Chapter 8 - The Price of Blood
Arthur Bell would not look at Luca.
The lawyer kept his eyes fixed firmly on the stone floor, his shoulders hunched within his tailored suit. When he spoke, his voice was thin, reedy, and stripped of the smooth, Harvard-educated polish that had served the Ventari family for three decades.
"They have my son, Luca," Arthur whispered, his voice cracking with a pathetic, miserable terror. "They picked him up in London yesterday morning. Silvio’s people have him in a cellar in Chelsea. What was I supposed to do?"
Luca did not answer him. He did not yell. He did not curse. The silence that emanated from him was terrifying, a vacuum of cold, absolute rage that seemed to draw all the warmth from the subterranean chamber.
Silvio Valenti chuckled, a dry, rattling sound that sounded like dead leaves blowing across concrete. He walked slowly around the stone table, his polished Italian leather shoes clicking against the limestone flagstones.
"Always the loyal dog, eh, Arthur?" Silvio mocked, gesturing with a manicured hand toward the cylinder on the table. "You see, Luca? Loyalty is a commodity. It has an exchange rate, just like the euro or the dollar. You thought you could defeat me with ledgers and court filings? You spent twelve years playing the businessman in Manhattan, while I remained what we have always been: wolves."
Silvio’s cold, reptilian eyes shifted from Luca to Elena.
A grotesque, appreciative smile twisted his thin lips. "And here she is. The little Moretti girl. You look like your mother, you know. She had that same defiant, ridiculous stare right before my boys put her in the trench behind the sheep pen."
Elena’s blood turned to pure acid. The Glock in her holster seemed to burn against her hip, but three red laser dots were dancing across her chest. One wrong movement, and she and Luca would be shredded into meat before they could clear leather.
"You killed your own cousins for a limestone quarry," Elena said, her voice shaking with a disgust so profound it stripped away her fear. "You're not a wolf, Silvio. You're a hyena that feeds on the dead."
Silvio’s smile vanished, replaced by an ugly, twitching malice. "Hand over the ledger, girl. Hand it to me, and I might let Luca die quickly. A bullet to the neck is a mercy compared to what my nephew Gianni has planned for him."
Luca slowly raised his hands, palms open, stepping half an inch in front of Elena, positioning his broad frame between her and the weapons of Valenti’s men.
"Take the ledger, Silvio," Luca said, his voice flat, emotionless, completely devoid of surrender. "The girl knows nothing. She was a waitress three days ago. Let her walk out of this valley, and you can have the mountain, the docks, and the accounts in Zurich."
Elena’s head snapped toward him. "Luca, no!"
"Shut up, Elena," Luca barked, without breaking eye contact with Silvio.
Silvio tilted his head, studying Luca with amused disbelief. "The great Luca Ventari... bargaining for a woman? My God, the blood of your mother really did make you soft. The old Don would have shot through her chest just to put a hole in mine."
Silvio stepped closer, reaching his hand out toward the parchment roll on the table. "Gianni, take the guns. Bind their hands with the zip-ties. We’ll burn them in the chapel above. Let the peasants think it was a gas leak."
One of the armed men—a hulking, thick-necked brute with a jagged scar running through his eyebrow—stepped forward, lowering his submachine gun to pull plastic restraints from his belt.
He stepped directly between Silvio and Luca.
It was the fraction of a second Luca had been waiting for.
Luca didn't draw a gun. He drew the four-inch ceramic boot knife he had kept concealed in the lining of his trousers.
With a speed that defied human reaction, Luca lunged forward, grabbed Gianni by the tactical vest, and drove the ceramic blade directly beneath the man’s jaw, angling it upward into the brain stem. Gianni went limp instantly, his weapon slipping from his fingers.
Before the corpse hit the floor, Luca grabbed the falling submachine gun with his left hand, spun Gianni’s heavy body around as a human shield, and opened fire on the remaining five gunmen.
*“Down!”* Luca roared.
Elena reacted on pure instinct. She didn't drop to her knees; she threw her body sideways across the stone table, her hand grabbing the bronze cylinder as bullets chewed the air where she had been standing. The deafening, concussive roar of automatic weapons in the enclosed vault was paralyzing. Ricochets whined off the stone pillars, throwing shards of rock and lead across the chamber.
Elena drew her Glock from the floor, rolled onto her back, and fired upward into the chest of a shooter who was attempting to flank Luca from the stairs. The man shrieked, clutching his throat, and tumbled backward over the steps.
Luca was a machine of death. Using Gianni’s armored corpse to absorb the barrage of fire, he advanced step by step, firing short, brutal bursts that eliminated two more gunmen in three seconds. His face was covered in blood—some of it his own, most of it Gianni's—his eyes burning with an unholy, ancient fury.
Silvio Valenti screamed in terror, dropping to the floor and scrambling toward the dark tunnel behind the Bourbon chests—the escape route leading toward the ravine.
Arthur Bell was cowering behind a stone pillar, his hands clamped over his ears, weeping like a broken child.
The last gunman turned to run toward the stairs, but Nico—bloody, broken, dragging himself across the stone flags with his left arm—grabbed the man’s ankle with the last ounce of his strength. The gunman stumbled, losing his balance, and Luca put a single round through the back of his skull.
The silence that followed was sudden, heavy, and thick with the smell of blood, cordite, and pulverized stone.
Elena pushed herself up from behind the table, her hands trembling, her ears ringing with a deafening whine. She looked across the chamber.
Four bodies lay motionless in the dust. Nico was slumped against the pillar, unconscious, but his chest still rose and fell with a shallow rhythm. Arthur was sobbing in the corner.
And Luca was standing near the Bourbon chests, his weapon lowered, staring at the dark opening of the escape tunnel.
Then, slowly, Luca swayed.
Elena’s heart stopped. "Luca?"
He turned toward her. His hand moved slowly to his side, pressing against the dark wool of his sweater. When he pulled his hand away, his palm was slick with dark, frothy crimson.
A stray bullet had bypassed his vest, penetrating deep into his abdomen beneath the ribcage.
"Luca!" Elena screamed, dropping her gun and running toward him.
May you like
She caught him just as his knees gave way, the sheer weight of him bringing them both down onto the cold limestone floor.
***