Chapter 22 - A Bargain in Ashes
The dust was thick enough to choke on, tasting of ash, crushed bone, and centuries of dried rot.
"Elena!" Vincent’s fists pounded against the impenetrable limestone barrier on the other side. The impact sounded dull, muffled, like a man buried alive beneath a mountain. "Dante! Bring the breaching charges! Move!"
Elena coughed, pushing herself up onto her elbows. Her vision was clouded by white dust, her ears ringing from the deafening concussive blast of the falling slab. She reached blindly across the stone floor, her fingers brushing against the cold steel of the Beretta she had dropped earlier. Her fingers curled around the grip.
A heavy, dragging bootstep shuffled behind her.
"Bitch..." a voice gurgled through a mouthful of blood.
Elena spun around on her knees, leveling the gun into the swirling haze.
Marcus stood barely five feet away, clutching his shattered, bleeding shoulder. His face was twisted into a grotesque sneer of hatred, blood pouring freely from his crushed nose over his cracked lips. In the dim lantern light filtering from a side passage, he looked less like a man and more like a demonic specter dragged out of hell.
"You always were a fighter," Marcus hissed, his good arm coming up, leveling his snub-nosed revolver at her heart. "Remember what happened every time you fought back? Remember the basement? Remember the iron belt?"
Elena’s hand trembled. The ghost of every scream she had ever swallowed clawed at her throat. The cold phantom of every winter night she had spent shivering in a locked cellar rushed back, threatening to extinguish her courage.
*He is just a man,* Vincent’s voice echoed in her mind. *He bleeds. He dies. You are protected by the Donati name, but more than that, Elena—you are stronger than the monsters who tried to break you.*
Elena’s grip stopped shaking. The terror in her eyes hardened into diamond.
"I remember," Elena whispered, her voice chillingly calm. "And I remember that I survived you."
Marcus’s eyes widened in sudden disbelief as Elena pulled the trigger.
*BANG.*
The bullet tore into Marcus’s right knee. He shrieked in agony, his leg collapsing beneath him as he crashed heavily onto the cobblestones, his weapon flying out of his hand and skittering into the darkness.
"You shot me!" he wailed, clutching his shattered joint, writhing like a crushed serpent on the stone floor. "You fucking whore, you shot me!"
Elena stood up, towering over him. For five years, she had looked up at this monster from the dirt, begging for mercy, pleading for him to spare her ribs, her face, her unborn child. Now, he was the one groveling in the dust.
She took two steady steps forward, pressing the smoking barrel of the Beretta directly against the bridge of his broken nose, exactly where he had pressed his gun against her skull minutes before.
"Where is the second vial?" Elena demanded, her voice flat, devoid of mercy.
Marcus spat blood onto her shoe, coughing violently. "There... there is no second vial. Luciano had only one batch brewed. The formula... the formula died with the chemist in Milan..."
"You lie," she hissed, cocking the hammer back with a metallic click.
"I swear to God!" Marcus wept, the pathetic cowardice that had always lived beneath his cruelty finally bursting to the surface. "Luciano wanted Vincent destroyed! He used the kid to draw him out! If the vial broke, she dies! That was the plan! Elena... please... we were married... remember the promises we made?"
Elena looked into the face of the man who had stolen her youth, who had carved scars into her flesh that would never fade. She felt no satisfaction. She felt only a hollow, terrifying panic for her daughter.
Suddenly, from the shadows deeper in the tunnel, Don Luciano’s cold voice drifted forward.
"He tells the truth about the vial, my dear. But he lies about the formula."
Elena whipped her head up. Luciano was standing by a narrow iron doorway leading to an underground drainage canal. In his hand, he held a sealed leather notebook, its pages yellowed and thick.
"The chemist’s original handwritten composition," Luciano smiled thinly, his finger tracing the binding. "Every compound. Every synthetic stabilizer required to synthesize the cure within twelve hours. Enough to save your little girl before her heart stops."
Elena's breath caught. "Give it to me."
"A simple exchange," the old Don murmured, his gun aimed steadily at Elena’s chest. "Drop your weapon. Let Marcus crawl through this door. And tell Donati when he blows that stone to ash that if he follows me, I burn the notebook."
Behind Elena, the stone wall trembled violently. *BOOM!* Cracks spiderwebbed across the slab as Dante’s demolition charges began to chew through the rock.
Time was running out. Lily had less than ten hours before the neurotoxin crossed her blood-brain barrier.
Elena looked at Marcus, bleeding at her feet, and then at the leather book in the serpent’s hand.
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She had to make a choice between vengeance... and her child’s life.
***
