Our advance team had already silenced the outer sentries, with silent knives and suppressed shots. No alarms. No warnings. Just the quiet inevitability of death approaching.
We stepped out of the vehicles in unison. Leo adjusted his cuffs with that signature calm precision, as if we were attending a business meeting rather than an execution. I checked the chamber of my Glock, the metallic click echoing in the cool night air. The gun felt like an extension of my rage, cold, loaded, ready.
The heavy front doors swung open without resistance. Edoardo waited for us in the grand sitting room, lounging in a high-backed leather armchair like a king who still believed his crown was intact.
A crystal tumbler of whiskey dangled lazily from his fingers. He looked older than the last time I’d seen him, silver threading through his once-dark hair, deep lines etched around his eyes and mouth, but the smug superiority in his gaze remained untouched.
A fire crackled in the massive stone hearth behind him, casting flickering shadows across oil paintings of long-dead Morettis.
“Santino,” he drawled, voice smooth as aged poison. His eyes slid to Leo. “And the great Serpent. To what do I owe this unexpected family gathering? Come to beg for scraps of territory, or has the girl already bored you?”
Leo crossed the room in three measured strides. Without a word, he produced a small glass vial from his pocket and poured its clear contents directly into Edoardo’s whiskey.
The poison was one of Leo’s specialties, fast enough to incapacitate, slow enough to hurt. Edoardo’s eyebrows rose slightly, but he didn’t flinch.
“Drink,” Leo commanded, his voice like velvet over steel.
Edoardo chuckled, but the sound lacked its usual confidence as Leo’s men raised their weapons, barrels trained on his head.
He lifted the glass, took a deliberate sip, and set it down with a steady hand. “Always so dramatic, Leonardo. You get that from your mother’s side.”
I remained near the doorway, arms crossed over my chest, watching. This was Leo’s domain right now. The Serpent had earned the right to carve answers from my father’s flesh. My turn would come if needed.
For now, I let the rage simmer, feeding on memories of Aurora’s smile, her body curled against mine, the way her hand had instinctively protected her stomach.
The interrogation unfolded with clinical brutality. Leo asked about Aurora. Where she was, who had taken her, what Edoardo knew of the hitman in the garden. My father denied everything with that same bored, aristocratic smile, even as the first tremors of the poison began to show in the slight shake of his hand.
“You think I waste resources on your little obsession?” Edoardo sneered, sweat beading on his forehead. “The Ventura whore was always going to be a weakness. You’ve always been soft, Santino. Just like your brother.”
The mention of Angelo ignited something feral in my chest. Leo moved before I could. His knife flashed, slicing a precise line across Edoardo’s forearm.
Blood welled, dripping onto the expensive rug. Edoardo hissed but kept talking. Taunts about my pathetic need for a womb to fill, about how I’d disowned the family name for pussy, about how Angelo would have laughed at what I’d become.
Leo tortured him methodically. Cuts to pressure points. Twists of the blade in shallow wounds. Questions repeated in that low, dangerous tone. Edoardo bled and sweated and cursed, but gave nothing useful. No locations. No confessions. Only venom.
I paced the edges of the room, jaw locked so tight it ached. Every denial fueled the storm inside me. Aurora’s face flashed behind my eyes, flushed from my kisses, tear-streaked in the study, fierce on the back of my bike.
She carried my child. My heir. My future.
Our men stormed the rest of the property in coordinated waves. Reports flooded in through earpieces: cellars swept, empty. Outbuildings cleared, nothing but dust and old wine. Hidden panic rooms pried open, vacant.
No trace of Aurora. No cells holding prisoners. No documents linking Edoardo directly to the kidnapping beyond what we already suspected.
The poison was taking hold fully now. Edoardo slumped in the chair, skin ashen, lips tinged blue, chest rising and falling in shallow, labored gasps. Blood soaked his tailored shirt from Leo’s precise work. His once-imposing frame looked frail, broken.
On his dying breath, he lifted his head with visible effort and fixed his fading gaze on me. A grotesque smile twisted his mouth.
“The dead will rise,” he rasped, the words wet and broken, bubbling with blood.
Then he laughed, a choked, gurgling sound that dissolved into a cough spraying crimson across his lap.
Leo didn’t hesitate. He seized Edoardo by the hair, yanking his head back violently to expose the throat. The knife drove upward under the ribs first. Deep, twisting, shredding organs.
Edoardo convulsed, eyes bulging. Leo pulled the blade free with a wet squelch and plunged it again, this time into the sideof the neck, sawing through flesh and artery. Blood erupted in thick, arterial sprays, painting the hearth, the rug, Leo’s sleeves. The Serpent kept cutting, methodical, unrelenting, until what remained of my father was a slumped, unrecognizable ruin of meat and bone.
The fire crackled on, indifferent, as the last of Edoardo Moretti’s blood pooled across the marble floor.
I watched the entire spectacle without a flicker of emotion crossing my face. No grief. No twisted satisfaction. Just hollow finality.
