Chapter 4 - THE DESCENT OF THE BROKEN KING
The climb up the four flights of stairs felt like scaling Mount Everest. With every step, a white-hot cramp ripped through my lower abdomen, and my vision tunneled until the edges of my sight blurred into blackness. By the time I reached the fourth-floor landing, I was sobbing silently, gasping for air in the freezing corridor.
I managed to turn the knob of Room 4B and stumble inside, collapsing onto the small wooden stool beside the fireplace.
“John...” I sobbed, burying my face in my shaking hands, the pain in my stomach becoming an unbearable, rhythmic crushing sensation. “I think... I think I’m losing her. Mrs. Gable... she’s going to kill us both.”
In his rusted wheelchair near the window, Giovanni Moretti turned his head with a speed and fluidity that defied his paralyzed state. His milky, clouded eyes locked onto me, taking in my pale, tear-stained face, my trembling hands pressed against my swollen stomach, and the raw agony twisting my features.
Something inside the old man—something ancient, ruthless, and terrifyingly powerful—finally snapped.
For five long years, he had sat in this freezing room like a caged animal, enduring the indignities of a staff that thought he was a vegetable, watching his legacy get hollowed out by greed and incompetence. He had stayed silent because his body was a prison, because the time hadn't been right, because revenge was a dish best served cold.
But looking at me—the only person in this entire cursed mansion who had ever shown him an ounce of genuine human kindness, the girl who fed him, washed him, and spoke to him with love while carrying an innocent child—he realized he couldn't wait another second.
A deep, guttural sound rose from the back of Giovanni’s throat. A sound that hadn't been heard in these halls for half a decade.
“Argh...”
I gasped, lifting my head through my tears, staring at him in shock.
Giovanni gripped the rubber-rimmed wheels of his wheelchair with both hands. His knuckles turned white, the skin stretching taut over his bony fingers as the veins in his forearms bulged with a superhuman surge of adrenaline and sheer, unyielding willpower.
“Geh... ah...”
“John? What are you doing?” I whispered, scrambling off the stool, forgetting my own pain for a fraction of a second as I rushed to his side. “Don't strain yourself—let me help—”
With a violent, shuddering heave that popped the rusted bearings in the chair’s axle, Giovanni Moretti wrenched the wheels forward.
The heavy oak door of Room 4B stood slightly ajar.
Without looking back, using every ounce of strength left in his withered, seventy-year-old body, Giovanni wheeled himself out of the room and into the freezing hallway.
Panic seized my chest, overriding my contractions. If Mrs. Gable or any of the guards found him wandering out of his room, they would punish him cruelly—and they would fire me instantly.
“John, stop! Please, you’ll get hurt!” I cried out, rushing after him, grabbing the back of his wheelchair to slow his descent.
But stopping Giovanni Moretti was like trying to stop an avalanche with your bare hands.
He rolled down the fourth-floor corridor with terrifying momentum, passing the abandoned guest suites, heading straight toward the grand central staircase that overlooked the multi-story foyer below.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. The pain in my stomach flared into a blinding supernova of agony, but I ignored it, planting my feet and holding onto the handles of the wheelchair as we reached the top of the grand marble staircase.
Down below, on the ground-floor foyer, the silence was absolute.
Mrs. Gable was standing near the front doors, instructing two junior housemaids on how to arrange floral centerpieces for the evening dinner.
Suddenly, a strange, metallic grinding noise echoed down from the upper levels of the mansion.
Mrs. Gable froze, frowning, and looked up toward the vaulted ceiling. “What on earth is that?”
One of the housemaids gasped, dropping her bouquet of lilies. “Look!”
All movement in the foyer ceased. Every head turned upward, eyes widening in sheer, unadulterated horror.
Emerging from the shadows of the upper landing, pushing his own wheelchair forward with trembling, claw-like hands, was Old John.
And standing directly behind him, clutching his wheelchair with pale, bloodstained hands and weeping in pain, was me.
Mrs. Gable’s face drained of all color. Her jaw dropped open, her eyes bulging as terror paralyzed her vocal cords.
“Get... get down here right now!” Mrs. Gable shrieked, her voice cracking with panic as she realized the disaster unfolding above her. “Security! Get those lunatics away from the landing before Mr. Moretti hears this!”
Before any of the guards could move toward the grand staircase, the heavy oak door of the ground-floor study swung open.
Lorenzo Moretti stepped out into the foyer, his dark overcoat slung over one arm, a sheaf of financial reports in his hand. He looked irritated by the sudden commotion.
“What is the meaning of this racket?” Lorenzo’s cold, baritone voice cut through the silence like a razor blade. “I gave explicit instructions—”
He stopped dead in his tracks.
His gray eyes swept upward, locking onto the top of the grand staircase.
He saw the rusted wheelchair. He saw the frail, broken old man sitting in it.
And then, his gaze shifted slightly to the left.
His eyes landed on me—a twenty-three-year-old pregnant maid, standing in a puddle of my own silent agony, clutching the back of the wheelchair while tears streamed down my pale face.
The entire grand foyer held its collective breath. You could hear the wind howling against the leaded glass windows outside, three miles deep in the snow-choked mountains.
Giovanni Moretti raised his right hand.
For five long years, that hand had been dead, paralyzed, useless. But now, fueled by a rage older than mountains and a fierce, protective instinct that transcended speech, his trembling arm rose into the air.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
His index finger extended, pointing a direct, unyielding accusation straight down from the landing.
And for the first time in five years, Giovanni Moretti spoke.
May you like
His voice was a gravelly, subterranean roar that rattled the crystal chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling—a voice forged in blood, power, and absolute dominion.
“Kill... them... all.”
