Chapter 2 - The Lazarus EffectThe room turned into a absolute bloodbath within three seconds.
Dante’s eyes bulged with pure horror as he stared into the face of the man he thought he had murdered. The gun slipped from Dante's hand, clattering onto the floor beside me.
"Lorenzo—! It's... it's a miracle—" Caldwell stuttered, stumbling back into a tray of surgical instruments, sending them crashing to the floor.
"No miracle, Doctor," Lorenzo rasped. His paralysis was breaking, melted away by sheer rage and the warmth I had given him. "Just bad medicine."
With a brutal twist of his arm, Lorenzo slammed Dante’s face into the edge of the stainless-steel operating table. The sound of breaking bone echoed through the room. Dante crumpled to the floor, unconscious and bleeding heavily from his nose.
Caldwell turned to run for the alarm button on the wall.
"Clara!" Lorenzo barked. "The gun!"
I didn't hesitate. The timid maid who hid in the pantry was gone. I snatched Dante’s silenced 9mm off the floor, raised it with both hands, and squeezed the trigger.
THUMP.
The bullet shattered the wall-mounted alarm box an inch from Caldwell's hand, showering him with sparks and plastic fragments. The doctor froze, his body shaking violently as he raised his hands into the air.
"Turn around, Caldwell," Lorenzo ordered, swinging his legs over the side of the table. He was still weak; his muscles quivered under the strain, but his presence filled the entire room like a suffocating dark cloud.
Caldwell slowly turned around, his face white as a sheet. "Lorenzo... please. Dante forced me! He threatened my family! He said if I didn't fake your time of death and inject the toxin, he’d slaughter my daughters!"
Lorenzo stood up. He wobbled for a fraction of a second, and I instantly sprang from beneath the table, placing my shoulder beneath his arm to steady him. He looked down at me, his dark eyes softening for a microsecond as his bare hand gripped my shoulder to steady himself.
"You saved me, Clara," he murmured softly, so low only I could hear. Then, his face hardened as he looked back at Caldwell. "Give me the antitoxin. Now."
"It... it's in the safe in my office upstairs!" Caldwell stammered. "I can get it for you! Just don't kill me!"
"You're coming with us," Lorenzo said. He looked down at Dante, who was beginning to groan on the floor. Lorenzo reached down, pulled the heavy gold signet ring off Dante's pinky finger, and slipped it onto his own. "He thinks he's taking over the Moretti Syndicate tonight at the summit in the grand ballroom. How many loyalists are left upstairs?"
"None that know you're alive," Caldwell whispered. "Capo Frank and Capo Bruno... they think Dante is taking the oath at 7:00 a.m. It's 6:15 a.m. now. In forty-five minutes, Dante becomes the new Don."
Lorenzo smiled, a cold, terrifying expression that sent shivers down my spine. "Then we have forty-five minutes to stage a resurrection."
Lorenzo dragged Caldwell toward the back service elevator—the private line that led directly to his personal penthouse quarters above the estate. I dragged Dante’s unconscious body into the walk-in cold storage unit where they had intended to dump Lorenzo's corpse, locking the heavy steel door from the outside.
As the elevator doors closed on the three of us—Lorenzo, Caldwell, and me—the doctor suddenly chuckled nervously.
"You think you can just walk upstairs and take it back, Lorenzo? The whole estate is crawling with fifty armed mercenaries hired by Dante's Russian allies. The moment you step out of this elevator, you're a dead man."
Lorenzo didn't answer Caldwell. Instead, he turned to me. He reached out his hand and gently touched the bruise on my arm—a bruise left by the drunken captain months ago that had long since healed, but he remembered.
"Miss Bell," Lorenzo said, his voice deep and velvet. "Do you know how to use that gun?"
I looked at the heavy 9mm in my hands. My hands were shaking, but my heart was solid steel. "I know how to pull the trigger."
"Good," Lorenzo whispered, stepping closer to me as the elevator numbers ticked upward. "Because tonight, the maid becomes the Capo."
Suddenly, the elevator jolted to a violent halt between the 3rd and 4th floors. The lights flickered and died, plunging us into total darkness.
From the top of the elevator shaft, the sound of heavy metal grinding echoed through the dark, followed by a voice over the elevator intercom.
"Did you really think I didn't have a backup plan, Don Moretti?"
May you like
It was Dante’s voice. He wasn't unconscious in the cold room. He had used an emergency override transmitter.
"Cut the cables," Dante ordered someone over the speaker. "Send them straight to hell."
