Chapter 4 - Sins of the Patriarch
Dante didn't lower his gun. He stood tall, deliberately positioning himself between Alexander Cross and the sofa where Isabella lay clutching her belly.
“Cross,” Dante said, his voice dangerously low. “You’ve spent thirty years playing the polite legal scholar. I didn’t know you carried firearms for my mother.”
“A good attorney provides whatever counsel the family requires,” Cross replied without blinking. “Now, please step aside from the girl. An ambulance is waiting outside. We will transport her to an affiliated facility where she can deliver the child safely under our supervision.”
“You mean where you can take my baby and put my wife in an induced coma,” Dante countered, taking half a step forward. “Just like you did to my sister.”
Cross’s eyes flickered, the tiniest crack in his aristocratic veneer. “Your sister was an unfortunate casualty of stability, Dante. If she had spoken to the grand jury, this entire dynasty would have crumbled before you were even old enough to shave. Your father would have died in federal prison. Every asset, every port, every title—gone. Your mother made the hard choice. The necessary choice.”
“She threw a child to wolves to save her own neck!” Dante bellowed, the sound reverberating off the subterranean brickwork.
“And look what that choice built!” Cross snapped, his voice rising in irritation. “It built an empire! An empire that is now yours—if you simply let go of this irrelevant girl! She doesn’t belong in this world, Dante! Her father was nobody!”
Isabella suddenly lifted her head, her face pale, eyes blazing through the pain of another contraction. “My father was Arthur Vance,” she whispered.
The cellar plunged into a silence so absolute that only the dripping of an underground water pipe could be heard.
Dante turned his head slowly, staring at Isabella in sheer disbelief. “What?”
Isabella struggled to prop herself up on the sofa, tears spilling down her cheeks. “My real maiden name isn't Miller. It was Vance. After my father disappeared, my mother changed our names and fled to Pennsylvania. She died when I was sixteen. I never knew why he died… I only knew he vanished trying to prosecute a family named Moretti.”
She looked up at Cross, her voice shaking with raw grief. “You knew. Victoria knew all along.”
Cross smiled faintly, a chilling expression devoid of humanity. “Of course she knew. When Dante brought you home two years ago, claiming he had met a sweet girl in a Manhattan floral shop, your mother did a complete ancestral scrub. When she found out you were Arthur Vance’s only living daughter, she was delighted. Poetic justice, she called it. A way to bind the Vance bloodline under her boot forever.”
Cross shifted his aim from Marco directly toward Isabella’s belly.
“Victoria’s plan was elegant: let the Vance girl carry the Moretti heir, strip her of her rights, lock her away with Elena, and raise the child to inherit both legacies under Victoria’s sole guidance. A perfect circle.”
“You sick son of a bitch,” Dante hissed.
“Lower the gun, Dante,” Cross commanded, his finger tightening on the trigger. “Or the child dies in the womb.”
In that fraction of a second, when Cross’s attention shifted to Isabella, Marco acted.
Despite his cracked ribs and bleeding torso, Marco lunged forward, sweeping his legs out to take down the guard closest to him. The guard’s rifle discharged into the stone floor with a deafening crack.
*BANG!*
Dante didn’t hesitate. In a split-second draw, he fired two rounds directly into Cross’s chest.
Cross was thrown backward against the mahogany wine racks, shatteringly expensive bottles of vintage wine raining down upon him in a deluge of red glass and liquid.
Gunfire erupted in the narrow cellar. Dante snatched Isabella off the couch, diving behind the thick oak support pillar as Marco eliminated the remaining guards with surgical precision.
Smoke filled the air, acrid and blinding.
When the shooting stopped, three mercenaries lay motionless on the stone floor. Alexander Cross was slumped against the wall, clutching his bleeding chest, gasping for air amidst the pool of ruined vintage.
Dante stepped out from cover, his Glock trained on Cross’s head.
“Where is she?” Dante demanded. “Where is Elena?”
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Cross coughed up dark blood, a grotesque grin stretching his lips. “You’re… too late, Dante. Whispering Pines… transfer orders were signed an hour ago. Victoria is having her moved to an offshore freighter. If you leave now to save your sister… your wife delivers this baby in a cellar and bleeds to death. Choose, Dante. Your sister… or your son?”
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