Chapter 74 - The Scent of Betrayal
The air inside the escape tunnel was freezing, smelling of wet slate, sulfur, and ancient dust. Red LED emergency strips flickered along the floor, guiding my frantic steps as I rushed downward into the belly of the mountain.
Maya’s small arms were locked around my neck with bruising force. She wasn't crying anymore; the shock had turned her completely rigid.
"We’re almost there, baby," I whispered between gasps for air, my boots slipping on the slick stone stairs. "Just hold on tight to Mommy."
Behind me, far up the tunnel shaft, the sounds of hand-to-hand combat echoed—the dull thud of bodies hitting stone, the metallic click of weapons, and the vicious curses of two people fighting to the death. Then, a single gunshot roared through the stone corridor, its concussion rattling the loose pebbles around my feet.
My heart stopped.
*Vincent.*
I wanted to turn back. Every instinct that had kept me alive screamed that I should run, but my soul felt violently anchored to the man who had just thrown himself into the line of fire to buy us thirty seconds of life. Five years of anger, resentment, and fear evaporated into a single, undeniable truth: Vincent had never stopped protecting us.
"Clara!" a voice hissed from the darkness ahead.
I raised the Glock with trembling hands, aiming at the mouth of the tunnel.
A figure emerged from the shadows near the lower archway. It was Salvatore.
I gasped in confusion, lowering the weapon slightly. "Salvatore? How... you were just upstairs fighting Valerie!"
The man stepped into the faint glow of the red strip.
He wore the same tactical gear, the same build, but as the light struck his face, my blood ran instantly cold.
It wasn't Salvatore.
It was a man whose face I had seen in old black-and-white family photographs in my mother's attic—a man with the sharp, aristocratic jawline of the Moretti family, his silver hair cropped close to his scalp, his cold blue eyes fixing upon Maya with predatory satisfaction.
"You have your mother's stubbornness, Clara," the man said smoothly, resting his gloved hands on an ebony walking cane.
"Don Lorenzo," I whispered, the breath leaving my lungs in a ragged gasp.
Vincent’s father. The dead patriarch who had supposedly been poisoned three years ago.
May you like
"The reports of my demise were somewhat exaggerated," Lorenzo said, offering a chilling, paternal smile. "A necessary fiction to flush out the traitors in my council... and to bring my beloved granddaughter home where she belongs."
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