Chapter Twenty-Three SANTINO
The convoy sliced through the night like a blade forged in hell itself.
Blacked-out SUVs roared along the private coastal road leading to my father’s fortified estate, headlights cutting through the darkness like predatory eyes.
I sat rigid in the back seat beside Leo, the silence between us heavier than lead.
The weight of Angelo’s watch, now on Matteo’s wrist, still haunted my skin where it used to rest.
My cousin, the Serpent, stared straight ahead, his profile carved from cold marble under the passing streetlights. He hadn’t said much since we sealed our uneasy alliance at the docks. Neither had I. Words were useless now. Only blood would speak tonight.
Aurora was out there. Pregnant with my child. Taken.
The thought clawed at my insides like barbed wire, twisting deeper with every mile. I pictured her dark hair spilling over her shoulders, those fierce eyes that had once challenged me in a devil mask now wide with fear. My hands curled into fists on my thighs.
Edoardo Moretti’s compound emerged from the shadows like a monument to arrogance.
Marble fountains gleamed under floodlights, perfectly manicured hedges lined the long drive, and armed guards patrolled the perimeter.
It was the kind of place built to project power, but tonight it felt like a tomb waiting to be filled.
Our advance team had already silenced the outer sentries, with silent knives and suppressed shots. No alarms. No warnings. Just the quiet inevitability of death approaching.
We stepped out of the vehicles in unison.
Leo adjusted his cuffs with that signature calm precision, as if we were attending a business meeting rather than an execution.
I checked the chamber of my Glock, the metallic click echoing in the cool night air.
The gun felt like an extension of my rage, cold, loaded, ready.
The heavy front doors swung open without resistance. Edoardo waited for us in the grand sitting room, lounging in a high-backed leather armchair like a king who still believed his crown was intact.
A crystal tumbler of whiskey dangled lazily from his fingers. He looked older than the last time I’d seen him, silver threading through his once-dark hair, deep lines etched around his eyes and mouth, but the smug superiority in his gaze remained untouched.
A fire crackled in the massive stone hearth behind him, casting flickering shadows across oil paintings of long-dead Morettis.
“Santino,” he drawled, voice smooth as aged poison. His eyes slid to Leo. “And the great Serpent. To what do I owe this unexpected family gathering? Come to beg for scraps of territory, or has the girl already bored you?”
Leo crossed the room in three measured strides. Without a word, he produced a small glass vial from his pocket and poured its clear contents directly into Edoardo’s whiskey.
The poison was one of Leo’s specialties, fast enough to incapacitate, slow enough to hurt. Edoardo’s eyebrows rose slightly, but he didn’t flinch.
“Drink,” Leo commanded, his voice like velvet over steel.
Edoardo chuckled, but the sound lacked its usual confidence as Leo’s men raised their weapons, barrels trained on his head.
He lifted the glass, took a deliberate sip, and set it down with a steady hand. “Always so dramatic, Leonardo. You get that from your mother’s side.”
I remained near the doorway, arms crossed over my chest, watching. This was Leo’s domain right now. The Serpent had earned the right to carve answers from my father’s flesh. My turn would come if needed.
For now, I let the rage simmer, feeding on memories of Aurora’s smile, her body curled against mine, the way her hand had instinctively protected her stomach.
The interrogation unfolded with clinical brutality.
Leo asked about Aurora. Where she was, who had taken her, what Edoardo knew of the hitman in the garden.
My father denied everything with that same bored, aristocratic smile, even as the first tremors of the poison began to show in the slight shake of his hand.
“You think I waste resources on your little obsession?” Edoardo sneered, sweat beading on his forehead. “The Ventura whore was always going to be a weakness. You’ve always been soft, Santino. Just like your brother.”
The mention of Angelo ignited something feral in my chest. Leo moved before I could. His knife flashed, slicing a precise line across Edoardo’s forearm.
Blood welled, dripping onto the expensive rug. Edoardo hissed but kept talking. Taunts about my pathetic need for a womb to fill, about how I’d disowned the family name for pussy, about how Angelo would have laughed at what I’d become.
Leo tortured him methodically. Cuts to pressure points. Twists of the blade in shallow wounds. Questions repeated in that low, dangerous tone. Edoardo bled and sweated and cursed, but gave nothing useful. No locations. No confessions. Only venom.
I paced the edges of the room, jaw locked so tight it ached. Every denial fueled the storm inside me. Aurora’s face flashed behind my eyes, flushed from my kisses, tear-streaked in the study, fierce on the back of my bike.
