Chapter 32
SCARLETT
The basement is cold and dark, and even from here, I can smell the death and violence going on upstairs.
I’m sitting on the stone floor with Luca in my lap, his face buried against my chest, his small body still trembling from everything he’s been through.
Marco’s men are positioned around us, four of them watching every entrance with their weapons ready, their faces tight, ready to intercept any intruder.
“You’re safe down here.” That’s what Marco said before he went back upstairs to help Dante.
But I don’t feel safe. I feel like I’m sitting in the eye of a hurricane, waiting for it to swallow me.
The gunfire above us has slowed down, which should be a good thing. It means Dante’s winning and Viktor’s men are dead or dying. It means this nightmare might actually be ending and I can take my son home and try to piece together some kind of normal life.
So why can’t I shake this feeling in my gut? This cold, heavy certainty that something terrible is coming?
“Mama?” Luca’s voice is small and hoarse from crying. “Is D okay?”
“He’s fine, baby. He’s upstairs making sure all the bad men go away.”
“When can we go home?”
Home. I don’t even know what that word means anymore. The estate doesn’t feel like home, it’s a fortress full of armed men and security cameras and the constant threat of violence. Where my son had been kidnapped from, despite all of those.
Portland wasn’t home either, just a place I was hiding, always looking over my shoulders and waiting to run. Maybe home is wherever Dante and Luca are. Maybe home is something we’ll have to build together after all this is over. That’s if we survive long enough to build anything.
“Soon,” I tell him, pressing a kiss to his forehead. “We’ll go home soon.”
One of Marco’s men, a guy with a shaved head and a scar across his chin, presses his hand to his earpiece. His expression changes. Goes from alert to alarmed in half a second.
“What?” I ask, my heart starting to pound. “What’s happening?”
“There are new hostiles incoming. Multiple vehicles. We need to—”
The explosion cuts him off before he can complete the sentence.
The whole basement shakes, dust and debris raining down from the ceiling. Luca screams and I pull him tighter against me, my heart slamming against my ribs.
“Move!” the scarred man shouts. “Get them to the east passage!”
Everything becomes chaotic as Marco’s men grab me, pulling me up and pushing toward a narrow doorway I didn’t notice before. Luca is crying in my arms, his tears hot against my neck.
We’re soon running through a passage, climbing stone steps, and the gunfire above us is different now. It’s louder and more intense. Whatever’s happening up there, it’s terrible.
We emerge through a door hidden behind a large artwork of the twelve disciples, and I duck behind a pillar with Luca to case the room where we aren’t as vulnerable. The men with us also move into more protected positions.
The cathedral has become hell on earth. There are bodies everywhere, more than before, fresh ones mixed with the old. Blood is coating the ancient floors in spreading pools that reflect the weak light from the shattered windows. Smoke and dust fill the air so thick I can barely breathe.
And in the middle of it all, walking through the chaos like a queen entering her throne room, is a woman.
She’s guarded by soldiers. At least thirty of them, all armed to the teeth with armored gears and automatic weapons.
But she’s not dressed like them. She’s wearing an expensive suit, dark and perfectly tailored, her hair pulled back severely from a face that’s beautiful, cold and without mercy.
My eyes widen as I stare at her, an alarm instantly going off in my head. I know her.
At that moment, everything pieces together and I almost stop breathing.
The voice!
She’s the owner of the voice from my memory that I’ve been trying to recall.
I remember her walking through that mansion six years ago.
Her designer heels clicking on the concrete floor.
Her expensive perfume mixing with the smell of fear, sweat and desperation of the girls.
She inspected us like we were livestock, pointing at girls, deciding their fates with a flick of her manicured finger.
She never touched anyone herself, never had to get her hands dirty.
She just pointed, and other people did the dirty work for her.
She moves toward the altar, stepping over bodies like they’re nothing more than dirt. She stops at the center of the cathedral, her eyes scanning the shadows and the hiding spots with a predatory manner.
“Scarlett.” Her voice rings out across the cathedral, cutting through the gunfire. “I know you’re here somewhere. I can smell your fear from here, hun.”
