Milo turned his tear-streaked face toward his uncle. “Why are you hurting us?”
Nico’s hand began to shake.
“You’re his uncle,” Sienna said quietly. “You can still be the one who protects him instead.”
Salvatore, pinned against the column, shouted, “Shoot them, now!”
“You said the boy would never be harmed,” Nico snapped back.
“He’s leverage.”
“He’s family.”
“He’s the reason your brother will always be stronger than you!”
Something in Nico’s face broke apart. Dante shoved Salvatore harder into the stone. “Listen to him, Nico. He was never going to hand you anything.”
Salvatore laughed through the pain. “You could never have led this family. You wanted the throne without ever becoming the man who deserves to sit in it.”
Nico’s gun swung slowly away from Sienna and toward Salvatore instead. “You lied to me about the bomb.”
“I improved your plan.”
“You murdered Elena.”
“You gave me the access to do it.”
Nico fired. The bullet caught Salvatore in the shoulder, and he screamed, wrenching free of Dante’s grip long enough to snatch up the fallen knife and lunge for Nico. Dante intercepted him, and the two men crashed against Elena’s coffin hard enough to shift the marble lid.
Something inside cracked. A stack of documents spilled loose through the gap.
Salvatore froze mid-struggle. Dante saw account ledgers, passports, photographs, sealed envelopes — an entire archive spilling out of his dead wife’s grave.
The coffin had never been empty. It had been Salvatore’s private vault.
Sienna dragged Milo behind a column as Bruno’s men stormed through the entrance, exchanging fire with two gunmen who’d been hiding in the rear chamber. Nico stood frozen, staring at the paperwork scattered across the floor. “You hid everything in here?”
“No one searches the grave of a pregnant woman,” Salvatore said, pressing a hand over his bleeding shoulder.
Dante picked up a photograph — Salvatore shaking hands with federal agents, rival crime bosses, judges, police officials. Decades of bribes and bodies compressed into a single stack of paper.
Enough to bury the entire Marchetti empire. Enough to send half the powerful men in this city to prison alongside him.
Salvatore read the realization on his face and smiled through blood-soaked teeth. “You can’t release any of that. Your name is written all through it too.”
Dante opened a ledger. Payments routed through companies he controlled filled the pages — some approved before he’d even inherited the organization, others disguised behind legitimate transactions. To a courtroom, none of that distinction would matter much.
“Kill me,” Salvatore said, “and you spend the rest of your life running from what’s sitting in that box.”
Sienna stepped out from behind the column. “Or he hands it to the authorities himself.”
Every head turned toward her. Salvatore laughed. “He’d lose everything.”
Dante looked at Milo, still clinging to Sienna’s hand, tear tracks drying on his small face. Everything. For years that word had meant territory, obedience, fear, the particular silence that came from being feared correctly. Now everything stood in front of him wearing a wrinkled shirt and holding a red toy car.
“What happens to him,” Dante asked, “if I surrender all of it?”
Salvatore’s smile widened. “He grows up visiting his father through a plate of glass.”
“He grows up,” Sienna said, “knowing his father chose him over an empire.”
Salvatore lunged for Nico’s dropped weapon. Dante’s gun was already up. One shot. Salvatore fell against the coffin and didn’t move again.
The mausoleum went silent except for the rain hammering the roof. Nico dropped his own weapon without being asked. Bruno kicked it aside and forced him to his knees.
Dante stood over the man who had orchestrated three years of grief, blood soaking through his torn shirt, breathing hard. Sienna rushed to him.
“You’re hurt.”
“It’s shallow.”
“That’s exactly what men say right before they collapse.”