Chapter 2 - The Scent of Iron and Lilies
The voice vibrating through the small speaker belonged to Vittoria Duca.
Vittoria—the woman who had spent the last two years attending church every Sunday in spotless cream cashmere, kissing Emma on the forehead whenever she passed through the foyer, and sliding white envelopes filled with cash across the kitchen island so I could buy Emma winter coats.
The same woman who had spent the last six hours sitting in the parlor above us, clutching a black lace handkerchief, sipping tea, and orchestrating the funeral of her only living brother.
“Ensure the body is disposed of in the deep quarry,” Vittoria’s voice droned from the vintage reel-to-reel deck. The tape hiss sounded like dried leaves grinding beneath a combat boot. “If Lorenzo breathes a single word to the Capos, the transfer of power fails. Make it clean. Make it quiet.”
Lorenzo’s hand remained frozen on the machine’s brass toggle switch.
Even in the amber gloom of the subterranean vault, I saw the color drain completely from his face, leaving behind an ashen, skeletal mask. A drop of sweat traced the ridge of his jaw, pooling into the dark stubble before splashing onto the concrete floor.
“Mama,” Emma murmured, her voice muffled against my collarbone. She had both arms wrapped tightly around my neck, her tiny knees digging into my ribs. “The music stopped. Is the hurt man sleeping?”
“No, sweetheart,” I whispered, pressing my mouth to her soft curls. “He’s resting. Keep your eyes closed, okay? Play the quiet game with Mama.”
Above us, the floorboards groaned violently.
Heavy steel-toed boots stomped across the potting shed floor just five feet overhead.
“Boss! Nothing here!” a voice shouted, muffled by the timber and packed earth. “Just fertilizer bags and gardening tools! Marco said he took two rounds to the midsection—he couldn’t have jumped the perimeter wall!”
“Then where is the blood trail leading, you idiot?” another man barked. “He bled all over the gravel by the greenhouse! Tear the floorboards up if you have to!”
Emma flinched, burying her face deeper into my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
Lorenzo didn’t flinch. His eyes—a storm-gray that had terrified every syndicate boss from New York to Chicago—flicked upward toward the ceiling, tracing the path of the footsteps above with predatory precision. Then, slowly, painfully, his gaze slid down to me.
He took a ragged, rattling breath. The air coming out of his lungs whistled—a sick, wet sound that made the medical training buried deep inside my memory scream alarms.
*Hemothorax. Or a punctured lung.*
Before my husband, David, was killed in an armed robbery three years ago, I had been six weeks away from completing my clinical rotations as an emergency room nurse. When David died, the hospital debts, the rent, and a six-month-old baby had crushed me. I had traded my stethoscope for a maid’s dust cloth because cash-in-hand paid faster than an unfinished degree.
I knew the exact sound a human body made when it was drowning in its own blood. Lorenzo Duca had less than an hour if I didn't stop the internal hemorrhaging.
“You’re going into shock,” I breathed, kneeling beside him on the cold stone.
Lorenzo looked down at his ruined tailored shirt. The white silk was plastered to his abdomen, saturated in dark, arterial red. Beneath the smiling-bear band-aid Emma had stuck above his left eyebrow, his skin was graying at the temples.
“Leave,” Lorenzo whispered. His voice was gravel dragged through glass. “There is… an emergency exit. End of the tunnel behind the surveillance rack. It leads to the drainage culvert near the lake. Take your girl. Run.”
“And what happens when they search the perimeter and find us climbing out of a sewer pipe?” I countered, setting Emma gently down on an old wooden crate. “They’ll put a bullet through both of our heads before I can scream. You’re our only shield, Mr. Duca. If you die in this basement, Emma and I are dead by sunrise.”
Lorenzo let out a harsh, bitter laugh that instantly choked into a spasm of coughing. He clamped a bloodstained hand over his mouth, suppressing the noise with sheer willpower. When he pulled his hand away, his palm was slick with pink froth.
“She wanted me dead,” he muttered, his eyes drifting back to the tape recorder. The betrayal burned hotter in his eyes than the pain of two bullets. “My own blood. My father’s daughter.”
“We don’t have time for your family drama,” I said bluntly, stripping off my outer maid’s apron. “I need sterile water, clean towels, and alcohol. Look around this room. What did your father store down here?”
Lorenzo stared at me, perhaps surprised that an employee who normally scrubbed his marble staircases was ordering him around. But survival respects no hierarchy. He nodded weakly toward a green military footlocker shoved beneath the bank of glowing security monitors.
“Emergency supplies,” he rasped. “Cold War surplus. My father was… paranoid.”
I rushed to the trunk, flipping the rusted metal latches. Inside were vacuum-sealed combat dressings, iodine, morphine ampoules, surgical shears, sterile suture kits, and bottles of 90-proof grain alcohol, preserved alongside stacks of bearer bonds and unlisted passports.
