Chapter 4 - The Man Beside the Door
For three seconds, nobody moved.
Then every gun in the room turned toward Carlo DeLuca.
Carlo still had one knee pressed against the priest’s back. Slowly, he lifted his hands.
“That man is lying,” he said.
Lorenzo’s face was unreadable. “Get up.”
Carlo stood.
He had served the Duca household for seventeen years. He had stood outside Lorenzo’s wife’s hospital room the night she died. He had carried Matteo out of a burning car when Matteo was nineteen. He had been trusted with gate codes, family routes, private names, and the kind of secrets people were buried for knowing.
Now he stood beneath the damaged chandelier, soup on his shoes, guns pointed at his chest.
“I did not betray this family,” Carlo said.
Mia watched his right hand.
Not his face. Faces lied. Hands told the truth.
His fingers were too still.
“Empty your pockets,” she said.
Carlo looked at her with hatred. “You have no authority here.”
“She has mine,” Matteo said.
That surprised everyone, including Mia.
Lorenzo nodded once.
Carlo slowly removed his phone, keys, wallet, and a folding knife. Mia scanned each item. Nothing obvious.
Then she saw it.
Not an object.
A stain.
A tiny black crescent beneath Carlo’s left cuff, the same oily residue she had seen on the camera housing in the library when she passed it earlier.
“You fixed the camera,” she said.
Carlo’s nostrils flared.
“Not remotely,” Mia continued. “Manually. You wiped the lens housing after looping the feed, but you got oil under your cuff.”
Carlo smiled.
It was the first honest expression Mia had seen from him all night.
“You are very clever,” he said. “For a girl who falls over trash cans.”
Mia felt Matteo shift beside her.
Carlo’s smile widened. “But clever girls still die when they stand in rooms full of men who think honor protects them.”
The lights went out.
The dining room plunged into darkness.
Someone screamed.
Mia grabbed Matteo’s sleeve and dropped. Gunfire erupted across the room, not from outside but from the walls. Hidden panels opened. Armed men poured through service entrances.
The betrayal had not been a single man.
It was an invasion.
Mia pulled Matteo beneath the table as bullets tore through carved wood. Lorenzo’s men fired back blindly. Crystal shattered. Plates exploded. Enzo crawled behind a cabinet, sobbing.
“Mia,” Matteo said sharply, “my father.”
She looked through the darkness. Lorenzo was trapped at the head of the table, pinned behind an overturned chair, one hand pressed against his side.
Blood darkened his white shirt.
Matteo tried to move.
Mia shoved him back. “No.”
“That’s my father.”
“And you’re the target.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
The words came out harder than she expected.
Matteo stared at her in the flashes of gunfire.
Mia grabbed a fallen serving tray and slid it across the floor. It struck one attacker’s ankle. He stumbled. Mia fired twice. He went down.
Then she moved.
Not gracefully. Not beautifully.
She crawled, rolled, kicked, slipped in spilled soup, collided with a chair, cursed once, and still somehow crossed the room faster than any of them expected. She reached Lorenzo, grabbed his collar, and dragged him behind the marble sideboard.
He grunted in pain. “My son—”
“Alive,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I told him to stay down, and unlike you, he listens occasionally.”
Lorenzo almost smiled.
Almost.
Then Carlo’s voice cut through the darkness.
“Bring me Matteo, and the rest of you live.”
Mia pressed her back against the sideboard.
May you like
Before tonight, Lorenzo Duca had said no woman could guard his son.
Now his life and his empire depended on one.
