Chapter 6
Her heels clicked against the imported hardwood as she moved through the blacked-out penthouse with the unhurried confidence of a predator who believed she had already won. “He thinks like a blunt instrument,” her voice echoed through the dark, smooth and cultured and utterly without mercy. “I think like a scalpel. I’ve had a rogue contractor inside his servers for a month. I’ve been watching you through the security cameras for three days, little milkmaid.”
Mara’s blood went cold. Vittoria had watched her feed Nico. Had watched Damiano kiss her forehead. This had stopped being about mafia politics the moment Vittoria decided Mara was a rival worth destroying personally.
There was no time to be afraid in any way that helped. Mara ran, silent and barefoot, toward the medical bay — the most fortified room in the penthouse she could actually access — and laid a fussing, confused Nico into the padded bassinet.
“Stay quiet, my brave boy,” she whispered, hands shaking as she searched the drawers for anything that could serve as a weapon. No guns; Damiano kept those in the master suite. But this was a trauma room built to patch gunshot wounds off the books, and it offered her a surgical scalpel and a heavy steel defibrillator unit. They would have to be enough.
Outside the door, Vittoria’s voice slid closer, needling every soft place it could find. He’s using you as a biological pacifier for his dying brat. The moment that baby is weaned, you’ll be thrown back into the gutter where you belong.
Mara’s grip on the scalpel only tightened. She had already lost one child to a man who thought cruelty was a weapon that worked on her. She would not lose another to a woman who thought the same.
The door blew open on a suppressed gunshot, wood splintering across the room. Vittoria stood silhouetted in the frame in a pristine white trench coat, a gold-plated pistol in her uninjured hand, two armed enforcers at her back. Her eyes found the bassinet and lit with something close to hunger.
“Get out,” Mara said, stepping between Vittoria and the child, scalpel raised in a stance that was more instinct than training.
Vittoria laughed — genuinely, delightedly amused. “You brought a tiny knife to a gunfight. How quaint.” She didn’t even look at her men as she gave the order. “Kill the maid. I want to handle the baby myself. A pillow over the face leaves no marks. A tragic crib death.”
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What happened next took less than four seconds. Mara hurled the defibrillator into the first enforcer’s knees, dropping him screaming to the floor, and drove the scalpel into Vittoria’s gun hand before the second man could close the distance. Vittoria shrieked as the gold pistol clattered from her fingers, blood blooming instantly across white silk. The surviving enforcer raised his weapon at Mara’s skull, and Mara threw her arms wide across the bassinet, bracing for an impact that never came.
The shot that ended it came from the hallway — and it did not come from the enforcer’s gun.