“Mama,” Emma called softly from the crate. She held up her plastic toy stethoscope. “I check his tummy now?”
“Stay right there, baby,” I told her, keeping my voice as even and sweet as if we were baking cookies in our tiny apartment over the estate garages. “Hold Mister Bunny tight. Mama needs to help him fix his shirt.”
I pulled a pair of sterile shears from the kit and knelt back at Lorenzo’s side.
“This is going to hurt,” I said, looking into his eyes. “I don't have local anesthetic. Just the morphine, but if I give you a full dose, your respiratory drive will crash.”
Lorenzo’s jaw tightened. A cold, dangerous fire sparked in the depths of his pupils. “Do it raw. Keep the morphine for when I have to kill my sister.”
I cut away the soaked silk.
The wounds were brutal. One round had grazed his lower left ribcage, tearing through muscle and leaving a jagged gutter of blackened flesh. The second round—the killer—had entered his right lower quadrant, missing the iliac artery by centimeters and lodging deep within the abdominal wall. The exit wound did not exist. The bullet was still inside him, acting like a cork in a leaking dam.
“Hand me the iodine,” I told him, forgetting entirely that this man controlled an empire of three thousand armed men.
He didn’t argue. He reached out with trembling, blood-crusted fingers and handed me the brown glass bottle.
I poured it directly into the open wound.
Lorenzo’s entire body went rigid as iron. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the edges of the metal table, the veins in his neck bulging like thick cables. A low, guttural vibration rumbled in his chest, but he did not make a sound. He didn't scream. He didn't even close his eyes. He just stared at the ceiling, his breathing coming in ragged, shallow gasps.
From across the room, Emma stood up from her crate.
She walked over, her little pink sneakers squeaking against the stone. She didn't look at the blood. She looked directly at Lorenzo’s contorted face.
With infinite three-year-old seriousness, she reached into her pocket, pulled out another cartoon bandage—this one featuring an orange cat holding a balloon—and pressed it firmly onto the center of his forehead.
“Big boys don’t cry,” Emma whispered, patting his cheek with her chubby palm. “You get a sticker.”
For a second, the world stopped spinning.
Lorenzo Duca, the man whose name made district attorneys resign and rival cartels retreat across state lines, blinked slowly. The murderous tension in his jaw softened by a fraction of a millimeter. He raised one shaking hand, carefully curling his massive, calloused fingers around Emma’s tiny wrist.
“Thank you, little one,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “I’ll… try to be brave.”
“Emma, sit down,” I warned, my hands already deep in sterile gauze as I packed the wound to arrest the bleeding. “Now.”
She scurried back to her crate, hugging her stuffed rabbit to her chest.
I worked rapidly, packing the cavity with hemostatic gauze, using the pressure dressing to lock the bleeding down, and applying a tight abdominal wrap using three rolls of elastic bandage. My hands were steady, running on pure clinical adrenaline, but my mind was spinning out of control.
Above us, the footsteps finally began to recede from the shed.
“They’re heading back to the main house,” Lorenzo whispered, his breathing slightly easier now that the pressure wrap was holding his abdominal wall intact. He pointed a finger toward the wall of glowing monitors. “Switch the feed to Channel Four.”
I wiped my hands with alcohol and walked over to the surveillance console. The equipment was decades old, but it was tapped directly into the mansion’s modernized fiber-optic security network.
I hit the button for Channel Four.
The screen flickered, showing the grand library on the ground floor.
Vittoria Duca stood by the massive mahogany desk. She was wearing a high-collared black silk dress, her diamond earrings catching the warm light of the crystal chandelier. Across from her stood Marco—Lorenzo’s chief of personal security.
The man who had sworn an oath of blood to protect him.
Marco was holding a stained microfiber cloth, wiping something off the barrel of a customized silver Sig Sauer.
Lorenzo leaned forward from the floor, his eyes narrowing until they looked like shards of broken glass.
“Marco,” Lorenzo hissed through his teeth. “I paid for his mother’s cancer treatment. I put his brothers through college.”
On the screen, Vittoria poured two glasses of scotch from Lorenzo’s private crystal decanter. She handed one to Marco with a serene, radiant smile.
“Drink,” Vittoria said through the vault’s hidden audio pickup. “To the new era of the Duca family.”
Marco took the glass, took a sip, and looked at his watch. “The Capos will be here at eight in the morning. If we don’t have Lorenzo’s body by then, Dante won’t let you take the seat.”
Vittoria laughed softly—a chilling, melodic sound.
“Dante is a loyal dog, Marco. When a dog’s master dies, you don’t reason with the dog. You put it down.” She set her glass down and leaned forward. “Search the grounds once more before dawn. If you find him breathing, put two in his head. If you find him dead, dump him where the fish can have him. By noon tomorrow, this house belongs to me.”
On the floor of the vault, Lorenzo pulled himself upright against the steel wall.
He didn't look like a dying man anymore.
May you like
He looked like an executioner who had just received his assignment.
***
