Chapter 4 No.4

Seraphina POV

The Grand Salon of the Russo Estate was an exercise in gaudy, insecure wealth.

It was a room designed to intimidate through sheer volume-soaring ceilings painted with frescoes of dubious artistic merit, gold-leafed moldings, and heavy velvet drapes that seemed to swallow the light.

But tonight, the air didn't smell of old money or beeswax. It smelled of cordite, metallic blood, and the cloying, expensive floral perfume Caterina used to mask her terror.

Giovanni sat in a high-backed leather chair, his hands shaking so violently that the ice in his scotch glass clinked like a rhythmic death knell. He looked smaller than he had on the steps. The bravado of a minor Don had evaporated the moment he saw me put a bullet through a man's skull without blinking.

"You... you killed them like it was nothing," Caterina whispered from the velvet sofa. She was clutching a string of South Sea pearls so tightly I thought the silk thread might snap.

Her eyes were fixed on the mud and blood staining the Persian rug beneath my boots.

To her, I wasn't a daughter returned; I was a monster that had crawled out of a nightmare she thought she'd buried eighteen years ago.

"They came to kill you," I stated.

My voice remained a flat, horizontal line, devoid of the peaks and valleys of human emotion. I stood in the center of the room, my eyes already scanning the sightlines.

"The windows are too large. Your guards are positioned in the light, making them easy targets. The driveway is a kill zone with no secondary barriers. I didn't kill them like it was nothing, Caterina. I solved a tactical problem."

"Where have you been all these years?" Giovanni asked, his voice hoarse.

He took a long, desperate gulp of his scotch. He was looking at me now, his mind clearly working through the shock to calculate my value.

A daughter was a bargaining chip; a daughter who could single-handedly repel an assassination squad was a nuclear deterrent.

"The file the Vatican liaison sent... it said you were raised in a quiet orphanage in the Swiss Alps. It said you were a teacher's assistant."

"The file says what it needs to say so that you can sleep at night," I replied, meeting his gaze until he was the one to look away.

"Do not ask questions you cannot afford the answers to, Giovanni. You wanted a daughter. You got a Russo. Be careful what you wish for."

The heavy mahogany doors at the far end of the salon swung open with a deliberate, theatrical flair.

A young woman stepped in, and for a moment, the room felt even colder. She was flawlessly dressed in a cream-colored designer pantsuit, her dark hair sleek and pinned back with surgical precision. This was Bianca. The adopted daughter.

The replacement who had spent eighteen years warming the seat I had been forced to vacate.

She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She took in the scene with the cold, calculating eyes of a girl who had been raised to survive in a den of vipers.

She looked at the blood on the floor, then at her trembling mother, and finally at me.

"So, the prodigal daughter returns," Bianca said, her voice smooth like poisoned honey.

She walked over to the bar, ignoring the tension, and poured herself a glass of sparkling water. "And she brings a body count as a dowry. How charming."

"Bianca, please," Caterina pleaded, her voice cracking. "She... she saved your father."

Bianca turned, leaning against the marble bar, her eyes raking over my tactical boots and the concealed bulge of the Browning beneath my jacket.

There was no sisterly warmth in her expression, only the sharp, jagged edge of a rival who had just seen her inheritance threatened.

"We have men to handle security, Mother. Professional men. We don't need a feral stray turning our front yard into a slaughterhouse just to prove she belongs here."

I stepped into her personal space. Bianca was taller in her designer heels, but I let the aura of the Cistern-the cold, dead weight of the Island-bleed into the air between us. She physically stiffened, her breath catching in her throat as she realized that I wasn't playing a role.

"Your men were dead on their feet before the first shot was fired," I whispered, my voice a blade pressed against her jugular. "

I am not here to play house, Bianca. I am not here for the pearls or the frescoes.

Stay out of my way, and you get to keep playing the mob princess in your ivory tower. Cross me, and I'll show you what a real slaughterhouse looks like.

I promise you, you won't like the color of your own blood."

She held my gaze for three seconds-long enough to show she had pride, but the slight, nervous tremor in her hand as she held her glass gave her away. The territory was established.

I turned back to Giovanni, who was watching us with a mixture of awe and fear. "I want the room in the east tower.

It has the best vantage point of the grounds and only one point of entry.

Have my bags sent up. And tell your 'professionals' that if they approach my door without announcing themselves, I will consider them hostile."

He didn't argue. He just nodded, a man who had realized he was no longer the most dangerous person in his own home.