CHAPTER 5: First Blood
1797 Words
She woke to shouting.
For a second, Elena thought she was dreaming. The room was dark, the curtains drawn. The digital clock on the bedside table read 2:13 a.m.
Then she heard it again—muffled voices, urgent, coming from somewhere below. The distant thud of hurried footsteps.
Her heart slammed into wakefulness.
She slid out of bed, wrapping the soft robe from the wardrobe around herself. The floor was cold under her bare feet as she padded to the door and cracked it open.
The hallway glowed dimly with night lights. Down the stairs, shadows moved—a flash of black suits, glint of metal. Someone barked an order in Italian.
Every instinct she had from growing up in bad neighborhoods told her: stay put. Lock the door. Hide under the bed.
Another instinct—stubborn, reckless—pushed her forward.
She crept down the hall, staying near the wall, and leaned over the banister at the top of the staircase.
The foyer below swarmed with motion. Two of Matteo’s men were dragging someone between them—a figure in dark clothing, mask half-torn, blood staining the side of his face. A third followed, gun drawn.
Matteo stood in the middle of it all, barefoot on the marble, wearing only sweatpants and a black t-shirt. He looked like he’d been dragged straight from sleep, but there was nothing groggy about him. His eyes were sharp, his jaw clenched, veins standing out in his forearms.
“What did I say about the east wall?” he demanded, voice low but carrying.
“Thought we fixed the cameras, boss,” one of the men said, breathless. “He slipped past the hedge. We caught him near the side door.”
“Nearly in the kitchen,” another added. “If Marco hadn’t seen movement…”
The name made Elena’s stomach flip. A different Marco, she reminded herself. One of Matteo’s men. Not her brother.
The intruder groaned, trying to straighten. He was young—no more than mid-twenties, Elena guessed—from the brief glimpse she had of his eyes when the men shifted their hold.
“Who sent you?” Matteo asked.
The intruder spat on the floor.
One of the guards raised his gun, anger flashing across his face.
“Stop,” Matteo said sharply, and the man froze.
He stepped closer to the intruder, so close their foreheads almost touched.
“You break into my home,” Matteo said softly, dangerously soft, “and you threaten my people. You’re either brave or stupid. Which one is it?”
The intruder’s jaw worked. “You think you own this city,” he rasped. “But you’re just sitting on a throne made of other people’s blood.”
Elena’s fingers tightened around the banister.
He laughed, a bitter sound. “Il Corvo sends his regards, De Luca. Says your walls aren’t as strong as you think.”
A muscle ticked in Matteo’s cheek.
“Take him to the cellar,” he said.
The guards moved.
The intruder wrenched himself sideways with surprising strength, twisting out of one man’s grip. In the same motion, he grabbed for the guard’s gun.
The shot cracked through the foyer like lightning.
Elena gasped.
The intruder jerked, eyes going wide, then crumpled, blood blooming across his chest.
For a heartbeat, everything froze.
Then chaos exploded.
“s**t,” one of the guards hissed. “I didn’t— he grabbed—”
“Get him out of here,” Matteo snapped. “Now.”
The men moved with drilled efficiency, hauling the limp body away. Another rushed to clean the blood from the floor, as if it were spilled wine instead of life.
Elena’s mouth tasted like metal.
She took an involuntary step back—and her heel clicked on the polished wood.
Matteo’s head snapped up.
Their eyes met across the dim space.
For a moment, it felt like the whole house inhaled.
“Elena,” he said.
It wasn’t loud, but it might as well have been shouted.
Every guard in the foyer looked up. Rosa, who had appeared at the edge of the chaos in a simple nightgown, let out a soft exclamation.
“Back to bed,” she hissed up the stairs. “You should not—”
“I’m fine,” Elena said, but her voice shook.
Matteo held her gaze for another beat, then jerked his chin at the men.
“Clean up,” he ordered. “Tighten patrol on the east wall. Double the cameras. I want every inch of that hedge wired.”
“Yes, boss.”
He started up the stairs, taking them two at a time. The closer he came, the more Elena saw.
The tension in his shoulders. The vein thudding in his neck. The thin spray of red across his forearm, already drying.
He stopped one step below her, bringing them almost eye-to-eye.
“How much did you see?” he asked.
“Enough,” she whispered.
