Chapter 8 - The Price of Loyalty

I walked down the grand staircase, my rifle lowered, the barrel smoking in the cold draft entering through the blown-out entryway.

Dante looked up at me through swollen, blackened eyes, spitting blood onto the rug. "Gallo... you sick bastard... protecting a servant girl and a bastard brat... Silvio is going to rip your empire apart."

I knelt beside him, placing the hot barrel of my sidearm against his cheekbone. "Who gave you the schematics to my security grid, Dante?"

Dante laughed wetly. "Find out in hell."

"Marco," I said calmly. "Call the city sanitation department. Clear this trash."

Before Dante could scream, I squeezed the trigger. The gunshot cracked sharply against the marble walls, ending his laughter forever.

I stood up, wiping a smear of blood from my sleeve, only to hear a soft intake of breath behind me.

I turned around.

The blast doors upstairs had unlocked automatically after the breach protocol cleared. Linda was standing at the top of the stairs, clutching her robe tightly around her chest, looking down at the carnage.

She saw the corpses. She saw the pool of blood spreading across the white marble. She saw the cold, detached monster holding the smoking gun.

For a long moment, nobody spoke. The blizzard raged through the broken windows, fluttering the velvet drapes.

"This is who I am, Linda," I called up to her, my voice hard and unforgiving. "This is the reality of the money that bought your son's medicine. Do you still think I'm a king?"

Linda slowly walked down the stairs, stepping carefully over the spent brass casings. She didn't look at the bodies. She kept her eyes fixed entirely on me.

When she reached the bottom step, she didn't recoil. Instead, she took out a small handkerchief from her pocket, stepped directly into my personal space, and gently wiped a speck of blood from my jawline.

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"I don't care what you do to the monsters outside, Lorenzo," she whispered, her voice steady despite the trembling in her hands. "I care that you kept my son alive."

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