Chapter 14 - The Traitor’s Mask
Valentina’s gunships vanished back into the mist as quickly as they arrived, leaving us stranded on the wrecked mountain pass with Marcus bleeding onto the gravel.
I dropped to my knees beside Dante, immediately checking his neck for a carotid pulse. It was running dangerously fast, beating in irregular, thumping spasms—the first clear stage of Neuro-7 toxicity.
“Claire…” Dante gasped, his skin turning a sickly gray as the poison began its work. “Take Mia… run to the consulate…”
“Shut up!” I screamed, tears blinding my vision as I pulled a emergency epinephrine pen from my medical pack and jammed it through his trousers into his thigh. “I saved your life on an operating table in Seattle while armed men tried to shoot through the doors, Dante Moretti! I am not letting a synthetic toxin take you from our daughter!”
Marcus groaned, sitting up against the guardrail, wiping blood from his chin. “Doctor… she’s right. But we can’t go to the consulate. Valentina owns the regional diplomacy channels. There is only one person who has the antidote formula locked away.”
“Who?” I demanded, pressing my hands over Dante’s chest as he began to shiver violently.
“Valentina’s father—the disgraced former Don, who is currently being kept in a secret solitary wing beneath the state psychiatric hospital in Rome,” Marcus revealed. “He created the weapon to keep his own family in line. If we want the cure, we have to break into a high-security black-site facility in less than twenty-four hours.”
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Dante reached up, clutching my hand with trembling fingers. His eyes, usually so focused and sharp, briefly lost their focus, looking straight through me. “Claire… where’s Mia? Why can’t I… why can’t I remember her face?”
The poison was already taking his memories.
