Chapter 24 - The Sicilian Summit
Dominic’s weapon was raised and leveled at Isabella’s chest before she could even blink. The air in the library grew suffocatingly dense, heavy with the lethal aura of a man ready to execute an enemy on sight.
“Put the gun down, Dominic,” Isabella said, her voice remarkably steady, though a thin sheen of sweat coated her forehead. “If you wanted to kill me, you should have done it in Marseille three years ago. Right now, you need me alive.”
“I don’t need anything from a Moretti except their unconditional surrender,” Dominic retorted, his finger tightening slightly on the trigger.
“Stop it!” I snapped, standing up from my desk so fast my chair scraped loudly against the stone tiles. I stepped directly into Dominic’s line of sight, forcing him to lower his weapon by an inch. “Put the gun down, Dominic. She came here unarmed to deliver intel on the Vipera network out of Marseille. At least listen to what she has to say before you turn my library into a crime scene.”
Dominic’s dark eyes flicked from Isabella to me, a flash of pure anger crossing his face. “You don’t know what her family did, Nora. You don’t know the blood on their hands.”
“And you don’t know when your pride is going to get you killed,” I shot back, meeting his glare with absolute, unyielding stubbornness. “Rule one of my medical protocol: assess the patient’s vitals before you diagnose the trauma. Right now, your ego is threatening to ignore a lethal hemorrhage.”
For three long, agonizing seconds, Dominic stared at me, the muscle in his jaw twitching violently. Then, slowly, with a dark, disgusted sigh, he lowered the Sig Sauer and re-holstered it under his linen jacket.
“You have five minutes, Isabella,” Dominic said, his voice dropping into a lethal whisper. “Then my men throw you off this cliff.”
By the time Isabella finished laying out her intelligence—complete with encrypted shipping manifests, financial routing codes, and coordinates for a massive arms shipment landing in the Palermo harbor in less than forty-eight hours—the sun had dipped below the horizon, plunging the villa into deep, indigo shadows.
“The Vipera network is using a legitimate pharmaceutical front to smuggle synthetic narcotics inside medical supply crates,” Isabella concluded, gathering her coat. “If that shipment clears customs tomorrow night, they’ll have enough leverage to destabilize every port from here to Rome.”
May you like
“And why betray your own financial backers?” Dominic asked, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“Because the Corsicans don’t share power,” Isabella said coldly at the door. “They take over. And I prefer a dead Rossi to a Corsican master.”
