Chapter 3 - Blood on the Ivory Table
When Vanessa pushed back through the doors of the third-floor private lounge, the room was already crawling with Damien’s inner circle.
Cassian, Damien’s imposing Chief of Security, stood near the doorway with six armed men, their weapons drawn and eyes scanning every shadow. Medical personnel from Damien’s private syndicate clinic were kneeling on the carpet beside the high-backed leather chair where Damien sat.
"Nobody moves!" Cassian barked, swinging his heavy sidearm toward the door.
He froze when he saw who stepped into the room.
Vanessa stood in the doorway, bare feet black with garage grime, emerald silk gown ripped at the seam, a heavy semi-automatic held casually at her side, and a blood-stained satellite phone in her left hand.
"Put it down, Cassian," she said softly. "Unless you want to explain to your boss why you pointed iron at his wife."
Cassian blinked, his jaw slackening. "Mrs... Mrs. Moretti?"
"Where's Luca?" Damien's voice cut through the room like a blade.
He was sitting upright in the leather chair, his shirt torn open to expose a deep, bloody furrow across his shoulder where the surgeon was hurriedly working to clamp a severed artery. His face was deathly pale from blood loss, but his dark eyes were fixed entirely on Vanessa.
Vanessa walked past the stunned bodyguards, ignoring their gaping stares. She stopped beside Damien's chair, picked up a clean linen napkin from a ruined serving tray, and handed him the satellite phone.
"He got into an armored sedan in the sub-level," Vanessa said, her tone businesslike and precise. "Driver took the northern ramp toward the highway. But he dropped his secondary comms hub when the driver hit a pillar. It’s encrypted with a six-digit rolling cipher, but your IT team should be able to ping the last outgoing tower location if they act within twenty minutes."
Damien didn't look at the phone. He looked at her hands.
Her fingers were steady. There was no tremor of shock. No tearful collapse. No hysterical realization of the violent world she had just witnessed.
"You took out two of my men in the hallway," Damien said, his voice low, almost a whisper beneath the hum of the room's air filtration. "I saw the guard outside. Broken cheekbone. Dislocated shoulder. Done in less than four seconds."
"He was standing in the wrong stance for an Ashford security detail," Vanessa replied simply. "He was leaning on his right hip. Anyone who actually works security at this level knows you keep your weight centered in case you need to draw. He was a plant."
Damien slowly lifted his good hand and rubbed his blood-smudged temple. He looked at Cassian, who was still standing with his mouth half-open.
"Clear the room," Damien ordered.
"Boss, we need to secure the perimeter—" Cassian started.
"Clear the room!" Damien roared, the sheer power of his authority rattling the crystal glasses remaining on the table. "Every single one of you. Outside the door. Now."
The men scrambled out, Cassian closing the heavy mahogany doors behind them, leaving only the soft hum of the air conditioning and the sharp smell of iron and gunpowder.
Damien turned his full attention back to Vanessa. He reached out, his long fingers trembling slightly from blood loss, and gripped her wrist.
"Three years," Damien said, his dark eyes searching every inch of her face as if looking at a stranger. "Three years you sat across from me at breakfast. You talked about garden roses. You complained about the rain. You let me assign six bodyguards to follow you whenever you went to an art gallery."
May you like
Vanessa met his gaze without flinching. "Your bodyguards were very polite, Damien. They also had horrible situational awareness. I lost them three times a week just to buy coffee in peace."
Damien let out a harsh, dry breath that was half-laugh, half-groan. "Who are you, Vanessa?"
