Page 69 of The Mafia Bloodline
A low growl tore from my chest before I could stop it.
Roman turned toward me, his gaze steady. “She’s alive. Focus on that.”
“You didn’t see her face,” I rasped, every word scraping raw. “She was in pain. I felt it. Every scream.”
Lucien’s voice cut in, calm but iron-hard. “Then hold that connection. It means she’s still fighting. You hold on, she holds on.”
I wanted to believe him. I needed to. But the truth was clawing at me every second she was in there was another chance for fate to rip her away.
Draugr appeared at the far end of the hall, his usual stoicism cracked by concern. “The changelings cleared the perimeter. No more demons. The doctor said the surgery is underway.”
The word surgery hit like a blade.
I sank back against the wall, closing my eyes. “She’s not supposed to be this far along,” I murmured. “The baby’s early. She wasn’t ready. None of us were.”
Roman rested a hand on my shoulder, grounding me with quiet strength. “Then be ready now. Because when she wakes, she’s going to need you steady.”
I looked up at him, the brother who’d led us through centuries of blood and darkness I saw fear in his eyes. Not for himself. For me.
And that’s when I knew. If Runa died tonight, Volken Dragic wouldn’t see dawn, but neither would anyone who’d caused it. The thought wasn’t a threat. It was a promise.
The hallway felt smaller after that. The air tightened around us as if it, too, braced for retribution. Roman’s hand on my shoulder was iron; Lucien’s jaw was a line of stone; Viking’s usual sarcasm had gone blunt-edged. We didn’t need to trade barbs or plans in that instant, our intent hung there, a dark thing that didn’t require words. We would burn the world if it came to that, and we would do it together.
My phone buzzed against my palm a small, sharp sound in the cavernous silence. I didn’t want to look, but necessity made my fingers move. Lucien answered before I could, lips pressed thin as he stepped aside. I watched him listen, saw his eyes go hard, then harder still.
He flicked me a look and mouthed one word: airport.
By the time he returned, his face had changed. The strategist’s calm had been cultivated for centuries; tonight it held a brittle edge. “They saw Caesar at the airport,” he said without preamble. “He caught a flight out. A private one; he moved like he’d planned for escape.” His voice was tight, not surprised so much as annoyed, a predator who’d had its scent trail ruined at the last second.
Roman’s hand flexed. “Then he’s out of our reach for now.” His tone was a flat assessment, but his fingers dug white into my shoulder. “For now.”
“Out of our lives for the moment,” Lucien amended. “That doesn’t mean gone. Not by a long shot. We’ll track him. We’ll flush every rat he hides behind.” He was already enumerating the steps in his head, contacts to activate, flight logs to pull,safe houses to watch. The detail-minder’s work calmed him a fraction; plotting was a remedy for rage.
Viking spat under his breath. “So, he runs like a coward. Good. Let him go. There’s no sanctuary from us.” The old spark was back in him; the grin stripped of humour and shining with bloodlust.
Draugr, who’d been silent, stepped forward, the slow certainty of a man who understood the long teeth of vengeance. “If he’s out, we make sure he never returns.” His voice was quiet and final. “If he hides, we find his holes and fill them. If he dies somewhere else, we track it to his grave.”
Roman looked at each of us in turn, and the weight of being leader pressed down in the way it always did, calm, absolute. “He’s slipped away tonight. We don’t flail. We set the net. We gather proof, and then we end him where he hides. No theatrics. No mistakes.” He pulled in a breath, then added, softer but merciless: “And while we do that, we make sure everything that matters stays alive. Runa stays alive.”
Lucien’s hand found mine, giving it a brief, hard squeeze. “Send me every feed. I’ll trace his exit points, his backers, the buyer networks. Caesar didn’t move alone.” The calculation in his voice was a promise of patient cruelty. He would not be satisfied with a half-measured revenge; he would map it, dismantle it, and make the enemy’s world uninhabitable.
Viking’s laugh was low and dangerous. “When we find him, we’ll make him regret the idea of being born into a world with us in it.” The brothers exchanged looks not of bravado, but of iron commitment. Each of us had drunk from the same source of violence and loyalty; each of us understood how thin the linecould be between keeping the world running and burning it to the ground.
Roman finally exhaled, and his gaze rested on me, then Lucien. “Right now, our priority is here,” he said. “Don’t let grief distract you. Let it fuel the hunt later. Keep your head so you can finish the thing that matters.” He looked at me with a fierceness that warmed and terrified at once. “Hold together, brother. For Runa.”
I nodded, because there was nothing else to do. The plan was falling into place even as my heart hammered. Flights to trace. Contacts to pressure. Safe houses to burn. But those were logistics, a cold, necessary scaffolding for the fire that would come. Caesar had slipped the net tonight, but we would tighten it, and when he tried to find sanctuary, there would be none left for him.
The world could burn. Let it. We would make sure the ashes still spelled our names, and Runa’s.
The words had barely left my mouth when the bond screamed.
It was a knock, a rip through my chest so sudden it felt like someone had plunged a blade through the quiet. For a breath I had light, warm, tethered sensation, her heartbeat, tiny and fast…and then nothing. The thread doubled, then severed as if cut by cold glass.
My knees went out from under me.
Silence around me turned to a high, clinical hum. For a second time I couldn’t breathe. The room shrank. The brothers’ faces blurred into masks, their voices narrowing into tunnel sound. Panic is clean and simple: it strips the mind down to one brutal instruction. To find, protect and kill.
“Volken.” Lucien’s voice was close and steady, but it didn’t reach the place inside my ribs that had just been hollowed. “Hold on.”
