Chapter 8 - The Traitor's Price
"Don't move a muscle, Lorenzo," Arthur Vance said, his voice trembling not from fear, but from the desperate adrenaline of a cornered rat. "Drop your piece and kick it away. Now!"
Behind me, my two bodyguards were still stuck inside the narrow elevator cage behind the gurney, unable to get a clear line of sight without risking hitting my mother or me.
I slowly unholstered my suppressed Sig Sauer with my right hand, knelt down, and slid it three feet across the polished concrete floor.
"Arthur," I said calmly, stepping directly in front of the gurney so my body shielded my mother, Elena, and Mia completely. "Forty years my father paid your firm retainers. My family put your two sons through Harvard and Johns Hopkins. And you sell us out to Matteo Conti?"
Arthur’s weathered face twisted beneath the fluorescent tunnel lights. Beyond him, his sons Luca and Julian were limping out of the wine cellar, freed from their zip-ties.
"Your father didn't pay me, Lorenzo—he owned me!" Arthur spat, keeping the twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun leveled at my chest. "For forty years, I cleaned up the Duca family’s messes, hid your offshore trusts, buried your enemies in legal tape, and what did I get? Crumbs! While you inherited a ten-billion-dollar throne!"
"You made twelve million a year, Arthur," I said evenly, inching half a step closer while keeping my hands slightly raised. "If your idiot sons hadn't blown sixty million at Macau underground casinos owned by the Conti cartel, you wouldn't be holding a shotgun in my basement."
"Shut your mouth!" Luca snarled from behind his father, nursing his broken wrist. "Kill him now, Dad! Shoot him and the old woman so Matteo clears our debt!"
I glanced past Arthur’s shoulder. At the far end of the tunnel, the heavy steel stairs leading up to the main house echoed with heavy boots. Matteo’s mercenaries were coming down to link up with them.
I had less than ten seconds before we were pinned between two firing squads.
I looked down at my mother lying on the gurney right behind my hip.
Since we had disconnected the tainted IV bag two hours ago and Dr. Moretti had instructed Sister Agnes over the phone to administer a counter-cholinergic injection, the paralytic toxin in her bloodstream had been steadily metabolizing.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother’s right hand slowly grip the chrome rail of the gurney.
Arthur didn't see it. He was staring at my chest.
"Goodbye, Lorenzo," Arthur whispered, his finger tightening on the shotgun trigger.
At that exact millisecond, a raspy, commanding voice echoed through the concrete tunnel—a voice nobody in this house had heard in ninety days:
"Arthur."
Arthur Vance gasped, his eyes bulging in sheer, superstitious terror as he looked past my shoulder at the woman he had just declared legally dead.
Isabella Duca slowly lifted her head two inches off the pillow, her dark Italian eyes blazing like hellfire.
"Look me in the eyes when you shoot my son, you cowardly dog."
That half-second of shock broke Arthur’s focus. His shotgun barrel dipped two inches to the right.
It was all I needed.
I lunged forward like a striking viper, grabbing the hot steel barrel of the twelve-gauge with my wounded left hand and shoving it upward just as both barrels discharged into the concrete ceiling with a deafening roar.
Before the smoke even cleared, my right hand swept down, snatched my Sig Sauer off the floor, and fired twice from the hip.
Pop. Pop.
Both silenced rounds hit Arthur Vance square in the kneecaps. He collapsed with a bloodcurdling shriek, dropping the shotgun as my two bodyguards burst past the gurney and tackled Luca and Julian back to the concrete floor.
"Get them inside the panic room and seal the blast door!" I shouted over the ringing in my ears as Matteo’s mercenaries reached the top of the cellar stairs and opened fire down the corridor.
We shoved the gurney, Elena, Mia, Sister Agnes, and the screaming Vance family inside the subterranean vault.
I hit the hydraulic switch, and the six-inch solid steel vault door hissed shut, locking us in total safety just as rounds ricocheted harmlessly off the outer armor.
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I turned around, breathing heavily, blood dripping from my left sleeve onto the floor—and watched my mother slowly sit up on the gurney and open her arms to Mia.
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