Chapter 7 - The Truth of the Forty-First Floor
"What are you talking about?" I whispered, holding Maya tighter against my chest, her small heart hammering against my palm. "I saw what you did in that office. I saw the man lying on the floor!"
"And you thought I was executing an innocent man," Luca said, his voice dropping into a harsh, ragged whisper as he kept one eye on the shattered window. He kept his pistol lowered by an inch, though he never relaxed his stance. "That man on the floor wasn't a victim, Vivien. He was an assassin sent by the federal prosecutor’s office to plant a wiretap and eliminate me before I could testify against the very corruption syndicate that’s hunting us right now."
The words hit me like a physical blow. The room seemed to tilt sideways.
"No," I stammered, shaking my head. "No, I heard what he said. You told him he understood the arrangement—"
"The arrangement was that he was a double agent who had been caught selling my shipping routes to the feds," Luca interrupted, his jaw tight, a muscle ticking violently along his cheek. "When he walked into my office that night, he didn't confess—he tried to pull a Glock from his waistband. Vincenzo put him down a fraction of a second before he raised it at me. If Vincenzo hadn't fired, I would be dead."
Silence settled over the bedroom, broken only by the distant wail of a police siren echoing somewhere out in the rainy Portland streets.
The horror of what I had done washed over me in a freezing wave. For six years, I had built an entire universe of hatred and fear around a single, misunderstood moment. I had hidden his children, run across state lines, lived in constant terror, and cursed his name in the dark—all because I had let panic write a story that wasn't true.
"You... you didn't kill an innocent person," I whispered, the realization tasting like ash on my tongue.
"I'm a lot of things, Vivien," Luca said, his voice softening, the hard edges of the crime lord melting away to reveal the man who used to watch boxing footage with me on mute. "A monster? Maybe to my enemies. But I never would have hurt you. And I never, ever would have walked away if I had known you were carrying my children."
May you like
Before I could answer, a sharp, metallic sound echoed from the fire escape outside the bedroom window.
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