He Let My Brother Die, So I Let His Kingdom Burn

Chapter 4 The Glass Castle Shatters

(Alessandro’s POV)

The first explosion shattered the ballroom windows. Glass and plaster struck the tables as guests dropped to the floor.

Something punched through my thigh. When I looked down, a piece of metal stood out from the muscle and blood soaked my trousers.

“Bratva!” Marco shouted. My Capo pulled me behind the overturned head table. “They breached the waterfront perimeter!”

Leo’s firewall was supposed to make that impossible.

I caught Marco’s shoulder and hauled myself up. “Get me to the med-bay. Find Elena and bring her there.”

My men closed around us and forced a path to the service elevator. The car dropped beneath the ballroom to the medical floor I had built for Elena.

The doors opened on emergency strobes.

Every monitor and diagnostic screen was blank except for the same blue message: *System Offline.*

“Get it back online!” I shouted. “Where is Elena?”

Men ran from console to console. Nothing responded. Elena’s station was clean, her tools washed and put away. Her coat was gone.

Pain climbed my leg. The blood around the metal had turned thick and dark. Skin at the edge of the wound was going black.

“Poison.” I could barely force the word out.

The Russians used a fast necrotic toxin on blades and shrapnel. I had seen its victims before.

Isabella crouched near the door. I pointed to the refrigerated storage unit.

“The coagulant. Get your formula.”

She missed the latch twice before opening it. When she pulled out a clear vial, the syringe shook in her hand.

“Inject it!”

She pushed the drug into my IV line.

Heat tore through my thigh. The black edge spread while purple blotches rose under the skin. I screamed until my voice broke.

Dr. Moretti, the old family physician and retired surgeon, rushed in. One look at my leg stopped him.

“Dio mio. What did you give him?” He snatched the empty vial from Isabella. “This is reacting with the toxin. It’s accelerating it.”

I remembered Elena in her lab one month earlier, holding a vial like that one.

*“It’s unfinished, Alessandro. The molecular bonds are unstable. With some toxins, it could act as an accelerant.”*

I had called her jealous of Isabella’s success.

The vial in Moretti’s hand was Elena’s unfinished prototype. Isabella had copied it. Elena had warned me exactly what it could do, and I had called her jealous.

I pulled out my phone and opened the tracker I had installed on Elena’s device years ago. The map showed her at JFK’s international-departures terminal, moving toward the gates.

I watched the dot blink once.

Then it disappeared.