Enzo smiles up at Luca.
His right hand moves beneath the desk.
The gunshot splits the air before I can scream. Enzo's hidden pistol fires from beneath the mahogany, the bullet tearing through Luca's left shoulder in a spray of crimson that splatters across the desk lamp and turns the warm gold light a sickening red.
Luca doesn't flinch.
He doesn't stagger. Doesn't clutch the wound. Doesn't give Enzo the satisfaction of watching pain register on his face, either.
Blood spreads across his already ruined shirt, blooming dark and fast from the entry wound, and his left arm drops to his side with a heaviness that tells me the muscle is compromised even if his will is not.
He barrels forward, his right hand seizing Enzo by the throat and slamming him back into his chair so hard the leather groans and the chair rolls until it crashes against the wall. The hidden pistol skitters across the desk and falls to the floor. Luca presses his gun to Enzo's forehead, the barrel dimpling the skin between those pale, calculating eyes.
"Luca, stop." My voice cuts through the room, sharp and commanding in a way I barely recognize as my own. I cross to him, my bare feet slapping against the cold stone, my hand reaching for his arm. "Look at me. Not him. Look at me."
His eyes don't move from Enzo's face. His finger tightens on the trigger.
"He was going to kill our baby." The words grind out through clenched teeth, blood dripping from his shoulder onto Enzo's pristine shirt. Each drop lands with a soft sound that punctuates the silence between them.
"I know." My voice comes out steady despite the terror and the nausea and the sight of Luca's blood pooling on the desk beneath the lamp.
"Give me one reason not to pull this trigger."
I place my hand over his on the gun, feeling the tension vibrating through his fingers, the heat of metal warmed by his grip, theslickness of blood that has traveled down his arm and coated the handle.
"Think about what you are going to do." My voice is steady despite the trembling in my chest. “He saw me as an asset. You saw me as leverage. If you kill him, you prove him right about both of you. I need you to be better than that. I need to know I chose better than my mother did.”
The words hang between us, carrying the weight of everything we've been and everything we might never be.
His hand shakes. The gun trembles against Enzo's forehead. The muscle in his jaw works beneath his beard, grinding back and forth. Blood continues to seep from the wound in his shoulder with a persistence that makes my stomach clench. The fear has nothing to do with Enzo and everything to do with the amount of crimson spreading across Luca's chest.
He slowly lowers the gun.
Enzo exhales. Whatever he expected, it was not mercy, and the confusion that flickers across his features before he reassembles his mask tells me that mercy is a weapon he has never learned to wield and therefore has no defense against.
"Take him to Club Genesis, Kon. Just because I am not putting a bullet in him doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy filleting him alive one part of his body at a time until I grow bored." I don’t know what Club Genesis is, but I suspect it’s not good.
Luca's voice is flat, emptied of everything except command. Blood drips steadily from his fingertips onto the stone floor, each drop a small red clock counting down the time before the adrenaline fades and the pain arrives. "His empire gets dismantled tonight. Trafficking operations, financial networks,every alliance he's built. By morning, Enzo Marchetti owns nothing. Not even his name."
“Trafficking?”
Kon moves forward and lifts Enzo from his chair. Enzo doesn't fight. He watches me as Kon guides him toward the door, his pale eyes holding mine with an expression I've never seen on his face before.
Loss. Not of me. He never cared about losing me. But the loss of everything else carves itself into the lines of his face with a devastation no bullet could have achieved.
“Luca?” I urge.
“Your father sold women as sex slaves,” he states flatly as he turns to me and cups my cheek. “I’ll tell you more later though.”
I nod. Later sounds good. Right now my emotions are all over the place and I don’t know how much longer I can keep it all together.
I rush to my mother. She's still on the floor, her body folded in on itself, her hands pressed against the cold stone. I kneel beside her, the marble hard beneath my knees, and gather her into my arms.
"Is it true,Mom? That he’s not my father?" The question falls from my lips before I can stop it, the paternity reveal still burning in my chest alongside everything else.
Her chin lifts. Her red-rimmed eyes find mine, and the tears that fall carry the weight of twenty-two years. She nods once. No words. Just the small, devastating motion of a head dipping forward.
I don't ask who my real father is. That question belongs to a quieter room, a safer moment, a day when the air doesn't taste like gunpowder and the floors aren't slick with blood.
