to the throne. My daughter has renounced her bloodline by defying my treaty. She is no longer family. She is a traitor."
Elena didn't retreat. She stepped forward, her bare soles crunching on the shards of broken wine glass, leaving tiny red smears on the parquetry. She stopped two inches from my chest, looking up into my face under the flashing red strobe.
"Put a bullet through her forehead," the Don's voice commanded over the intercom. "Do it now, or I release the nerve agent throughout the entire wing. You have fifteen seconds to execute the traitor, Dante. If she is breathing at sixteen, you both die in agony."
"Fifteen," the synthesizer counted down.
The red light bathed Elena’s face in crimson. She wasn't crying. Her lips were slightly parted, her breath hot against my chin. She reached out, her cool fingers wrapping around my right wrist, guiding my hand down toward the holster at my hip.
"Do it," she whispered. Her eyes were wide, dark pools of bottomless green, entirely devoid of fear. "Obey him, Dante. Be his good dog. Put the gun to my head."
"Fourteen."
My fingers touched the checkered wood grips of the .45. The steel was ice cold.
"Elena, stop," I begged, my voice cracking down the middle. My entire body was trembling, fighting against ten years of psychological iron, against a lifetime of conditioned terror that said Don Bellandi was an all-seeing, inescapable god who held my immortal soul in his fist.
"Thirteen."
"He's going to give me to Enzo tomorrow, Dante," she breathed, her forehead coming to rest against my sternum, right over my armored vest. Her fingers tightened around my wrist, hauling on my arm, trying to force my hand to draw the weapon. "He’s going to let another man touch me. Break me. Tear me apart. If you won't kill him to keep me... then kill me yourself. Don't let them take me to that church."
"Twelve."
"Elena..."
"Eleven."
"Choose," she hissed against my chest, her voice rising to a frantic, feverish pitch. "Him or me, Dante! Damnation or the leash! Choose!"
"Ten."
The countdown hammered into my ears like a funeral bell.
I looked up at the steel blast door, covered in running red wine and shattered glass. Behind that four-ton slab sat the man who had dragged me out of a Brooklyn cell, who had taught me how to shoot, how to break bones, how to be an instrument of death. The man who had made me wear a shock collar on my knees in front of the only woman I had ever loved.
If I obeyed, I would live. I would remain the family's shadow, the ghost with a Kimber, empty and hollowed-out until someone put a bullet in the back of my head.
And Elena would be dead.
"Nine."
A switch flipped behind my eyes.
The iron conditioning didn't crack—it vaporized. The fear that had kept me kneeling for a decade burned away, consumed in a sudden, blinding inferno of pure, unadulterated madness. I didn't care about the oath. I didn't care about the syndicates, the five families, or the fires of hell waiting for an oath-breaker.
