Chapter 8 - The Price of Surrender
It wasn't a gentle kiss. It was desperate, hungry, and charged with all the pent-up terror, grief, and adrenaline of the past twenty-four hours.
For a second, my mind screamed at me to push him away—to remember Isabella’s warning, to remember my own rule about staying away from dangerous men. But my hands betrayed me. My fingers curled into the lapels of his shirt, pulling him closer as the walls I had built around my heart for four years began to crumble like dry clay.
When we finally broke apart, both of us breathing heavily, Dominic rested his forehead against mine.
“Stay with us, Elena,” he whispered against my lips. “Not as a nurse. Not as an employee.”
Before I could answer, a frantic pounding echoed down the hallway, shattering the intimate silence.
“Boss!”
Viktor burst into the kitchen, his face pale, his suit jacket torn at the shoulder.
Dominic instantly stepped back, his mafia mask slamming back into place with terrifying speed. “What is it?”
“It’s the West Wing,” Viktor panted, clutching a smoking radio. “Marcone’s men didn't just send a message at the hospital. They hit the estate’s power grid. The backup generators are fried, and someone just bypassed the medical wing’s security seal.”
My blood ran cold. Mom.
“My mother!” I screamed, shoving past Viktor and sprinting down the hallway toward the West Wing.
“Elena, wait!” Dominic roared, drawing his Beretta as he bolted after me.
We tore around the corner into the West Wing hallway. The emergency red lights were flashing, casting long, bloody shadows across the stone walls.
The door to my mother’s medical suite was blown off its hinges.
Smoke billowed from the doorway. Inside, the two private nurses we had hired were bound and gagged in the corner, conscious but terrified.
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And sitting in the armchair beside my mother’s empty hospital bed was a man holding a small, silver music box—the exact music box my mother had played for me when I was a child.
Standing behind him, holding a Glock to my mother’s temple, was Sal Marcone himself.
