Chapter 10 - The Traitor’s Banquet
Sloan Marchetti took the stairs four at a time, moving like a phantom of death through the smoky corridor.
His overcoat was missing.
His white dress shirt was soaked in blood that did not belong to him.
In his right hand, he carried a customized chrome-plated .45, the slide locked back from recent firing.
Behind him followed eight elite enforcers, clearing rooms with ruthless, mechanical precision.
When Sloan reached the end of the hallway and saw the bodies of the mercenaries strewn across the shattered floorboards, his face turned completely feral.
Then his eyes found Delphine.
She was sitting on the floor, leaning against the blood-splattered marble pillar, clutching her heavy stomach, her face pale as snow.
Sloan dropped his weapon without caring where it landed.
He fell to his knees in front of her, his large hands grabbing her face, his thumbs wiping soot and sweat from her trembling cheeks.
“Delphine,” he breathed, his voice cracking with a terrifying mixture of relief and panic.
“Are you hit? Did they touch you?”
His hands moved frantically over her shoulders, her arms, her swollen belly, searching for wounds.
“I’m not shot,” Delphine whispered, her voice shaking so hard her teeth chattered.
“Bishop took a round to the shoulder.”
“The hitman… he was going to execute him.”
“I… I hit him with the candlestick.”
Sloan looked over at the dead mercenary lying two feet away with a shattered kneecap and a severed throat.
He looked back at his pregnant wife.
A dark, awe-inspiring light ignited in Sloan’s gray eyes.
He pulled her into his chest, burying his face in her auburn hair, holding her so tightly she could feel the violent, racing beat of his heart.
“You survived,” he whispered, his frame trembling against hers.
“You protected our child.”
“Sloan, he came here to kill us,” Delphine wept against his neck, the shock finally breaking through her emotional dam.
“Matteo sent them here to slaughter Cora and me while you were gone.”
Sloan pulled back slowly, his eyes turning into bottomless pits of obsidian ice.
“I know,” Sloan said quietly.
“And that is why Matteo is currently tied to a chair in the banquet hall downstairs.”
Delphine froze.
“What?”
“I didn't storm his estate,” Sloan explained, helping her gently to her feet, his arm locked securely around her waist to bear her weight.
“I knew he would try a decapitation strike on Blackwood Manor while I was supposedly hunting him across town.”
“I let his strike team breach the outer perimeter so every single traitor in my syndicate would reveal their hand.”
“And while his mercenaries were dying in my hallways…”
Sloan leaned down, whispering with chilling calm:
“My men dragged Matteo out of his safehouse before he could even celebrate.”
Ten minutes later, the massive dining room of Blackwood Manor was bathed in the harsh glare of industrial work lights.
The grand dining table had been cleared of all silverware and china.
Around the perimeter of the room stood twenty high-ranking capos of the Marchetti syndicate, their faces pale, sweating, and paralyzed with terror.
None of them dared to speak.
None of them dared to look each other in the eye.
In the center of the room, tied securely to a heavy iron chair with industrial zip-ties, sat Matteo Marchetti.
His face was badly beaten, one eye swollen shut, blood dripping from his split lip onto his ruined silk designer suit.
Beside him stood Julianna Vance, her hands handcuffed behind her back, her expensive jewelry askew, weeping softly in terror.
The heavy double doors of the dining room swung open.
The room held its breath.
Sloan walked into the hall, immaculately composed, radiating an aura of lethal supremacy.
Beside him, with his hand firmly anchored around her lower back, walked Delphine.
She was pale, wearing a clean oversized dark sweater, her pregnant belly prominent, her hazel eyes staring straight ahead.
The capos parted like the Red Sea, bowing their heads in absolute deference as the Lord and Lady of the Marchetti family took the center of the floor.
Matteo lifted his bloody head, spitting red onto the Persian rug.
When he saw Delphine standing alive and unharmed beside Sloan, the last vestige of hope died in his swollen eyes.
“Delphine,” Matteo rasped, coughing up blood.
“The runaway nurse.”
“Look at you… playing the mob boss’s wife again.”
Sloan did not raise his voice.
He walked over to the side table, picked up a crystal decanter of amber whiskey, and poured a single measure into a glass.
He took a slow, deliberate sip.
“You made three fatal mistakes, Matteo,” Sloan said smoothly, his voice echoing off the high ceilings.
“First, you used a coward’s weapon—poison—to attack a nineteen-year-old girl.”
“Second, you believed you could outmaneuver me on my own territory.”
Sloan walked slowly toward his bound cousin, stopping two feet in front of the chair.
“And third,” Sloan continued, his gray eyes locking onto Matteo’s face with absolute finality,
“You sent armed men into the sanctuary of my pregnant wife.”
Matteo let out a bitter, desperate laugh.
“She doesn't love you, Sloan!” Matteo shouted, his voice cracking with hysteria.
“She ran from you!”
“She hates everything you are!”
“She will run again the first chance she gets!”
Delphine stepped forward.
Her voice cut through the silence like a scalpel, sharp, precise, and devoid of fear.
“I may despise his world, Matteo,” Delphine said, looking down at the beaten traitor with icy contempt.
“I may hate the violence that surrounds this family.”
“But I am the mother of his heir.”
“And I just shattered your hitman’s knee with a brass candlestick to keep my baby alive.”
Delphine stepped right up to Matteo’s chair, leaning down until her eyes burned into his.
“You tried to suffocate an innocent girl with peanut oil and digitalis.”
“You are not a boss, Matteo.”
“You are a rat.”
“And in this house, we exterminate rats.”
A collective shiver ran through the assembled syndicate leaders.
The woman they had dismissed as a soft, runaway waitress had just pronounced a death sentence with the terrifying authority of a mafia queen.
Sloan looked at Delphine, a dark, breathtaking pride burning behind his eyes.
He turned back to Bishop, who stood by the wall with a sterile medical field kit.
“Julianna,” Sloan called out.
Julianna Vance fell to her knees, sobbing hysterically.
“Sloan, please! I only provided the chemicals because Matteo threatened my brother! Please, have mercy!”
“Mercy is for the church, Julianna,” Sloan said coldly.
“In this room, there is only balance.”
Sloan pointed to the two syringes resting inside Bishop’s open medical kit.
One contained concentrated digitalis.
The other contained five hundred milligrams of potassium chloride.
The exact compounds that had almost ended Cora Marchetti’s life.
“You gave my sister two minutes of air,” Sloan whispered, leaning down to look Matteo in the eye.
“Let’s see if your heart lasts three.”
Sloan turned his back on his cousin, reaching out his hand to Delphine.
Delphine looked at the syringes.
She looked at the terrified capos who would now bend their knees to Sloan until the end of time.
She knew that the life she had once dreamed of—a quiet, ordinary life in a small town—was dead and buried.
Her child was born of fire.
Her child was born to a king.
And if she was going to protect this baby from the wolves of the underworld, she could no longer hide behind a waitress’s apron.
Delphine placed her small, steady hand into Sloan’s.
Their fingers intertwined, cold steel meeting resolute fire.
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“Take me back to the nursery, Sloan,” Delphine said quietly, never looking back at the doomed men behind them.
“Our son needs to rest.”