Oh god, she knows my name.
I press myself harder against the pillar, pulling Luca tighter against my chest, clamping my hand over his mouth to keep him quiet. My heart is pounding so loud I fear she can hear it.
“You can keep hiding if you want,” she continues, her heels clicking on the floor as she paces slowly.
“My men will find you eventually. They always do. But if you come out now, voluntarily, I’ll make it quick.
Painless and easy. A single bullet to the head.
You won’t feel a thing.” She pauses, letting that sink in.
“But if you keep hiding, I promise you, it will be slow. Very, very slow.”
I don’t move, because my entire body has been paralyzed by fear.
“You know, I’ve been looking for you for six years,” she says, like she’s having a casual conversation. “Six years of hunting down every single girl who was in that mansion the night my Antonio died.”
The other girls. She killed them. I was right after all. Their deaths were too precise to be coincidental.
“I watched the CCTV footage of Antonio’s death hundreds of times, can you believe that?
” She laughs, a cold chilling sound. “He looked right at the camera with his last breath. Even in death, he still trusted me to fix things. He tried to tell me something—where he hid the ledger, I assume. But the audio was damaged. I could see his lips moving but I couldn’t hear a single word. ”
She stops pacing and turns slowly, scanning the cathedral again.
“But you were there, weren’t you, my darling?
Standing right in front of him when he died.
Close enough to hear everything he whispered.
” Her voice hardens. “And you went running to Dante. So I decided to be patient instead. Let Dante Moretti do the hard work. Let him chase the clues and follow the trail and find the ledger for me.” She smiles.
“And he did. He found it. Which means I don’t need any of you anymore. ”
Luca whimpers against my hand and I hold him tighter, my whole body shaking.
“So here’s how this ends. My men will kill everyone in this building. I take the ledger. No loose ends this time.”
Sweat breaks out as my grip on Luca tightens. I have to look for a way to get him out of here. I don’t mind dying, but nothing must happen to my son.
A hand suddenly clamps over my mouth from behind. Panic grips me, and I almost fight, but I hear Marco’s voice in my ear, low and urgent.
“Shhhh… Don’t make a sound. Follow me. Now.”
He pulls me backward, away from the pillar, guiding me and Luca through the shadows toward a different position. I stumble but he keeps me upright as we keep moving, until we’re behind a thick stone column far from Isabella’s line of sight.
“Who is she?” I gasp, even though I already have a clue.
“Isabella Marchetti. Antonio’s widow,” Marco reveals.
“She was his wife and partner in crime. The real power behind his empire and the shadow queen who pulled all the strings. She was the one who ran the trafficking operation, selected the girls, organized the shipments and handled the money while her husband played the charming businessman at fancy parties.” His fists clench.
“Antonio was the face everyone saw, but Isabella was the real mastermind. They call her the cold, calculating machine.”
Everything dawns on me now. We all thought Antonio was deadly, how wrong we were. His wife is clearly deadlier.
But before I could ask more questions, Isabella’s forces open fire again and the cathedral becomes an apocalyptic warzone.
Her soldiers are fresh and well-armed, pushing forward and fighting with relentless vigor. Dante’s team has already dwindled from fighting Viktor’s men, exhausted and running low on ammunition. They really timed their attack well.
I watch one of Dante’s soldiers go down with three bullets in his chest. He was young, maybe mid-twenties, probably had someone waiting for him at home.
Another takes a shot to the head and drops without a sound.
A third tries to retreat and gets cut down from behind, his body jerking as the gun tear through him.
The fighting is brutal beyond anything I’ve witnessed today, beyond anything I could have imagined in my worst nightmares.
Blood covering the floors in rivers now, pooling around fallen bodies, splashing under boots as men fight and die.
Bodies piling up faster than I can count.
The smell of cordite and death and blood so thick it makes me want to gag.
I spot Dante across the cathedral, fighting with his knife with no gun in sight. He’s moving through Isabella’s soldiers with deadly speed and strength. But there are too many of them. For every one he kills, two more take their place.
