Chapter 8 - Blood and Reckoning
The battle of Pier 42 was over in less than four minutes.
Moretti’s men were either dead on the oil-stained floor or kneeling with their hands clasped behind their heads, guarded by stone-faced Gallo soldiers. The smell of cordite, blood, and ozone hung thick in the cold air.
Luca Moretti lay on his back in the center of the clearing, groaning in agony, clutching his shattered shoulder while blood pooled beneath his impaled hand.
Dante walked slowly toward him. Every step seemed to cost him an enormous physical effort, his face tight with pain from his reopened stitches, but he did not waver. The long shadow of his frame fell over Luca like a shroud.
“Dante... please...” Luca wheezed, his arrogance completely gone, replaced by the pathetic sniveling of a coward facing the executioner. “It was business... just business! The Commission will destroy you if you kill me! We have rules!”
Dante stopped beside him. He did not raise his shotgun. Instead, he looked down at Luca with the bored, clinical detachment of a man looking at a cockroach.
“The rules died the moment you put a bomb in my mother’s car twenty years ago, Luca,” Dante said quietly.
Luca’s eyes widened in sheer, paralyzing horror. “You... you couldn't know that. That was my father’s crew—”
“Your father built the bomb,” Dante said, his voice dropping into a register of icy, absolute finality. “You set the timer. I was ten years old, Luca. I remember the smell of your cheap cologne as you walked away from the curb.”
Dante handed his shotgun to Angelo, who had stepped up beside him. Then, Dante reached down, pulled Nora’s grandfather’s silver cross from Luca’s pinned hand, and wiped the blood off the blade onto Luca’s expensive velvet lapel.
“Angelo,” Dante said smoothly.
“Boss?”
“Take Luca to the docks. Put him on the freighter heading to our scrap yard in Antwerp. Let him spend the rest of his miserable life cleaning the bilges of iron ore ships. Death is too quick a mercy for him.”
“Consider it done, Boss.”
Two soldiers grabbed Luca by his collar, dragging him screaming and cursing out into the pouring rain.
The warehouse fell quiet.
Dante turned slowly toward Nora. The cold, merciless boss of the New York underworld seemed to melt away, leaving only a wounded, exhausted man who looked as though he were barely holding onto consciousness.
He dropped the silver cross into her trembling palm.
“You’re insane,” Dante whispered, his voice trembling with an emotion that was raw and overwhelming. “Do you know that? You are completely, utterly insane.”
Nora clutched the cross to her chest, her eyes filling with tears that she couldn't stop. “You were supposed to be in bed. You could have torn your stitches. You could have died!”
“You walked into a room with twenty armed men using a church cross as a weapon!” Dante roared, taking a step toward her, his hands coming up to cup her face with desperate, bruising intensity. “If he had pulled that trigger... if I had been half a second slower... Nora, I would have burned this entire city to the ground.”
Nora looked up into his dark, tortured eyes. She saw the terrifying power he wielded, the blood that stained his past, and the empire he ruled with an iron fist. But she also saw the boy who had watched his mother die, the man who had stayed up every night watching her from across a crowded room, and the soul that was bound to hers by an invisible, unbreakable thread of fate.
“You didn't miss,” Nora whispered, leaning her forehead against his chest, right over his racing heart. “You came for me.”
Dante wrapped his arms around her, burying his face in her auburn hair, pulling her so close that she could feel every beat of his heart against her ribs. He groaned softly as his wound pulled, but he refused to loosen his grip by even a millimeter.
“Always,” Dante vowed against her skin. “In this life, or the next. Always, Nora.”
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Above them, through the shattered skylights, the dark storm clouds finally began to part, revealing the first faint golden rays of the morning sun breaking over the Manhattan skyline.
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