His jaw tightened. “This is why I said you stay in your room.”
“I heard shouting,” she shot back, fear sharpening into anger. “Did you expect me to just pretend nothing was happening while people screamed in your house?”
“They weren’t screaming,” he said. “Yet.”
The casual brutality of the word made her stomach heave.
“What would have happened if he hadn’t grabbed the gun?” she demanded. “You’d have just… taken him for coffee? Had a chat?
Asked who sent him and sent him home with a souvenir?”
A shadow crossed his face.
“I would have gotten information,” he said. “And then I would have decided what to do with him.”
“Do you ever decide anything that doesn’t involve blood?”
“You’re alive because I decided not to spill your brother’s,” he snapped.
The words cracked across the air between them.
She flinched.
Silence dropped, heavy and thick.
Immediately, remorse flickered in his eyes—not for the fact, she suspected, but for flinging it like a weapon.
“Elena,” he said, voice lower. “This is my world. People like him will keep trying to get in. That’s why I put walls here. That’s why I put you behind them. So you don’t have to see this.”
“But I do see it,” she said. “The gunshot. The way he fell. I see it, Matteo. You can’t pretend that locking me upstairs makes it disappear.”
His hand shot out, grabbing the banister beside her head, caging her in without touching her.
“I don’t pretend,” he said. “I preempt. That’s the difference between men like me and the ones bleeding on my floor.”
Her breath hitched. He was too close. She could see the fleck of darker brown in his left iris, the faint scar near his jawline.
“Il Corvo,” she said, dredging the name up. “He said that name.”
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
“A rival,” Matteo said. “A man who thinks the city isn’t big enough for both of us.”
“Is he right?” she whispered.
A ghost of a smile curved his mouth. “Probably. But I was here first.”
“So this is going to keep happening,” she said. “People breaking in, guns, blood. While I’m upstairs.”
“It shouldn’t have happened tonight,” he said, frustration scorching his tone. “That’s my mistake. It won’t happen again.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I can promise I’ll die before I let it touch you,” he said.
The raw truth in his voice stunned her into silence.
It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t romantic. It was simply… a fact, as solid as the marble beneath their feet.
“I didn’t ask you to do that,” she said, but it came out softer than she intended.
“You didn’t have to,” he replied.
His hand relaxed on the banister. He stepped back, creating space again.
“Go back to bed, Elena,” he said. “Rosa will bring you tea if you want. Take something to sleep if you can’t.”
She wanted to argue. To demand more answers. To scream that she wasn’t a piece of expensive porcelain to be kept in a high cabinet while men bled downstairs.
But the image of the intruder collapsing replayed in her mind, over and over.
Her legs felt unsteady.
“I don’t want tea,” she murmured. “I want…”
She trailed off, unsure where the sentence had been going.
“Peace?” he suggested.
Her lips twisted. “Do you have any of that lying around between the guns and the contracts?”
For a second—just a second—he looked tired. Bone-deep. Older than his years.
“No,” he said. “But I can give you a locked door and guards on the stairs. It’s the closest thing I can offer.”
It wasn’t enough. It was, for now, all she would get.
“Fine,” she said. “But next time something like this happens, you tell me. I’d rather hear it from you than from Rosa whispering in the kitchen at breakfast.”
“Next time, there won’t be,” he said.
She met his eyes. “You already know there will.”
They held each other’s gaze for a long moment.
Then he inclined his head a fraction, conceding the point.
“Good night, Elena,” he said quietly.
“Good night,” she whispered.
She went back to her room, closed the door, and slid the bolt into place with a soft, decisive click.
Only then did she let herself sink down with her back against the wood, pressing her fists against her mouth to stifle the shaking breaths.
This was her home now.
A house where blood could stain the foyer before dawn; where the man she’d married without a kiss promised to die before he let danger reach her; where enemies had names like birds and climbed walls like shadows.
A house that, as Rosa had warned, would eat the weak.
Elena stared at the dark room and made herself a promise.
You will not be weak here.
Whether Matteo De Luca liked it or not, she would not be just a contract on his desk, a name on his registry, a shadow in his hallway.
She would learn this house.
She would learn his world.
And one day, if the walls ever fell, she would make sure she knew exactly where to run.
Or where to stand and fight.
- Writer
