Chapter 7 - The Don's Choice
The alley was an icy wind tunnel running between centuries-old brick warehouses toward the dark waters of the harbor. Sleet lashed against Lorenzo’s face as he tracked the smears of blood along the wet masonry.
Moretti was wounded. He had taken a round to his thigh during the breach, leaving a clear trail through the slush.
Lorenzo rounded a corner behind an old seafood processing plant. The harbor was black, churning violently beneath the winter gale. At the end of the wooden pier, illuminated only by a single flickering security light, Moretti collapsed against a rusted bollard, his breath coming in ragged, bloody gasps. His two remaining bodyguards lay unconscious twenty yards back, neutralized silently by Marco’s advance scout.
Lorenzo walked onto the dock, his footsteps steady, deliberate, and unhurried.
Moretti looked up, his face pale, clutching his bleeding leg. He reached for his dropped revolver, but Lorenzo kicked it casually into the freezing harbor waters. It vanished with a dull splash.
"Kill me then, you bastard," Moretti spat, coughing up blood. "Do it! Your father would have done it twenty years ago!"
Lorenzo raised his pistol, aligning the front sight squarely between Moretti’s eyes. His finger tightened on the trigger. Five years of rage, five years of watching his mother slowly slip away into the shadows of her fractured mind, culminated in this single pull of the trigger.
"Wait!"
A voice cut through the howling wind.
Lorenzo turned his head slightly. Nadia was standing at the entrance of the pier, wrapped in her blood-splattered cashmere coat, her breath clouding in the freezing air. Marco was behind her, looking exasperated.
"I told you to wait in the car," Lorenzo said, his gun never wavering from Moretti’s forehead.
"And I told you I wasn't blind," Nadia replied, walking steadily down the slick wooden planks toward them. The wind whipped strands of dark hair across her face, but her eyes were fierce, burning with conviction.
"Step back, Nadia," Lorenzo warned, his voice dangerously low. "This is not your world. This man ordered your death ten minutes ago."
"I know what he ordered," she said, stopping just three feet from Lorenzo’s side. "And I know what he did to your mother. But look at him, Lorenzo. He’s broken. His men are gone. His syndicate is finished."
"In our world, you don't leave wounded wolves alive," Lorenzo growled. "They heal. They come back for your throat."
"Then lock him in a cage where he can never see the sun!" Nadia pleaded, reaching out and touching Lorenzo’s arm—the arm holding the weapon. "If you execute him here on this dock like a dog, you prove him right. You prove that you are nothing more than a killer who hides behind a suit! Your mother didn't raise a butcher, Lorenzo. She raised a protector!"
Lorenzo’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle twitched violently in his cheek. "You don't understand the law of the street, Nadia."
"I understand grief," she said, her voice dropping into an aching, intimate cadence that pierced through the roar of the ocean. "I watched my father die for three years. I know what it’s like to want to burn the world down because you couldn't stop the pain. But killing Sal Moretti won't give your mother her memory back. It will only carve out whatever piece of your soul she is still trying to save."
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the tarnished silver locket Elena had given her. She held it up in the harsh yellow light of the security lamp. The engraved falcon and barbed wire gleamed against her pale skin.
Lorenzo’s eyes widened in genuine disbelief. "Where did you get that?"
"Elena gave it to me," Nadia said, tears freezing on her eyelashes. "She told me that fear always turns to betrayal. She told me that one day, you would need someone who remembers how to show mercy. Choose, Lorenzo. Be the monster they think you are, or be the man your mother believes is still inside you."
Moretti stared at the locket, his eyes wide with ancient terror, recognizing the sacred seal of the Carbone patriarch.
For ten agonizing seconds, the only sound was the howling of the November wind and the waves crashing against the wooden pylons. Lorenzo stood motionless, caught between the ruthless code of his bloodline and the desperate humanity in the eyes of the woman standing beside him.
Slowly, with deliberate control, Lorenzo lowered the hammer of the gun. He slid the weapon back into his shoulder holster.
He looked down at Moretti, his voice cold as arctic ice. "Marco. Call the federal task force. Hand him over with the shipping manifests and the offshore accounts we seized in Providence. He spends the rest of his miserable life in a maximum-security penitentiary in Colorado."
Moretti slumped back against the bollard, gasping in disbelief.
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Lorenzo turned his back on his defeated enemy and looked at Nadia. The hardness in his expression cracked, revealing a depth of emotion so profound it made her breath catch.
"Let’s go home," he said.
