Chapter 6 - The Dragon’s Blood
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At four minutes and fifty seconds, the towering double doors of the second-floor library swung open.
Lorenzo Bellini strolled into the room with his hands in the pockets of his charcoal trousers, no submachine gun in sight, looking as calm and unbothered as if he had come down to offer his guests a mid-morning brandy.
The library was packed with killers. Six of Vittorio Drago’s capos stood along the mahogany bookshelves with their suit jackets open over shoulder holsters. Marcus Gallo stood by the fireplace with a shotgun aimed lazily toward the doorway, and seated in Lorenzo’s own leather armchair behind the partner’s desk was Genevieve, smoking a slim ivory cigarette in a silver holder.
Near the tall bay windows stood Don Vittorio Drago himself, leaning both hands on a silver-headed walking cane.
"Where is the maid, Lorenzo?" Genevieve asked coldly, blowing a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. "And the key?"
"Resting upstairs," Lorenzo replied smoothly, stopping in the center of the Persian rug. "After three days without water thanks to your hospitality, Genevieve, she wasn't in the mood for company. Though I have to ask, Marcus—how much did my stepmother pay you to spit on twenty-five years of my father’s bread?"
Marcus’s jaw tightened, lifting the barrel of the shotgun an inch. "Your father left me a fifty-thousand-dollar insult in his will while leaving you half of New York, Lorenzo. Miss Genevieve and Don Vittorio offered me the Westchester trucking routes."
"Which you’ll enjoy for about twenty minutes before Drago puts a bullet in the back of your head because nobody trusts a dog that bites its own master," Lorenzo said conversationally, turning his dark gaze toward the old Don by the window. "Isn't that right, Vittorio?"
Vittorio Drago’s weathered face remained carved from stone. "I didn't drive up from Bensonhurst to discuss your hiring mistakes, Bellini. On Tuesday afternoon, Genevieve called me with proof that your father, Salvatore, murdered your mother in 1998 to cover up his theft of the sixty million in Commission bearer bonds—and blamed my brother Carlo, whom your father had executed in front of a warehouse in Red Hook."
"My father was a liar and a butcher," Lorenzo said evenly. "On that, you and I agree. The rusted Geneva key is sitting in my safe upstairs. You can have the sixty million, Vittorio—with thirty years of compound interest—as blood money for Carlo."
Genevieve’s eyes narrowed sharply behind her cigarette smoke. That was too easy. "Don't listen to him, Vittorio! He’s stalling! Shoot him and take the key off his body!"
"Why would I stall?" Lorenzo asked softly, taking a single step closer to the old Don by the window. "When the real reason Genevieve invited you here this morning isn't to avenge your brother Carlo... it’s to make sure you help her burn down my third floor before you realize who is sleeping up there."
Drago frowned, his bushy gray eyebrows drawing together. "What are you talking about?"
"Genevieve told you my housekeeper was upstairs, didn't she?" Lorenzo’s voice dropped into a quiet, surgical cadence that commanded the entire room. "Did she also mention that my housekeeper has a five-year-old niece living in this house? A little girl born five years ago this month, three days before her twenty-two-year-old mother’s brakes were cut on the Bear Mountain Bridge?"
Across the desk, the color drained completely from Genevieve’s powdered face. She crushed her cigarette out in the crystal ashtray and stood up so fast her chair hit the bookcase.
"Marcus, shoot him!" Genevieve shrieked. "Right now! He’s lying!"
Before Marcus could pull the trigger of the twelve-gauge, Lorenzo drew his hand out of his pocket and tossed the thin gold chain onto the mahogany desk directly in front of Vittorio Drago.
The ruby eyes of the coiled gold dragon gleamed under the desk lamp.
"Hold your fire!" Vittorio Drago roared, raising his silver-headed cane to stop his six gunmen—and making Marcus freeze in his tracks.
With trembling, age-spotted fingers, the seventy-year-old crime boss picked up the gold dragon charm and clicked open the tiny companion locket showing his late son, Dante, smiling with his arm around a young brunette woman with hazel eyes.
"Where did you get this?" Drago whispered, his gravelly voice cracking with sudden, terrible emotion. "I gave this charm to Dante on his twenty-first birthday. He wasn't wearing it the night he was killed in Little Italy."
"Because he gave it to the woman carrying his child two weeks before he died," Lorenzo said, pointing a finger straight at Genevieve’s pale face. "And six months later, when Genevieve found out Dante’s girl had given birth to a daughter—a daughter who also happened to be my own mother Sofia’s blood granddaughter—Genevieve paid a mechanic to cut the girl’s brakes so she could steal both our families' empires without a living heir in her way."
Vittorio Drago slowly lifted his head. The look he turned on Genevieve wasn't the calculated coldness of a businessman; it was the volcanic fury of an old lion who had thought his bloodline was extinct for five years.
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"You killed Dante’s girl?" Drago whispered. "And you brought my men here today to burn my own flesh and blood alive on the third floor?"
Marcus Gallo saw which way the wind was blowing in half a heartbeat—and instead of aiming the shotgun at Lorenzo, he swung the barrel toward Drago to blast his way out of the room.
