Chapter 13 - The Weight of Mercy
The full weight of Sofia’s body plus the fifty-pound iron anchor jerked violently against my wounded left arm, tearing Sister Agnes’s fresh stitches completely open.
Hot blood poured down my wrist, making my grip on Sofia’s duct-taped forearms dangerously slick as she dangled over the churning gray water of the Hudson River.
"Pull me up! Please, Lorenzo, pull me up!" Sofia sobbed hysterically, her eyes wide with absolute terror as the icy waves splashed against her calves. "I'll tell you where Matteo’s safe house is! I'll testify against him! Just don't let me drown!"
I knelt on the wet wooden planks at the edge of the pier, looking straight down into the face of the woman who had spent the last two years smiling at me while plotting the destruction of everyone I loved.
"Yesterday afternoon, Sofia," I gritted out through clenched teeth as every tendon in my torn bicep screamed in agony, "you looked a terrified mother in the eyes and told her that toddlers wander off, gates get left open, and little girls drown in the river every day."
"I didn't mean it!" she wept, kicking frantically against the drag of the iron chain. "I was just scaring her! You know me, Lorenzo, I could never hurt a child!"
"Luca Vance came into my house at two in the morning with chloroform and a duffel bag in Mia’s nursery," I said darkly, my grip slipping half an inch down her slick wrists. "Give me one reason I shouldn't open my hands right now and let the river have you."
Behind me on the dock, Rocco walked up with his rifle slung over his shoulder and sixty-year-old Lucia leaning heavily on his arm.
"Let the bitch drop, Boss," Rocco growled coldly, looking out toward the fog where police sirens were finally converging on the river road. "Nobody saw anything. It clears the board."
Every ruthless instinct bred into my bones by three generations of Duca dons told me to let go. She was a viper. Leaving an enemy alive was how empires fell.
Then I heard Lucia’s quiet, shaking voice behind me.
"Señor Duca... please," the old grandmother whispered, crossing herself as she looked at Sofia dangling over the dark water. "Do not stain your soul with her blood when you just saved mine. My little Mia looks at you like you are an angel from God. Keep your hands clean for her."
Those quiet words hit me deeper than any bullet ever could.
If I opened my hands and watched this woman drown in cold blood, I was no different from Matteo Conti. And when I went back up that hill and picked Mia up in my arms, I would know what those hands had done.
"Rocco," I snapped, my jaw tight. "Grab her other arm and pull her up."
Rocco cursed under his breath, slung his rifle back, and knelt beside me. Together, we hauled Sofia and the fifty-pound iron anchor up onto the wooden planks of the pier.
She collapsed onto her side on the wet wood, coughing, gasping, and weeping as Rocco immediately used his combat knife to cut the anchor rope and replace the duct tape with steel handcuffs behind her back.
Sofia looked up at me from the planks, shivering violently, a mixture of disbelief and pathetic hope in her bruised eyes. "Lorenzo... you couldn't kill me. You still care about me—"
"Don't flatter yourself, Sofia," I said coldly, pulling out a handkerchief to wrap around my bleeding left wrist. "I didn't pull you out of that water because I love you. I pulled you out because drowning takes ninety seconds, and thirty years in a maximum-security federal penitentiary without a penny to your name takes a whole lot longer."
Just then, four New York State Police cruisers and two black FBI SUVs burst out of the tree line onto the pier, lights flashing red and blue through the river mist.
Special Agent Miller—head of the Manhattan Organized Crime Task Force, a man who had tried and failed to find dirt on my family for a decade—stepped out with his badge raised, staring in shock at the two dead gunmen on the pier, Sofia in handcuffs, and my bleeding arm.
"Duca," Agent Miller said slowly, walking up the dock. "We got a call from Credit Suisse in Geneva and a hostage alert at your estate. Where the hell is Matteo Conti?"
I held up my phone, showing the flashing red dot of the military GPS transponder hidden inside the velvet diamond pouch currently speeding north up the Hudson River at sixty knots.
"He’s heading straight toward the abandoned shipyard at Haverstraw Bay with fifty million in stolen bonds," I said, handing Miller the tracking frequency. "Wait—before you call in your Coast Guard helicopters, Miller, look closer at the GPS coordinates."
Miller frowned at the tablet screen. "He stopped moving half a mile offshore."
Suddenly, Sofia’s phone in her coat pocket rang with a FaceTime video call from an unknown satellite number.
I pulled the phone from her pocket and hit accept.
May you like
On the screen was Matteo Conti inside the cabin of a luxury yacht anchored in the middle of the river—and bound to a chair behind him, gagged and bleeding, was Dr. Moretti, my family physician who had analyzed the poison in my wine last night.
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