Chapter 8 - THE TRACE IN THE WINE: THE TRAITOR SITTING AT DANTE'S RIGHT HAND
By 6:00 AM, a private judge bound by sacred mob oaths stood in the grand drawing room of the estate.
I wore a simple white silk gown that draped over my shoulder, hiding my heavy bandages. Leo stood between us, holding a tiny ring pillow, his face beaming with confusion and pure joy.
“Do you, Dante Vance, take Maya to be your lawful wife?”
“I do,” Dante stated, placing the black diamond ring on my finger.
“Do you, Maya, take Dante...?”
“I do,” I said, looking down at my son, then up into the dark, terrifying eyes of the man who now held my life in his hands.
The papers were signed. The child was legally declared our son under both civil law and the blood oath of the underworld.
But our celebration lasted less than an hour.
In the war room downstairs, Dante’s technical team was decrypting the radios captured from the hitmen who had stormed the manor the night before. I stood beside Dante, wrapped in his dark wool coat, watching the audio waves bounce on the monitors.
A voice spoke through the static on the recording: “The target is in the west wing. The perimeter sensors have been disabled from the inside. Proceed with the purge.”
Dante’s second-in-command, a man named Marco who had been Dante’s best friend for fifteen years, stepped forward. “It must have been a hack, Don Dante. Valenti’s men must have breached our firewall.”
I stared at Marco. Then my eyes dropped to his left wrist.
He was wearing a vintage platinum watch—the exact same rare watch model I had seen on the wrist of the man sitting at Table Four in Lumina the night of the attack, the man who had whispered to the server before she dropped the tray of crystal glass.
“It wasn't a hack,” I said aloud, my voice sharp as a razor.
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Marco froze, turning his gaze toward me. “Excuse me, Mrs. Vance?”
“The night at Lumina,” I said, stepping toward Marco, ignoring Dante’s hand on my waist. “You weren't at the main bar like you told Dante. You were standing at the VIP aisle. You gave the signal to Chloe to drop the tray. And you were the one who opened the perimeter gate last night.”
