Chapter 3 - THE MAID'S DYING RECORDING
Elena, the nineteen-year-old immigrant maid who had phoned me from the pantry, burst through the side entrance of the conservatory. Her uniform was torn, blood dripping from a gash across her cheek, but her grip was ironclad around an old shattered smartphone.
"Elena, run!" my mother gasped, trying to push herself up from the floor.
Dante cursed under his breath, instinctively swinging his gun barrel away from my temple toward the girl. In that split fraction of a second—a window no wider than a heartbeat—my military reflexes took over. I threw my right elbow back with bone-crushing force, slamming directly into Dante’s throat. Cartilage crunched beneath my strike. Dante choked, stumbling backward, his gun discharging wildly into the coffered ceiling and showering us in plaster.
I lunged forward, tackling Dante through an antique glass coffee table. The explosion of glass was deafening. We rolled across the shards, fists trading savage blows in the dark ruin of my home. Dante was younger and faster, but I was fueled by primal, feral fury. I drove my thumbs into his eye sockets until he shrieked in agony, flinging him off me into the splintered wreckage.
"Shoot him, you idiot!" Vanessa shrieked, scrambling behind an ornate armoire and pulling a compact silver revolver from her purse.
Elena didn't flee. Instead, she threw the smartphone across the slick floor toward me. "The cloud drive! It’s live-streaming to every capo in the city, Mr. Vance! She poisoned your father too!"
Those words hit me harder than any bullet ever could.
My father had died eight months ago from what doctors diagnosed as sudden heart failure. The entire family had wept at his graveside. Vanessa had held my hand in the rain, whispering that she would always take care of me and my mother.
The cracked screen of Elena’s phone slid to a halt beside my knee. The video file was playing in a continuous loop. The footage was raw, filmed from between the slats of an air vent above the master suite.
On the screen, clear as day, was Vanessa standing over my father’s sickbed months ago. She was calmly mixing a clear vial of potassium chloride into his IV drip while Dante stood by the door, keeping watch. In the video, Vanessa leaned down and whispered into my dying father’s ear: "Die quietly, old man. Once you're in the ground, Dominic will sign everything over to me, and Dante will bury him beside you."
The footage jumped forward to that very morning. The camera captured Vanessa dragging my mother by her silver hair across the hallway, slapping her viciously across the face, shouting demands for the Swiss vault authorization codes that only my mother possessed.
"Give me the keys to the Zurich safety box, you miserable hag, or I'll cut Dominic's heart out while you watch!" Vanessa’s recorded voice shrieked from the phone’s tiny speaker.
Seeing my mother battered, hearing the confession of my father’s cold-blooded murder, snapped something fundamental inside my soul. The civilized man, the legitimate businessman I had tried to become for the past five years, vanished forever. Only the monster remained.
Across the room, Dante scrambled to his feet, blood pouring from his nose and eyes. He raised his weapon again, but he wasn't aiming at me anymore. He was leveling the barrel straight at Elena's chest for exposing them.
"Die, you little rat!" Dante snarled.
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I didn't think. I threw my body across the floor, shielding Elena with my back as Dante pulled the trigger. The gunshot was deafening. A burning white-hot poker ripped through the meat of my left shoulder, tossing us both against the marble base of the fireplace.
Vanessa’s laughter turned frantic, almost hysterical. "Kill them all, Dante! We leave no witnesses! Burn the whole damn house down!"