She carried my child. My heir. My future.
Our men stormed the rest of the property in coordinated waves. Reports flooded in through earpieces: cellars swept, empty. Outbuildings cleared, nothing but dust and old wine. Hidden panic rooms pried open, vacant.
No trace of Aurora. No cells holding prisoners. No documents linking Edoardo directly to the kidnapping beyond what we already suspected.
The poison was taking hold fully now. Edoardo slumped in the chair, skin ashen, lips tinged blue, chest rising and falling in shallow, labored gasps. Blood soaked his tailored shirt from Leo’s precise work. His once-imposing frame looked frail, broken.
On his dying breath, he lifted his head with visible effort and fixed his fading gaze on me. A grotesque smile twisted his mouth.
“The dead will rise,” he rasped, the words wet and broken, bubbling with blood.
Then he laughed, a choked, gurgling sound that dissolved into a cough spraying crimson across his lap.
Leo didn’t hesitate. He seized Edoardo by the hair, yanking his head back violently to expose the throat. The knife drove upward under the ribs first. Deep, twisting, shredding organs.
Edoardo convulsed, eyes bulging. Leo pulled the blade free with a wet squelch and plunged it again, this time into the side of the neck, sawing through flesh and artery.
Blood erupted in thick, arterial sprays, painting the hearth, the rug, Leo’s sleeves.
The Serpent kept cutting, methodical, unrelenting, until what remained of my father was a slumped, unrecognizable ruin of meat and bone.
The fire crackled on, indifferent, as the last of Edoardo Moretti’s blood pooled across the marble floor.
I watched the entire spectacle without a flicker of emotion crossing my face. No grief. No twisted satisfaction. Just hollow finality.
The man who had sired me, who had favored Angelo and discarded me, who had tested me with violence against the only light in my world, was gone. Good riddance.
Leo wiped the blade clean on Edoardo’s ruined sleeve and straightened, breathing steady. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He answered it, expression neutral at first.
“Chiara.”
Then the color drained from his face. Ashen. Haunted.
Whatever Chiara said on the other end hit him like a gut shot.
I moved like lightning. My hand shot out, fisting the front of Leo’s shirt as I slammed him backward into the nearest wall with bone-jarring force. Plaster cracked. A painting rattled and fell. I pressed the barrel of my gun hard under his jaw, finger tight on the trigger.
“Talk,” I snarled, voice guttural, barely human. “Right fucking now, or I paint this wall with your brains.”
Leo didn’t resist. His hands stayed at his sides, but his eyes met mine with grim urgency. The Serpent knew better than to test me when I was like this.
“Chiara got a garbled call through on Aurora’s phone,” he said, voice low and strained. “It connected briefly before dropping. Sergio is alive. He has her. He’s the one who took Aurora.”
The world narrowed to white-hot rage.
Sergio.
The man I had shot point-blank in the face at the altar. The one whose blood had stained Aurora’s wedding dress. Alive. Breathing. Holding my woman, my pregnant woman, in his twisted, vengeful grip.
A primal roar tore from my throat. I shoved Leo harder into the wall, gun digging in until fresh blood trickled down his neck. Men shouted around us, weapons half-raised, but I couldn’t hear them. All I saw was red. Aurora’s terrified eyes. Her hand on her belly. Sergio’s hands on what was mine.
I released Leo only to drive my fist through the nearest antique table. Wood splintered violently. Glass shattered. Blood ran hot down my knuckles, but I felt nothing.
“Find him,” I growled at Leo, voice shaking with pure, volcanic fury.
“Every safe house. Every rat hole. Every ghost connected to the old Families. I want Sergio dragged before me in chains. I want his head on a fucking spike before the sun rises. If he touches her, if he so much as breathes on her or my child, I will burn everything to the ground. Starting with you if you slow me down.”
The rage consumed me entirely. It wasn’t just anger. It was obsession unleashed. The Devil had been patient long enough.
War had come for Sergio.
And I would be its merciless end.
The war room beneath the estate pulsed with controlled chaos. Maps covered the long mahogany table, red pins marking every known associate of Sergio’s, every bolt-hole the bastard might have crawled into.
My men moved like shadows. Efficient, silent, lethal, updating feeds and coordinating strikes across the city. But the rage inside me refused to settle. It burned hotter with every passing minute, a living inferno fed by the image of Aurora in Sergio’s hands.