Chapter 6 - The Mask Slips
Ten minutes earlier, Dante Moretti had believed his fiancée was a cold-blooded assassin sent by her father to destroy his bloodline.
Ten seconds earlier, he had been fully prepared to blow her brains across the nursery wall.
Now, the woman everyone in his house feared was kneeling over his brother’s child, her bare hands working with furious, practiced precision to clear a thick, gelatinous blockage from the infant’s windpipe, while the baby’s frantic cries grew stronger and louder with every passing second.
And Clara Bell?
The saintly nanny, the pillar of the household, was staring down at the breathing, crying baby with an expression of unmistakable, bottomless horror.
Not because Leo had been injured.
Because he had survived.
Dante saw it. In the flickering light of the storm-tossed room, the mask of the terrified, devoted caretaker fractured and shattered into dust. Clara’s eyes were wide, her mouth slightly parted in a silent snarl of frustration, her fingers twitching involuntarily as if reaching out to finish a job interrupted.
"Sal," Dante called out, his voice a low, vibrating growl without turning his head.
Salvatore Mercer materialized in the doorway, his own pistol drawn, his eyes sweeping the room in a fraction of a second to assess the battlefield. When he saw the broken window, the bloody scalpel, and the weeping, terrified nanny versus the calm, blood-spattered surgeon, Sal’s professional instincts locked onto the anomaly.
"Boss?"
"Lock down the estate," Dante commanded, his voice dropping an octave into pure ice. "Nobody leaves. No cars through the gates. Cut the external comms lines. Anyone who tries to move gets put down."
Sal’s eyes flicked to Clara Bell, who was beginning to back away toward the hallway door, her breathing shallow and erratic.
"Got it," Sal murmured, stepping sideways to block the threshold. He didn't point his gun at her, but his massive frame completely sealed the exit.
Vivienne finally exhaled, letting her shoulders drop as she lifted Leo into her arms, pressing the crying infant against her chest. The dark stain on her dress was smeared across the cotton of the baby's onesie. She looked up at Dante, her gray eyes dark with exhaustion and a cold, vindicating fury.
"Anaphylactic shock," Vivienne said, her voice steady. "Someone introduced a concentrated dose of peanut protein into his evening formula. Within minutes, his pharynx swelled shut. If I had been ten seconds slower with the emergency tracheotomy, he would have suffocated before you reached the stairs."
Dante rose slowly to his feet. He looked down at Clara.
The nanny had stopped backing away. Her face was deathly pale.
"Clara," Dante said softly, taking a step toward her. "You told me she was killing him."
"I—I thought she was!" Clara stammerz, her voice suddenly shrill and desperate as she fell to her knees, clutching at the hem of Dante's jacket once more—the exact same gesture she had used moments before to seal Vivienne’s execution. "I walked in and saw the blade! She had it right at his neck! I panicked, Mr. Moretti! You have to believe me!"
May you like
Dante looked down at her small, trembling hands. Then he looked at the blood on Vivienne’s dress, and finally at the open bottle of formula sitting on the mahogany changing table across the room.
"You didn't panic, Clara," Dante said, his voice dropping into a register so chilling that Sal Mercer unconsciously stepped back. "You exposed yourself."
