Chapter 17 - The Shadow of the Matriarch
Dante’s hand dropped from my face instantly, his posture hardening back into that of an apex predator despite the blood soaking through his bandage.
"What do you see, Marco?" Dante asked, standing up with a silent, fluid grace.
"A private yacht," Marco said, lowering his scope. "Flying a Panamanian flag, but it’s a hundred-and-fifty-foot Benetti. It just dropped anchor half a mile offshore, outside the cove's firing lanes. They launched a tender. One man at the helm, two passengers."
"Coast guard?" I asked, moving to Marco’s side and squinting into the darkness.
"No," Marco said, his jaw tight. "The tender has a private crest painted in gold on the bow. Two crossed silver keys under a crown of thorns."
Dante let out a low, venomous curse in Sicilian that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
"That's my mother's personal standard," Dante said, stepping up behind us.
"Your mother?" I spun around to face him, my eyes wide. "You told me she was locked up in upstate New York under armed guard!"
"She was," Dante said, his slate-gray eyes turning pitch black with rage. "Which means the guards I left to watch her are either dead, or they took a higher bidder. Silvio couldn't have pulled the Bellandi into this alone. My mother... she brokered the alliance."
"Your own mother tried to have you assassinated?" I whispered, horrified.
"My mother is a Moretti by marriage, but she was born a Bellandi," Dante said coldly. "Her maiden name was Caterina Bellandi. I thought she cared more about her son than her bloodline. It seems I inherited my father's blindness when it comes to women."
The tender glided smoothly into the entrance of the sea cave, its electric motor cutting out as the fiberglass hull scraped gently against the pebble shore.
A man in an immaculate navy suit stepped off the bow, securing the mooring line to an iron ring driven into the rock wall. Then, he turned and extended a hand to assist the passenger stepping down.
Caterina Moretti stepped onto the damp pebbles of the cave as if she were walking into an opera house in Milan.
She wore a charcoal-gray tailored wool coat with a silver fox-fur collar. Her silver hair was pinned back in an intricate chignon, not a single strand out of place despite the sea breeze. She looked seventy, but carried herself with the terrifying, regal authority of an empress who had sent men to their graves with a flick of her manicured fingers.
Behind her stood a tall, broad-shouldered man with slicked-back dark hair and cold, reptilian green eyes.
"Giancarlo Bellandi," Dante muttered, his hand resting on the grip of his pistol.
"Put the gun away, Dante," Caterina’s voice echoed off the damp stone walls of the cave, crisp, aristocratic, and utterly devoid of maternal warmth. "If Giancarlo wanted you dead in this cavern, his sniper would have put a round through your ear from the yacht's upper deck three minutes ago."
Marco raised his Beretta, aiming directly at Giancarlo’s chest. "Take one more step toward Elena, and your sniper will be collecting your brains from these rocks, old woman."
Caterina didn't even flinch. She barely glanced at Marco, treating him like an annoying insect, before her icy blue eyes shifted from Dante to me.
"Still clinging to the hired help, I see," Caterina said smoothly, her gaze raking over my torn, dust-covered clothes with deep disdain. "And you, Elena. Look at you. Running halfway across the continent, dragging my son into the dirt with you. Did you really think five carats of diamond made you untouchable?"
I felt the rage that had been simmering in my veins for months ignite into an inferno.
I didn't cower behind Dante. I didn't let Marco shield me. I took three slow, deliberate steps forward, stopping five feet from the matriarch who had orchestrated my humiliation.
"Your son didn't come here because of a diamond, Caterina," I said, my voice steady, dripping with venom. "He came here because your house was so hollow and rotten that he had to cross an ocean just to find someone who wouldn't stab him in the back for a percentage of the docks."
Caterina’s lips thinned into a razor-sharp line. "You insolent little—"
May you like
"Enough, Mother," Dante’s voice cracked through the cave like a thunderclap. He stepped beside me, his presence towering, menacing, radiating pure death. "Tell me why you shouldn't die on these rocks tonight."
***
