Chapter 8 - THE TRUTH IN THE SHADOWSThe violence of the double gunshots hung suspended in the freezing air of the abandoned paper mill.
Rocco reeled backward, dropping his gun as Dante’s bullet tore cleanly through his right shoulder. He stumbled against the rusty handrail of the catwalk, blood splashing across the metal mesh floor.
But Dante didn't escape unhurt.
Rocco’s bullet had hit Dante high in the chest, tearing through his tactical vest and knocking him backward onto the frozen concrete floor.
"DANTE!" I screamed, dropping to my knees beside him.
"I'm fine... my vest stopped the worst of it..." Dante choked out, coughing up dark blood. "Get the detonator..."
I looked up at the catwalk. Rocco was on his knees, clutching his shoulder, his eyes gleaming with insane hatred as his hand reached out for the small black detonator box that had slipped from his grip during the fall. It was sitting just three feet away from him on the edge of the catwalk platform.
"You lost, brother..." Rocco wheezed, his fingers dragging across the rusty iron toward the red button. "We go to hell together..."
Before Rocco’s fingers could touch the button, a sharp, cold voice echoed from the shadowed doorway at the far end of the catwalk.
"He isn't going to hell today, Rocco. But you certainly are."
A figure stepped out of the darkness into the dim sunlight filtering through the broken roof.
I gasped, my blood instantly running cold.
It was a woman.
She was dressed in a tailored white winter coat, holding a silenced pistol equipped with a laser sight. She was stunningly beautiful, with cold green eyes and striking silver hair.
Dante’s eyes went wide with absolute, terrifying disbelief.
"Elena...?" Dante whispered, his voice trembling for the first time since I met him. "You're... you're dead. You died six years ago..."
Elena.
Luca’s mother. Dante’s late wife.
The woman whose tragic death in Detroit six years ago had sparked the massive mob war that split the Bellaro family apart.
Elena looked down at Dante with a cold, distant smile. "Hello, my love. You look terrible."
"How... how are you breathing?" Dante stammered, trying desperately to push himself up off the floor, his face filled with a mixture of profound shock and heart-wrenching pain. "I buried you! I stood over your coffin in Detroit!"
Elena let out a soft, musical laugh that made my skin crawl.
"You buried an empty box with a wax dummy, Dante," Elena said smoothly, stepping over Rocco’s bleeding body. "Six years ago, I realized that being the wife of the supreme mob king was a death sentence. So I faked my assassination, staged my funeral, and used twenty million dollars of syndicate slush funds to buy a new identity in Europe."
Rocco looked up at her, blood dripping from his mouth, his eyes full of realization. "You... it was you... You were the one who leaked Dante’s location to me three days ago..."
"Of course it was me, Rocco, you useful idiot," Elena sneered, pointing her silenced pistol directly at Rocco’s forehead. "I needed you to start this pathetic little war. I needed Dante to bring Luca out of hiding so I could take my son back."
My jaw dropped. The entire narrative—the betrayal, the ambush, the war—wasn't started by Rocco.
It was engineered from the very beginning by Luca’s own mother.
"You're a monster..." Rocco spat out.
PFFT.
A single silenced shot rang out.
Rocco’s body went completely limp, slumping over the catwalk rail before plummeting thirty feet down, crashing through the thin ice of the paper mill’s water outlet basin.
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Elena didn't even look down at the splash. She turned her green, venomous eyes down toward Dante and me.
"Now, Dante," Elena said smoothly, her laser sight drifting down the catwalk until the bright red dot rested precisely over my heart. "Give me my son, or I put a bullet through your brave little nurse's chest."
