Chapter 14 #3
Another five paces and we finally reach the study. The large doors stand ajar, firelight flickering through the crack. Luca pushes through with me behind him.
But we only find silence.
My heart starts beating erratically. My mother is gone from the chair by the fireplace and my father…where did they?
I fist Luca’s shirt where I have my hand on his back. He draws up and looks at me over his shoulder, gun raised and ready for the enemy.
“They’re not in here.” Acid swirls and boils in my stomach. “He’s taken her behind the wall.”
Confusion crosses Luca’s expression. I take a deep breath and try again. But instead of explaining I go to the large bookcase behind my father’s desk and slide a ceramic owl to the side.
The wall opens and Luca is immediately in front of me again.
“Behind me at all times.”
The hidden corridor is narrow and dark. It winds downward into the ground, the air stale with disuse and carrying the damp mineral smell of stone walls that haven't seen sunlight in decades.
Emergency lighting casts a weak amber glow along the floor, barely enough to see by, and our shadows stretch long and distorted against walls lined with pipes and electrical conduits that hum with the quiet pulse of a building keeping its secrets alive.
Luca moves through the passage with his gun raised, his body filling the narrow space so completely that I can barely see past his shoulders. My hand presses flat against his back, his muscles coiled tight beneath my palm, his breathing controlled.
In a few more paces, the corridor opens into a room I've never seen before. I only saw my father enter it once years ago. I never entered.
We step out of the corridor and Luca pauses.
My father's hidden study is smaller than the one upstairs, windowless and lined with dark wood paneling that absorbs the low light from a desk lamp casting a circle of warm gold across a mahogany desk identical to the one above.
Filing cabinets line the far wall, their drawers closed.
The air tastes like cigar smoke and old paper and the particular staleness of a room where terrible decisions are made in private and never spoken of in daylight.
Three guards stand between us and the desk, shoulder to shoulder, a wall of muscle and firepower that makes the corridor behind us feel like the safer option.
I glance around Luca’s massive form to see they have their weapons drawn. All three barrels are trained on the doorway where Luca and I stand silhouetted against the corridor light like targets on a range.
And behind the desk, Enzo sits in his leather chair with the settled calm of a man who planned for every contingency, including this one. His hands rest on the desk surface, fingers laced, the picture of composure.
My mother kneels on the floor beside him, a fourth guard pressing the barrel of a handgun against her temple.
Her eyes are wide and glassy with terror, her thin body trembling so violently I can see it from across the room.
A bruise darkens her left cheekbone that wasn't there an hour ago.
Someone hit her, and the rage that surges through my veins nearly sends me charging past Luca before my brain catches up to my body.
"I didn't think you were coming." Enzo's voice carries the mild disappointment of a man whose dinner guests arrived late. "I was beginning to think your husband's reputation was exaggerated, daughter."
Luca doesn't answer with words. He pushes me into the corridor and then he’s a blur of motion.
The first guard raises his weapon and Luca is already inside his reach, slamming the barrel aside with his forearm and driving his elbow into the man's throat with a force that drops him choking to his knees.
The second guard swings his gun toward Luca's chest and Luca catches the barrel in his left hand, twists it free, and uses the momentum to crack the stock across the guard's jaw.
Bone connects with metal in a sound that makes my stomach lurch. The guard crumples sideways into the filing cabinets with enough force to dent the steel.
The third guard is smarter. He hangs back, waits for Luca to commit to the second takedown, and raises his weapon at the back of Luca's unprotected head.
“Ilona, watch out!” My mother warns.
My body moves before my mind gives permission. The gun in my hand rises, my finger finds the trigger, and I squeeze.
The recoil jolts up my arms and rattles my teeth. The bullet catches the third guard in the shoulder and spins him sideways, his gun clattering to the stone floor as he staggers into the wall and slides down it, clutching the wound with fingers that are already slick with blood.
Bile rises in my throat, hot and sour. I just shot a man. The reality of it crashes through me in a wave of nausea so violent my vision swims. But the alternative was watching him put a bullet in the back of Luca's skull, and no one is taking my baby's father from her before she's even born.
No one.
Luca swivels and catches my gaze with his in recognition of saving his life.
A door slams open to our left from another entry point into the underground room and Kon fills the frame.
His massive body blocks the light from whatever corridor he came through, his gun sweeping the room with the methodical calmness.
His dark eyes assess the three downed guards, the fourth still pressing his weapon to my mother's temple, and Enzo behind his desk with his hands still folded in that infuriating display of composure.
"The guard," Luca barks without turning around. "On the woman."
Kon moves with a speed that defies his size. Three strides and his hand closes around the fourth guard's wrist, twisting the gun away from my mother's head with a controlled violence that bends the man's arm at an angle arms are not designed to bend.
Why he didn’t shoot my mother I will never know, but I am eternally grateful he couldn’t.
The guard screams. Kon silences him with a single strike that sends him sprawling across the floor, unconscious before he finishes falling.
My mother collapses forward onto her hands, gasping, her whole body shaking with sobs. I want to run to her but Luca is already advancing on the desk and something in the set of his shoulders tells me this isn't over yet.
Luca reaches the desk and presses the barrel of his gun against Enzo's temple.
His finger settles on the trigger with a steadiness that tells me the trembling from earlier is gone, replaced by a cold, lethal focus that transforms him into something more weapon than man.
Every line of his body screams execution.
Enzo smiles up at Luca.
