Chapter 6
Vivienne huddled on the cold floor, clutching her bruised jaw with shaking fingers. The emerald earrings she wore—heirlooms Cassandro had given her for their first anniversary—dangled against her disheveled hair like mocking ornaments.
"Cassandro... you have to understand the pressure the family was under two years ago," Vivienne wept, her voice cracking with hysterical justification. "Your father was dying. The Hale docks were bleeding territory to the Russians in Brooklyn. Natalie... Natalie had the maritime trust papers locked in her name! She refused to sign over the deep-water moorings to Damian! She was going to cut my family out of the syndicate entirely!"
"So you poisoned her tea on a Tuesday afternoon," Cassandro stated, his words not a question, but a cold, forensic deduction. "You told my captains that she took the offshore yacht to Montauk, boarded a helicopter to Teterboro, and liquidated thirty million in bearer bonds."
"It was Damian's plan!" Vivienne shrieked, pointing an accusatory, manicured finger at her bleeding brother. "He hired the clinic team! He brought the nurse from Pennsylvania! I just kept her quiet! I made sure she was fed, Cassandro! I didn't let her die!"
"You didn't let her die," Cassandro repeated softly, walking three slow strides until his polished leather shoes stopped inches from Damian’s face. "Why, Damian? If you were willing to commit high treason against the Moretti bloodline, why keep her breathing for twenty-four months?"
Damian spat a mouthful of dark crimson onto the clean floor, his broken jaw making his American accent slur heavily through his teeth. "The... the trust, Cassandro. The offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands... they’re tied to a living biometric scan. Every ninety days, the bank requires an iris authorization to keep the credit lines open. If she died... the accounts locked permanently. We needed her alive until the final transfer cleared."
"And when was the final transfer scheduled?" Cassandro asked, his pauses deliberate, lethal, and absolute.
"Tomorrow morning," the terrified private nurse blurted out from the corner, desperate to save her own life. "At nine o'clock. Mr. Hale told me to administer a double dose of the reversal agent at dawn so her pupils would dilate properly for the biometric scanner."
Cassandro closed his eyes for two full seconds.
In those two seconds, every memory of the past two years flashed behind his eyelids: the lonely nights in the master suite, the bitter taste of betrayal he had swallowed while raising Audrey alone, the calculating warmth of Vivienne slipping into his bed, whispering that Natalie had never truly loved him.
He opened his eyes. The obsidian in his gaze had turned to frozen fire.
Cassandro reached down, his left hand clamping into the lapel of Damian’s tailored summer blazer. With effortless, horrifying physical strength, Cassandro hoisted the two-hundred-pound man off the floor with one arm, slamming him against the concrete wall.
"You sat at my dining table for two years, Damian," Cassandro whispered into the older man's ear. "You drank my wine, you celebrated my daughter's birthdays, and every night, you slept fifty yards above the woman you buried alive."
"Cassandro... please," Damian gasped, clawing at Cassandro’s iron wrist. "The Commission... the Commission will sanction you if you kill an associate without a council vote—"
"I am the Commission, Damian," Cassandro murmured.
With a sudden, violent twist of his hips, Cassandro drove his right fist directly into Damian’s solar plexus, followed by a vicious knee strike to the man's fractured jaw.
Bone crunched like dry gravel. Damian went completely limp, collapsing onto the concrete in an unconscious, broken heap.
May you like
Cassandro let the man fall, stepping over the body without a backward glance. He looked at Marco.
"Call Dr. Mercer," Cassandro commanded, his voice ringing through the subterranean bunker. "Bring the private trauma unit from the hospital in Queens. We are waking my wife up. Today."
