Chapter 6 - THE LION AWAKES
Marco stepped in front of Nora and the wheelchair, drawing his nine-millimeter pistol and aiming it squarely at the heavy oak door. "Stand back behind the stone hearth, Miss Nora. Now."
"Marco, don't shoot!" Nora whispered frantically, clutching the velvet box and the ledger against her chest. "If gunshots go off in here, they’ll claim you went rogue and killed us both! Mrs. Gable has those guards bought and paid for!"
In the wheelchair, Giovanni’s chest heaved. For five years, the old lion had been trapped in a cage of silenced nerves and deadened muscles while jackals feasted in his house. He looked at Nora—the daughter of the man who had taken a bullet for him twenty-three years ago. He looked at her swollen belly, carrying the innocent little girl she wanted to name Lily.
And then he looked at the heavy cast-iron poker resting against the fireplace grate.
Outside, a heavy boot slammed against the oak door, splintering the wood around the brass lock.
"Break it down!" Mrs. Gable shouted from the hallway. "She has a weapon! Protect the old man!"
She was setting up the alibi right in front of the witnesses—claiming Nora was armed so the paid guards could shoot Nora dead the second the door gave way.
"Put your gun on the table, Marco," Nora said suddenly, her voice steady with fierce maternal clarity. "Do it right now. If they come in and see no weapons, they can't claim self-defense in front of the hallway cameras."
"Wait—there are no cameras in the east wing," Marco protested. "Mrs. Gable told Mr. Moretti the wiring broke three years ago."
Nora looked up at the crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling of room 4B—the chandelier she had dusted by hand two days earlier while standing on a precarious wooden stepladder. Hidden inside the brass canopy at the top of the chain, she had noticed a tiny, blinking green fiber-optic lens that had never been covered in dust.
"Someone has been recording this room," Nora whispered, her eyes widening. "Not Mrs. Gable—if it were hers, she wouldn't have ripped the blanket off him in front of it today."
Before Marco could answer, the oak door burst inward with a deafening crack.
Two burly estate guards rushed into the room, pistols raised, with Mrs. Gable right behind them holding a handkerchief over her red, scalded cheek.
"There she is!" Mrs. Gable cried, pointing a trembling finger at Nora. "She threw boiling water in my face when I caught her stealing the family heirlooms from the rose suite! Look at her hands—she’s holding the Moretti lockbox right now! Take it from her and lock her in the cellar until the snowplows clear the roads!"
The lead guard stepped past Marco, whose hands were raised away from his holstered gun, and reached roughly for Nora’s arm. "Hand it over, girl. Don't make this hard on yourself."
Nora backed up against Giovanni’s wheelchair. "Don't touch me! Ask her why her name is in this ledger! Ask her about the fifty thousand dollars she paid Brody—"
"Shut your mouth, you lying little thief!" Mrs. Gable lunged forward to snatch the leather ledger from Nora’s bandaged hands, raising her other hand to strike Nora across the face.
She never made contact.
As Mrs. Gable’s wrist came within inches of the wheelchair, Giovanni’s right hand shot up like a steel trap and clamped around Lydia Gable’s throat.
A collective gasp tore through the room.
Mrs. Gable’s eyes bulged in sheer, unadulterated terror as she stared down into the face of the man she had poisoned five years ago. The frail, silent invalid was gone. In his place sat Don Giovanni Moretti, his jaw set like granite, veins standing out on his forearm as he held her frozen in place.
His lips parted, trembling with the monumental effort of forcing air through vocal cords that had been silent for sixty months.
"Touch... her..." Giovanni rasped, his voice like grinding stones, low and lethal in the dead silence of the room, "...and... you... die."
Mrs. Gable let out a strangled shriek, clawing at his gnarled fingers until she tore herself backward, stumbling onto the floor at the feet of the stunned security guards.
"He—he spoke!" one of the guards stammered, his pistol wavering downward.
"That’s enough," a deep, thunderous voice commanded from the corridor.
The two estate guards froze, their faces turning as pale as the snow outside.
Dante Moretti stepped through the splintered doorway, flanked by his four personal Manhattan bodyguards, whose weapons were already trained directly on the heads of Mrs. Gable’s two hired men. In Dante’s left hand, he held a sleek black tablet playing a live high-definition video feed from the ceiling chandelier directly above them.
"I had the fiber-optic camera installed during the roof repairs last month after the nurse's signatures stopped matching," Dante said, his gray eyes burning like molten steel as he looked down at Mrs. Gable trembling on the floor. "I’ve been watching the uploaded cloud drive in my study for the last twenty minutes. I saw you rip the blanket off my father. And I just heard everything."
Dante stepped past her and walked straight to his father’s wheelchair, dropping to one knee and placing his hand over Giovanni’s trembling fist.
"Papa," Dante whispered, his voice cracking with raw emotion.
Giovanni looked at his son, then shifted his gaze to Nora, who stood shaking beside him, holding the birth certificate and the ledger.
"Dante..." Giovanni rasped slowly, pointing a shaky finger at the ledger in Nora’s hands. "The... tea. Five years... ago. Not... just... my cup."
Dante frowned, rising slowly to his feet as he took the open ledger and the birth certificate from Nora’s hands. "What do you mean, not just your cup?"
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From the floor, Mrs. Gable began to laugh—a bitter, broken sound as the bodyguards hauled her to her feet in steel handcuffs.
"Go ahead and read the rest of the diary page under that pawn ticket, Dante," Lydia Gable spat, tears of rage and defeat streaking her face. "Your father didn't have a stroke over charity money. He had a stroke because five years ago, your mother Lucia found out what I did—and when I poisoned the teapot that night, Lucia drank the first cup before driving out into the rain!"
