Chapter 1 - The Blood on the Pavement
The rain didn't feel cold anymore. It felt like fire.
Five hot, jagged tears tore through my muscle and bone, burning from the inside out. My lungs gasped for air, but every breath pulled in only the sharp, metallic stench of gunpowder, ozone, and my own blood spreading across the wet concrete.
"Caruso!" Marco screamed, his voice raw, stripped of all its usual icy composure. He was kneeling in the deluge, his bespoke charcoal suit ruined, dark water and crimson rivers soaking into his knees. His broad hands were pressed flat against my chest and shoulder, trying to stem the torrents of red pumping through his fingers. "Get the cars! GET THE MEDICS!"
Behind him, six feet away, Caruso stood in the downpour.
He wasn't running for the armored SUV. He wasn't barking orders into his radio. He was standing motionless, his slick black raincoat gleaming under the driveway floodlights.
And in his right hand, a heavy SIG Sauer P226 pistol was raised, its barrel pointed directly at the back of Marco DeLuca’s head.
"He's not calling the medics, Marco," I coughed, a thick drop of blood bubbling past my lips, staining my chin. My vision was tunneling, shrinking down to the trembling intensity of Marco’s dark eyes.
Marco froze.
He wasn't a man who missed detail. For fifteen years, he had survived the treacherous waters of the syndicate by reading the smallest shifts in a room, the subtlest micro-expressions on a traitor's face. Slowly, meticulously, Marco turned his head, looking over his broad shoulder.
Caruso’s face was devoid of color, but his hand was rock steady.
"Caruso," Marco said. His voice dropped into a register so dangerously low it seemed to undercut the roaring thunderstorm. "Lower the weapon."
"I can't do that, Boss," Caruso said, his voice straining against the sound of the rain. "The Moretti family paid thirty million for the contract. They promised me the docks. They promised me the East Side territory. You've gotten soft, Marco. Spending millions on your dying mother... keeping worthless staff around..."
Caruso's eyes flicked down to me for a fraction of a second—a look of pure, unadulterated contempt.
"She took five rounds meant for your mother," Caruso sneered. "A nobody. Dying in the dirt for a family that doesn't even know her last name."
"You broke your oath," Marco whispered. He didn't move away from me. He kept his hands clamped firmly over my chest wounds, using his own weight to hold pressure on my shattered shoulder. "I raised you from the gutter, Caruso. I gave you your life."
"And now I'm taking yours!" Caruso yelled, his finger tightening on the trigger.
BANG.
The gunshot cracked through the rain like thunder.
Caruso’s eyes went wide. A small, neat hole appeared in the center of his throat. He dropped his pistol, his hands flying to his neck as blood welled out, his mouth working in silent shock. He stumbled backward, his knees giving out, and collapsed backward into the flooded gutter.
Ten feet behind Caruso, seventy-one-year-old Isabella DeLuca stood in the rain.
Her white coat was splashed with my blood. Her gray hair was plastered to her scalp by the downpour. In her small, shaking, arthritis-riddled hands, she held Marco’s backup snub-nosed .38 revolver, smoke still curling from its snub barrel. Her chest heaved as fluid rattled in her damaged lungs, but her dark eyes were cold, unyielding, and fierce.
"Nobody," Isabella rasped, her voice trembling with rage as she lowered the revolver, "touches my son. And nobody disrespects the girl who saved my life."
"Mother!" Marco barked, turning back to me instantly as my head lolled to the side.
My eyes were closing. The world was slipping into a quiet, painless darkness. The rain sounded further away now, like a distant whisper softly fading.
"Lena! Look at me!" Marco’s voice cracked—a sound of absolute, desperate panic that I had never imagined the feared mafia boss capable of making. He wrapped his arms around my limp body, pulling my head up against his neck, his tears mixing with the rainwater pouring down his face. "Keep your eyes on me! That’s an order! Do you hear me, Lena?! THAT IS AN ORDER!"
"I don't... work... for you..." I whispered, a faint, fragile smile touching my bloodied lips. "...Mr. DeLuca."
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"You don't," he sobbed, his chest heaving against mine as he pressed his forehead to my cold, wet temple. "You don't work for me. Just stay alive. Please, God, stay alive..."
The dark finally swallowed me whole.
