Chapter 7 - Blood and Gold
The warehouse district in Queens smelled of rusted iron, stale river water, and impending death.
Luca Moretti’s armada of black SUVs didn't just arrive at the Santangelo safehouse; they assaulted it like a military battalion. The heavy metal rolling doors were blown off their tracks by synchronized breaching charges, and before the Chicago enforcers could even raise their weapons, Luca’s elite squads flooded the facility in a wave of tactical black and suppressed gunfire.
I sat tied to a metal chair in the center of a damp, dimly lit shipping office on the second floor, my heart hammering wildly against my ribs. The contractions had started fifteen minutes ago—brought on by the violent stress of the abduction. My lower abdomen gripped with sharp, agonizing pain, sending cold sweat pouring down my neck.
“Breathe, sweetheart,” Dante Santangelo mocked, pacing back and forth in front of me with a pistol in his hand. “Your husband is downstairs turning this warehouse into a slaughterhouse. But even if he makes it up these stairs, you’re in no condition to travel. And your baby...”
He smiled cruelly, tapping the barrel of his gun against his thigh. “Well, let’s just say accidents happen in the crossfire.”
Before I could answer, a deafening explosion rocked the floor beneath us.
BOOM!
The heavy steel door of the office blew inward, tearing off its hinges and crashing onto the concrete floor in a shower of sparks and splinters.
Through the thick haze of cordite and smoke walked Luca.
He wasn't wearing his tailored coat anymore. His white dress shirt was soaked in sweat and splattered with dark blood that wasn't his. His hair was messy, his eyes blazing with a terrifying, demonic fury that made even Dante Santangelo freeze in his tracks.
“Let her go, Dante,” Luca whispered. The quiet deadliness in his voice cut through the air like a butcher's knife.
Dante panicked, grabbing me by the hair and pressing the cold barrel of his pistol against my temple. “Stay back, Luca! One step and I blow her brains out right here!”
Luca stopped dead in his tracks. For a fraction of a second, the iron-clad facade cracked. I saw the raw, agonizing terror in his gray eyes—the fear of losing the only woman he had ever truly loved.
“You touch her,” Luca said, his voice dropping into an unnatural, shivering whisper, “and I won't just kill you. I’ll peel the skin off your bones while you’re still breathing and feed it to the rats in this warehouse.”
Dante’s hand trembled. The threat was so absolute, so devoid of bluff, that it paralyzed him.
It was all the opening Marcus needed.
Emerging silently from the shadows behind Dante, Marcus raised a silenced pistol and fired.
Puff.
Dante’s eyes widened. The pistol slipped from his fingers as he collapsed backward onto the concrete floor, lifeless.
Luca didn't look at the body. He dropped his weapon, sprinted across the room, and fell to his knees in front of me, cutting the ropes binding my wrists with a small pocketknife.
“Bella,” he choked out, pulling me into his arms. “Are you hurt? Did they touch you?”
“Luca... the baby,” I gasped, clutching my stomach as another severe contraction tore through me. “The stress... it’s coming. The baby is coming right now.”
Luca’s face went completely pale. The king of New York—a man who had faced down rival syndicates, assassins, and federal indictments without blinking—looked momentarily paralyzed by sheer terror.
Then his training kicked in.
He scooped me up into his arms effortlessly, ignoring the blood on his shirt, and carried me down through the smoking ruins of the warehouse straight into the back of his waiting Maybach.
May you like
“Drive!” Luca roared to Marcus in the front seat. “To our private clinic in Manhattan! Now! Or I put a bullet in your head!”
The Maybach tore out of the warehouse district, racing toward the hospital as the storm broke across the New York skyline in a blaze of lightning and thunder.
