Chapter 3 - The Price of a Secret
Leah didn't scream. Screaming woke up Matteo, and waking up Matteo caused his heart rate to spike—something the doctors had strictly warned her against.
Instead, she grabbed Vance’s pinky finger on his choking hand and bent it backward with every ounce of force she possessed.
Vance grunted in pain, his grip instantly loosening. Leah tore herself free, backing away toward the kitchen counter, grabbing a heavy cast-iron skillet from the drying rack.
"I am the woman who just carried your two-hundred-pound body up five flights of stairs!" Leah hissed, holding the skillet like a weapon. "I am the woman who saved you from being thrown into a delivery van by two men in dark suits! So if you try to choke me again, Gabriel Vance, I will crack your skull with this pan and drop you out the window!"
Vance lay back against the sofa cushions, his chest heaving as he stared at her through the haze of poison.
His amber eyes flickered with a mixture of shock and lethal calculation. He looked at the frying pan, then at Leah’s soaked, grease-stained server uniform, then at the modest, modest room around him.
"You... know my name," he rasped, his voice sounding like grinding stone.
"Everyone knows your name," Leah said, her breathing ragged as she set the skillet down on the counter. "You own half the city. Or at least, you did until your friends decided to put you in a laundry cart."
Vance reached up, touching his throat where the paralytic had caused his muscles to spasm. He looked down at his ruined suit, then checked his inner pocket.
His eyes hardened instantly. "Where is the envelope?"
"What envelope?" Leah asked, stepping back to hand him a glass of tap water. "There was no envelope. Just your wallet, your tie, and that broken glass vial."
Vance ignored the water. He sat up slowly, every muscle in his body fighting the lingering effects of the neurotoxin. He searched his pockets frantically, his jaw clenching so tight his facial muscles twitched.
"It was in the lining," he muttered, pulling out his leather wallet and ripping the silk interior lining open with a single sharp motion.
Empty.
"They took it before they put me in the cart," Vance said, his voice dropping into a register of cold, terrifying calm that made the room feel twenty degrees colder. "Sable took it."
"Who is Sable?" Leah asked, crossing her arms over her chest to keep her hands from shaking.
Vance looked up at her, his amber eyes locking onto hers with an intensity that made Leah’s skin prickle.
"Dominic Sable," Vance said slowly. "My underboss. My right hand for ten years. The man who sat at my dinner table every Sunday."
He paused, looking around the small living room—the cheap wallpaper, the toy trains on the shelf, the faint sound of a child coughing in the next room.
"You brought me to your home," Vance said, his voice quiet. "You shouldn't have done that."
"I wasn't going to let them kill you in a dark alley!" Leah snapped softly. "I'm a banquet server, not an executioner!"
"It doesn't matter what you are," Vance said, sitting forward, placing his elbows on his knees. "Sable isn't just taking my business, Miss...?"
"Moreno. Leah Moreno."
"Sable isn't just taking my territory, Miss Moreno," Vance said, his tone flat, devoid of emotion. "He is erasing everyone who ever looked at me. By sunrise, his men will search every square inch of the Grand Aurelia. They will check the CCTV logs. They will check the staff rosters. They will trace the laundromat van."
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He leaned in closer, his dark face inches from hers.
"By noon tomorrow," Vance whispered, "Dominic Sable will burn this building to the ground to make sure I am dead. And he will kill everyone inside it."
