Page 48 of Empire
Don Barone shifts slightly in his chair. Conti looks down at the papers in front of him with too much attention. Marchetti’sheir avoids looking anywhere near our side. They know. Every bastard in this room already knows what this is. We’re not here to argue; we’re here to witness the performance of justification before punishment starts.
I look across the table, and Salvatore finally raises his eyes to mine.
There’s no denial on his face. Only devastation held so rigidly inside the frame of his father’s son that it almost becomes invisible. If I didn’t know him, I’d miss it. But I do know him, and what I see there is worse than guilt.
I see that he has already lived this moment a hundred times in his head, and found no version in which he survives it whole.
My father rises slowly. “If you intend to frame my family as expansionist threats to preserve your own decaying hold on the eastern routes, at least have the courage to call it politics instead of justice.”
Aldo says nothing—that silence is the signal.
I don’t see who shoots first.
One second, the room is full of men standing behind their chairs, and the next, the first gunshot cracks through the hall hard enough to rattle the chandeliers. Then another. Then a third. The entire room erupts into movement so fast, training takes over before thought can.
I move on instinct.
Gun out—two shots toward the balcony. Viktor lunges across the table, flipping it half sideways as cover while my father reaches for his own weapon with the kind of cold fury that turns whole rooms stupid.
Men are shouting in Italian, Russian, and Greek. One of Conti’s guards goes down. Barone is dragged under cover by his son. Somewhere behind all of it, someone keeps yelling that this is Dragovich escalation, Dragovich retaliation, Dragovich proof, as if naming a thing quickly enough turns chaos into evidence.
That’s when I understand the real shape of the trap. They don’t just want us cornered politically; they want violence ugly enough to justify the decision publicly. They want this to look exactly what Aldo calls it: a dangerous bloodline unable to exist inside a civilized structure without turning the room into a battlefield.
“They fucking planned this,” Viktor snarls.
My father’s trying to breathe around a chest wound no one walks away from in rooms like these, not with medics still outside and bullets still flying. “Go!” he snarls at me.
I don’t, because if Mikhail Dragovich goes down here and I leave him, the room rewrites the whole story before his blood cools. Because part of me is still too much his son to survive obedience when it looks like abandonment.
He looks at me, and whatever is in his face then strips every remaining illusion from the room. “Go, Ruslan!”
I ignore him and grab him under one arm, while Viktor is on the other side, and for three seconds it looks as if sheer force might drag us toward the side exit.
The first grab for me comes from behind. I drive the butt of my gun into a face, hear bone go soft, twist free, and fire once more before the magazine clicks empty. Somebody takes the weapon from my hand in the same motion, and another man hooks an arm around my throat.
I slam him backward into the edge of the table hard enough to break his grip, but there are too many now, my father is bleeding too much, and Viktor is half-holding his side while still trying to cut through three men at once.
Across the room, Aldo says something I can’t hear, then I see Salvatore move toward me with a dagger in his hand.
At first, my mind refuses to understand it. There are too many immediate threats, too much blood, too much noise. But he comes through the chaos with that terrible controlled calm ofhis, eyes locked on mine now, and I know before he reaches me that this is the part they build for spectacle.
Exile has to be marked, not just decided.
Marked.
It requires the room to see what happens when a line is broken and an entire family is cast out.
Two men lock my arms behind me. A third shoves me to my knees on the blood-slick floor. Viktor roars and tries to reach me, and a shot hits the marble beside his boot. Another man’s hand is on his shoulder then, forcing him back at gunpoint while my father, pale now but still upright through sheer hatred, spits blood onto the floor and curses every family in the room with enough poison to kill lesser men where they stand.
I look up at my lover and see the villa. Morning sunlight. His head in my lap. The way he laughs when I tell him I’m going to keep him there forever. The way he says his sister will paint. Every soft thing crashes through me at once and becomes unbearable.
“Ruslan,” he says.
I could spit in his face or curse him. I could tell him to go to hell, to choke on legacy, to enjoy the empire he’s choosing over me.
I force calm on myself instead. If he’s going to do this, he can do it looking at me.
“Do it,lyubimiy,” I whisper.