Isabella watches from behind her wall of guards, that cold smile never leaving her face. She’s clearly enjoying this. Watching us die one by one while she waits to claim her prize.
I’ve never hated anyone the way I hate her right now.
Luca is sobbing against my shoulder, his tears soaking through my shirt. I want to comfort him and tell him everything will be okay, but I can’t lie to him. Because even I am not sure if things will be okay.
“I love you,” I whisper instead. “No matter what happens, I love you so much.”
“Mama, I’m scared.”
“I know, baby. Me too.”
I grab my gun and hold it ready, knowing I might have to fight. Knowing I might have to kill to protect my son.
Marco slides behind our pillar, blood running down his face from a fresh wound. He’s breathing hard, his eyes scanning the chaos for any path to safety.
“We need to move,” he says. “Isabella’s men are closing in on us.”
“Move where?”
“The catacombs. There’s a passage that leads outside. If we can get you and Luca out—”
He stops mid-sentence, his eyes going wide.
I follow his gaze and see what he sees. A grenade, flying through the air toward us, spinning end to end in a scary slow motion.
My body freezes, my brain losing its ability to think at that moment. But Marco moves without hesitation, putting his body between the grenade and us. I see him wrap himself around it, curling into a ball on the stone floor, shielding us with everything he has.
“Marco, no!”
But it happens before the words can completely leave my throat. The explosion is deafening.
The force of it slams me backward into the pillar, Luca clutched against my chest. My ears are ringing, a high-pitched roar that drowns out everything else. I can’t hear the gunfire anymore, or the screaming. Just that terrible ringing.
And when I open my eyes, what’s left of Marco is lying on the floor in front of me.
“No.” The word comes out as a whisper. Then louder, tearing from my throat. “No, no, no, no.”
I crawl to him, dragging Luca with me, my hands shaking so badly I can barely move.
He’s still alive somehow, his chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged gasps.
But the damage is horrible. His midsection is destroyed, torn apart by the blast. Blood is pooling beneath him faster than a rushing stream.
There’s nothing I can do. No tourniquet, no pressure, no medical intervention that can fix this. He absorbed a grenade with his body. He’s dying, and I can’t save him.
“Marco.” I grab his hand, squeezing hard, my tears falling onto his bloodied chest. “Marco, stay with me. Please stay with me.”
His eyes find mine. They’re full with pain but still open. Still the eyes of the man who’s protected us through all of this, who stood between my son and death without a moment’s hesitation.
“Elena,” he gasps, blood bubbling at his lips. “Tell her…tell her I love her. Tell her I’m sorry.”
“You can tell her yourself. You’re going to be fine, you’re going to—”
“Don’t.” A dry, choking cough erupts from him. “Don’t lie to me. Not now.”
The tears are streaming down my face now, in unstoppable torrents. “Okay. Okay, I won’t lie.”
“Take care of her. And the kids. Promise me, Scarlett. Promise me you and Dante will take care of my family when I’m gone.”
“I promise.” My voice breaks on the words, my heart shattering to pieces. “We’ll take care of them. We’ll make sure they’re okay. Elena and your kids will never want for anything, I swear it on my life.”
“Good.” His grip on my hand is weakening, his fingers going cold. “That’s good. That’s…that’s all I needed to hear.”
“Marco, please. Please don’t leave us. Dante needs you. Elena needs you. Your kids need their father.”
“Tell Dante…” Another cough, weaker this time, with more blood spilling from his lips.
“Tell him it was an honor. Every fight we survived together. Every mission. Every stupid risk we took when we were young and thought we were invincible. Even the bad parts. Especially the bad parts. Tell him…he was the brother I chose. The brother I never had.”
“I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him everything.”
His eyes are drifting now, losing focus, the pain fading from his expression as something else takes over. It’s like peace and relief.
“Marco. Marco, please!”
His chest rises one more time then falls. And doesn’t rise again.
I watch the light leave his eyes. Watch the last breath escape his lips in a soft sigh. Watch the man who saved my life, who threw himself on a grenade for me and my son, slip away into Oblivion.
He’s gone.