His right hand moves beneath the desk.
The gunshot splits the air before I can scream. Enzo's hidden pistol fires from beneath the mahogany, the bullet tearing through Luca's left shoulder in a spray of crimson that splatters across the desk lamp and turns the warm gold light a sickening red.
Luca doesn't flinch.
He doesn't stagger. Doesn't clutch the wound. Doesn't give Enzo the satisfaction of watching pain register on his face, either.
Blood spreads across his already ruined shirt, blooming dark and fast from the entry wound, and his left arm drops to his side with a heaviness that tells me the muscle is compromised even if his will is not.
He barrels forward, his right hand seizing Enzo by the throat and slamming him back into his chair so hard the leather groans and the chair rolls until it crashes against the wall.
The hidden pistol skitters across the desk and falls to the floor.
Luca presses his gun to Enzo's forehead, the barrel dimpling the skin between those pale, calculating eyes.
"Luca, stop." My voice cuts through the room, sharp and commanding in a way I barely recognize as my own. I cross to him, my bare feet slapping against the cold stone, my hand reaching for his arm. "Look at me. Not him. Look at me."
His eyes don't move from Enzo's face. His finger tightens on the trigger.
"He was going to kill our baby." The words grind out through clenched teeth, blood dripping from his shoulder onto Enzo's pristine shirt. Each drop lands with a soft sound that punctuates the silence between them.
"I know." My voice comes out steady despite the terror and the nausea and the sight of Luca's blood pooling on the desk beneath the lamp.
"Give me one reason not to pull this trigger."
I place my hand over his on the gun, feeling the tension vibrating through his fingers, the heat of metal warmed by his grip, the slickness of blood that has traveled down his arm and coated the handle.
"Think about what you are going to do." My voice is steady despite the trembling in my chest. “He saw me as an asset. You saw me as leverage. If you kill him, you prove him right about both of you. I need you to be better than that. I need to know I chose better than my mother did.”
The words hang between us, carrying the weight of everything we've been and everything we might never be.
His hand shakes. The gun trembles against Enzo's forehead.
The muscle in his jaw works beneath his beard, grinding back and forth.
Blood continues to seep from the wound in his shoulder with a persistence that makes my stomach clench.
The fear has nothing to do with Enzo and everything to do with the amount of crimson spreading across Luca's chest.
He slowly lowers the gun.
Enzo exhales. Whatever he expected, it was not mercy, and the confusion that flickers across his features before he reassembles his mask tells me that mercy is a weapon he has never learned to wield and therefore has no defense against.
"Take him to Club Genesis, Kon. Just because I am not putting a bullet in him doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy filleting him alive one part of his body at a time until I grow bored." I don’t know what Club Genesis is, but I suspect it’s not good.
Luca's voice is flat, emptied of everything except command.
Blood drips steadily from his fingertips onto the stone floor, each drop a small red clock counting down the time before the adrenaline fades and the pain arrives.
"His empire gets dismantled tonight. Trafficking operations, financial networks, every alliance he's built.
By morning, Enzo Marchetti owns nothing. Not even his name."
“Trafficking?”
Kon moves forward and lifts Enzo from his chair. Enzo doesn't fight. He watches me as Kon guides him toward the door, his pale eyes holding mine with an expression I've never seen on his face before.
Loss. Not of me. He never cared about losing me. But the loss of everything else carves itself into the lines of his face with a devastation no bullet could have achieved.
“Luca?” I urge.
“Your father sold women as sex slaves,” he states flatly as he turns to me and cups my cheek. “I’ll tell you more later though.”
I nod. Later sounds good. Right now my emotions are all over the place and I don’t know how much longer I can keep it all together.
I rush to my mother. She's still on the floor, her body folded in on itself, her hands pressed against the cold stone. I kneel beside her, the marble hard beneath my knees, and gather her into my arms.
"Is it true,Mom? That he’s not my father?" The question falls from my lips before I can stop it, the paternity reveal still burning in my chest alongside everything else.
Her chin lifts. Her red-rimmed eyes find mine, and the tears that fall carry the weight of twenty-two years. She nods once. No words. Just the small, devastating motion of a head dipping forward.
I don't ask who my real father is. That question belongs to a quieter room, a safer moment, a day when the air doesn't taste like gunpowder and the floors aren't slick with blood.
I help my mother stand and turn to find Luca leaning against the desk, his right hand pressed over the wound in his left shoulder.
Blood seeps between his fingers in a steady stream that has already soaked through his sleeve and begun dripping onto the stone floor.
His face is pale beneath the olive of his skin but his eyes are clear, alert, locked on me with a focus that refuses to acknowledge the bullet hole in his body.
"We need to get you to a hospital." I cross to him and press my hand over his on the wound, feeling the hot slickness of his blood against my palm, the rapid pulse beating beneath the damaged muscle.
"You and your mother first." His voice is rough but steady. "Get her out of this house."
I wrap my arm around my mother's waist and Luca walks ahead of us, his gun still in his right hand, his left arm hanging useless at his side, blood leaving a trail on the marble floors as he clears our path to the entrance.
He saved my life tonight. Took a bullet for us. Came for me when Luna called and moved heaven and violence to reach me before Enzo could carry out his threats.
He saved me, but now when I look at him I feel a sense of numbness. Like what we shared wasn’t real. Trust is a tricky beast. Once it’s broken, it’s so hard to put it back together. Right now, my heart says it’s impossible.