Chapter 8 - When the King Kneels Before the Maid
Valenti never reached him.
Gabriel caught the accountant's wrist mid-air with bone-snapping force. A sickening crack echoed in the alley, followed by Valenti's agonized shriek as the knife clattered to the wet concrete.
Gabriel slammed Valenti against the brick wall, his hand locked around the traitor's throat, lifting him several inches off the ground.
"Who paid you, Leo?" Gabriel demanded, his voice a chilling growl that cut through the thunder. "Was it Vincenzo? Or did Julianna write the checks?"
"You... you destroyed everything!" Valenti choked out, his face turning purple. "Moretti offered us forty percent of the docks! You kept us on scraps! Cole and I... we were going to share the northern territory!"
"You sold my life for forty percent of a rotting dockyard?" Gabriel whispered.
With a swift, brutal motion, Gabriel threw Valenti to the ground. Carmine arrived a second later, gun drawn, his face streaked with rain and soot.
"Tie him up and throw him in the trunk," Gabriel commanded coldly. "He will tell us everything he knows before the sun comes up."
Gabriel turned back to me. The fury in his eyes vanished instantly, replaced by an expression of raw, unshielded vulnerability.
"Elena," he said, stepping toward me. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine," I whispered, my voice trembling from the adrenaline coursing through my veins. "Gabriel... your shoulder."
The violent struggle had torn the healing tissue. Dark crimson blood was soaking through his tailored tuxedo shirt, blooming across the white silk like a crimson flower.
Gabriel looked down at his wound, then looked back at me. Without a word, the most feared mafia don in the state of New York dropped to one knee in the rain-soaked alley.
He reached up, gently taking my trembling, rain-soaked hands into his.
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"You have bled for my debts, Elena," he said, his voice husky with an emotion that transcended mafia politics and power. "You have saved my life twice. I swear to you on my family's grave—no harm will ever touch you again as long as I draw breath."
I looked down at this dangerous, powerful man kneeling in the mud before me, and for the first time, I didn't see a crime lord. I saw a man who would burn the world to keep me safe.
