Chapter 3 - The Red Perimeter
The dining room erupted into chaotic stillness.
Consigliere Matteo Varga instinctively stood, his hand falling over the discreet holster inside his tailored charcoal blazer. Two armed sentries at the double oak doors snapped their submachine guns to low-ready positions.
"Nobody moves," Rocco ordered. He rose slowly from the marble floor, towering over everyone in the room. His presence filled the cavernous hall like smoke. "Matteo. Lock the estate down. Red perimeter. No vehicles pass the front gate. No private staff leave the basement quarters. If a bird flies over the perimeter fence, shoot it down."
"Understood, Don," Matteo replied, immediately tapping his earpiece to issue commands in rapid, coded Italian.
Valentina backed away until her spine met the grand sideboard. The calm, untouchable elegance that had defined her since the day she entered Rocco's world was beginning to fray at the seams. "Rocco, you cannot possibly believe an eight-year-old child over your own fiancée! We are to be married next month! I have stood by your side through the syndicate restructuring!"
"You smell of bitter almond blossoms, Valentina," Rocco said, taking a single, measured stride toward her. "You have worn custom French perfume distilled exclusively for you by Maison Grasse since last spring. No one else in this compound smells like that."
"Someone could have mimicked it! A rival family! The Castigliones—they want to divide us!" she pleaded, her hands trembling as she smoothed down her emerald-green silk robe. "Think rationally! Why would I want a child dead? What threat could an abandoned orphan be to me?"
"Because," Rocco said, holding up the tiny plastic bracelet between two fingers, "this child is not an orphan."
He turned back to Elena, whose face was pale as chalk. "Elena. Take your daughter and the boy to my private study. Matteo’s personal physician, Dr. Rossi, lives three minutes away inside the inner compound. Have him bring a full pediatric survival kit and a rapid-sequence genetic sequencer. Now."
Elena hesitated, terror rooting her to the floor. But Sophia stepped forward, nodding bravely. "I know the way, sir. I’ll keep him warm against my sweater."
"Good girl," Rocco said, his voice carrying a depth of warmth that shocked every hardened guard in the room.
As the heavy wooden doors clicked shut behind Elena and Sophia, Rocco turned his attention entirely to the woman he had promised to marry. He unbuttoned his suit jacket, tossing it onto the long mahogany table, revealing the black leather shoulder rig beneath.
May you like
"Now, Valentina," Rocco murmured, pulling out a heavy steel chair and gesturing toward it with cold precision. "Sit down. And tell me why my dead son is breathing in the kitchen trash."
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