Chapter Forty #2
The second barely had time to react before she drove the blade into his shoulder. As he stumbled, she turned towards the third man and sent him crashing backwards with a brutal kick.
Every movement flowed into the next. There was no hesitation or wasted motion. She fought with the instinctive precision of someone who had repeated these movements thousands of times, every strike landing before her opponents had time to react.
I'd thought I'd understood Sabrina.
Watching her now, I realised I'd barely known her at all.
She tore the knife from the second Russian's shoulder, drove the hilt into his jaw and stripped the first man of his pistol in one effortless movement.
The gunfire around the ballroom began to thin.
One by one, the remaining Russians found themselves surrounded by Moretti soldiers. Their escape routes disappeared until there was nowhere left to go.
Then something changed.
One Russian looked up from behind an overturned table and froze. Another followed his stare.
Within seconds, every surviving Russian had stopped shooting.
Rifles lowered one after another, not in surrender, but in stunned disbelief.
Sabrina stepped forward, her breathing already steady. The pistol hung loosely at her side as she regarded the remaining Russians with unnerving calm.
When she spoke, it wasn't in Italian or English.
It was flawless Russian.
“Which one of you thought it was a good idea to come back to an island you were thrown off?”
A chill crept down my spine.
The confidence the Russians had stormed the estate with vanished.
Fear replaced it.
An older Russian stumbled backwards, his rifle slipping from his grasp. The colour drained from his face.
“No...”
His eyes never left Sabrina.
“That's impossible...”
Then, barely able to force the word past trembling lips, he whispered, “Diabola.”
The name struck the ballroom harder than any bullet.
Every eye turned to Sabrina.
Diabola.
The name belonged to Russia's most feared assassin.
Ivan Volkov's perfect weapon.
The woman everyone believed Morana had killed years ago.
Matteo went rigid beside me. Dante's expression darkened, while Rafael looked as though the floor had disappeared beneath his feet. Leonardo stared openly at Sabrina, and even Salvatore had gone completely still.
The older Russian shook his head.
“No...” he whispered. “Morana killed Diabola.”
Sabrina didn't react.
Whatever warmth had remained vanished from her expression. She crossed the distance between them with slow, deliberate steps. There was no anger or triumph in her face. Only chilling indifference.
“Answer my question.”
She stopped in front of him.
“Which one of you thought it was a good idea to return to an island you were thrown off?”
The older Russian couldn't answer.
Beside him, a younger guard swallowed hard, his rifle trembling in his hands.
“S-Sergei...” he stammered. “Sergei wants what is owed to the Volkovs.”
Something inside Sabrina died.
The woman I'd danced with less than an hour earlier simply ceased to exist. Standing before us was the legend the Russians believed had returned from the dead.
She raised her pistol.
The movement was so smooth I almost missed it. One moment it rested at her side; the next, it was levelled at the Russian.
Two shots shattered the silence.
The younger Russian collapsed first. The older man followed a fraction of a second later, his body striking the marble almost in time with the first.
Sabrina didn't even blink.
She stepped over both bodies and swept her gaze across the surviving Russians, who now looked less like invading soldiers than condemned prisoners.
“Does anyone else dare tell me the Volkovs are owed anything?”
No one answered.
Around the ballroom, rifles slipped from numb fingers or lowered to the floor.
It wasn't the Morettis they feared.
It was her.
These men had crossed an ocean to attack six mafia families. One woman had stripped every ounce of courage from them simply by revealing who she was.
The faintest smile touched Sabrina's lips.
“The only thing Sergei Volkov deserves...” She lifted her pistol once more, her arm perfectly steady as she aimed at the final Russian. “...is to join his pathetic father.”
The shot echoed through the ballroom.
The last Russian crumpled without ever touching his trigger.
Silence followed.
Not the silence of peace, but the suffocating stillness left behind by unimaginable violence. Somewhere outside, the battle still raged. Inside the ballroom, no one moved.
Less than an hour ago, I'd held this woman in my arms while we danced. Now I was staring at someone whose name alone had reduced hardened Russian soldiers to trembling wrecks.
Diabola.
Every rumour I'd ever heard about Russia's deadliest assassin came rushing back. None of them fit the woman I'd come to know.
“Sabrina!”
The terrified cry tore through the silence like another gunshot.
Every head turned.
The transformation in Sabrina was so immediate it stole the breath from my lungs. The cold detachment that had settled over her inside the ballroom vanished as though someone had ripped away a mask, exposing raw panic beneath it.
“Dario!”
She was already running before she'd finished saying his name.
Matteo swore and sprinted after her. I followed a heartbeat later, vaulting over overturned tables and weaving through shattered glass and fallen bodies towards the entrance.
The marble beneath my shoes was slick with blood, each stride carrying us away from the devastation inside the ballroom and towards whatever had reduced Russia's deadliest assassin to sheer terror.
By the time we burst through the front doors, Sabrina had reached the top of the grand staircase leading into the gardens.
She stopped so abruptly it was as though she'd hit an invisible wall. One hand gripped her pistol so tightly her knuckles had turned white, and both arms were shaking.
Following the line of her weapon, my stomach lurched.
Halfway down the staircase stood a Russian soldier with one arm wrapped tightly around Dario's small body. The barrel of his pistol rested against the boy's temple, his finger curled loosely around the trigger.
Silent tears tracked down Dario's cheeks as his tiny hands clung desperately to the man's sleeve. His whole body trembled.
For the first time since I'd met Sabrina, she looked completely helpless.
An unnatural silence settled over the gardens, broken only by the distant crack of gunfire beyond the estate walls. Every armed man surrounding the staircase understood the same thing at once.
Nobody had a clear shot.
Every weapon remained lowered. My finger rested against the trigger, but instinct wasn't enough. At that distance, with Dario trapped between us, the slightest mistake would kill the very person we were trying to save.
Sabrina remained perfectly still. Her pistol never wavered, but the terrifying confidence I'd witnessed inside the ballroom had vanished.
She no longer looked like the assassin who had frozen an army.
She looked like a desperate older sister.
The Russian saw it too.
A slow smile spread across his face – not with the confidence of a man expecting to survive, but with the satisfaction of someone who had finally discovered the only weakness his enemy couldn't hide.
“So,” he said, his thick Russian accent dragging across the single word, “Diabola does have a weakness.”
Dario whimpered.
The tiny sound carried across the gardens with heartbreaking clarity, and I watched it splinter whatever remained of Sabrina's composure.
“Please.”
The word struck me harder than every gunshot I'd heard that evening.
Less than five minutes ago, I'd watched grown men lower their weapons rather than face her.
Now she was begging.
“Please...” Her voice cracked as she fought to keep it steady. “Let him go.”
The Russian laughed.
It wasn't triumphant. It was cruel.
“You begged no one when you slaughtered my brothers.”
Pain flashed across Sabrina's face, but she refused to lower her weapon.
“I said...” She swallowed hard, her voice barely holding together. “Let him go.”
His smile widened.
“No.”
I saw his finger begin to tighten around the trigger.
For one endless heartbeat, nothing else existed.
Only Dario.
Only Sabrina's terrified eyes.
Only the Russian's smile.
Then–
Bang.