Page 114 of Crown of Blood

"I made you strong!" Vito corrects. "I made you understand that in our world, trust is weakness, boy! Love is aliability." His gaze shifts to Bianca. "A lesson you seem determined to forget."

In one fluid motion, I raise my weapon, aiming directly at my father's head. "The only liability in this room is you."

Vito smiles the same cold smile I've learned to wear when death is imminent. "You won't shoot me, Luca. Not until you hear the truth about your precious wife."

Bianca trembles slightly, but her voice remains steady. "I already told him everything. About my father. About the Volkovs."

"Did you tell him about the arrangement?" Vito's finger tightens minutely on the trigger. "About how Dante recruited you specifically? How he's been planning to use you against Luca from the beginning?"

The words land like blows to my heart. But it can't be… it can't be true.

"What arrangement?" I demand, not taking my eyes off Vito's trigger finger.

"Ask her about those six months she disappeared," Vito urges. "Ask her why she returned engaged to that nobody, working in a hotel Dante owns through shell companies. Ask her how convenient it was that she happened to be cleaning that specific room the night Malenko was executed."

Doubt flickers like shadow, but I crush it instantly beneath certainty. "She's carrying my child."

"A perfect trap, isn't it?" Vito wheezes, oxygen tank clicking beside him. "Dante and the Volkovs playing the long game. Using the daughter of a traitor to infiltrate the Ravelli bloodline. To give you an heir that carries enemy blood."

The room tilts on its axis, past and present colliding with dizzying force. Elena's betrayal. Dante's manipulation. Bianca's unexpected presence in my path.

"Luca," Bianca's voice breaks through. "He's lying. I never met Dante before you introduced us. I didn't know any of this."

"She's good," Vito acknowledges. "Convincing. Just like her father was before he betrayed us for the Volkovs."

"Enough!" I surge forward, unable to contain the fury that's been building for fifteen years. My hands find the oxygen tube feeding life into Vito's lungs. I twist it in my grip, restricting the flow to my father's failing body.

Vito gasps, face reddening, but the pistol remains steady in his hand, although now it's shifted and is aimed at me.

"You killed her," I hiss, squeezing the oxygen tube tighter, watching him struggle for breath just as my mother must have struggled when her life bled out on cathedral steps. "You made me watch. You used her death to shape me into... this."

"I... made you... strong," he wheezes between desperate gasps.

"You made me a monster." I squeeze the air tighter, watching him gasp.

His eyes lock with mine, something like pride glimmering in their depths. "Yes."

I release the tube fractionally, allowing a thin stream of air to return to his lungs. "Tell me the truth. All of it."

"Elena was leaving. Taking you to the Volkovs." Each word costs him, but he pushes through. "She discovered things. About me. About the family."

"What things?"

"Ask your wife," Vito's gaze shifts to Bianca. "Ask her what the Volkovs have been protecting all these years."

Before I can respond, Vito's oxygen tank explodes from the pressure of my grip on the tube.

The blast throws me backward, smoke filling the chamber as metal shrapnel tears through ancient stone and flesh alike.

Ears ringing, vision blurred, I scramble to my feet, searching desperately for Bianca through the chaos.

"Luca!" Her voice reaches me, panicked but alive.

She emerges from the smoke, blood trickling from a cut on her forehead. I reach for her, pulling her against me, hands checking for injuries, for harm to our child.

"I'm okay," she assures me, clinging to my shirt. "The baby's okay."

Relief floods through me, short-lived as movement catches my eye. Vito, still alive despite the explosion, drags himself toward his pistol that landed several feet away. His face is blackened with soot, blood pouring from a wound in his chest where shrapnel tore through his suit.

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