Chapter 6 - THE WEIGHT OF VENGEANCE"Drop the weapon, Mr. Moretti!" Elena’s voice carried effortlessly over the howling wind, amplified by a megaphone clipped to her belt.
Dante froze, his gun hand trembling—not from the freezing rain, but from the raw, volcanic rage boiling inside his chest. Fifty feet above the black ocean, the wicker bassinet swung like a pendulum, a tiny pink blanket fluttering helplessly from its edge.
"You want me, Elena!" Dante roared, taking a step forward onto the wet metal platform. "Leave the boy out of this! He's just a child!"
"A child?" Elena lowered the megaphone, her pale eyes flashing with a lifetime of inherited agony. "Is that what you called my brother when your father’s men locked him inside a freezing shipping container twenty years ago? Did you care about his age when you left him out here to suffocate in the dark?"
Dante stopped dead in his tracks. The pieces clicked together with horrifying clarity.
"You're a Vane," Dante breathed, the name tasting like poison. "Julian Vane's daughter."
"And you are the prince of a dying dynasty built on bones and blood," Elena replied, stepping closer to the edge of the platform as the wind whipped her dark hair across her face. "My father died in a federal penitentiary after your family stripped him of everything. My brother didn't even live to see his tenth birthday. And you? You live in a palace, sipping tea, playing house with a stolen fortune."
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"The past is dead, Elena," Dante argued, taking another slow, calculated step forward while signaling Marco with a subtle flick of two fingers to climb the service ladder toward the crane controls.
"Nothing is ever dead in this city, Dante," she whispered bitterly. She reached out and grasped the emergency release lever of the crane. "It just waits for the right storm to wash it all away."
