Chapter 74 - The Scent of Bitter Almond
Blood pooled instantly beneath Henri Cassel’s broken nose, smearing across the immaculate white pages of the leather ledger. Cassel’s two bodyguards reached inside their overcoats with frantic haste, but before their leather holsters could clear fabric, Marco had two silenced semi-automatics drawn and leveled directly between their eyes.
"Move a finger," Marco growled with icy precision, "and you die before your knees hit the floor."
Dante remained seated, his left hand pressing Cassel’s face firmly against the cold steel, while his right hand smoothly withdrew a slim, silver folding knife from his waistcoat. With a flick of his wrist, the surgical steel blade snapped open, gleaming under the harsh halogen floodlight.
Dante pressed the razor tip directly against the carotid artery pulsing furiously in Cassel’s neck.
"You mentioned my daughter," Dante murmured, his voice deadly calm, almost intimate. "You spoke her name in a room filled with rats and diesel smoke."
Cassel gasped through a mouthful of blood and broken teeth, the arrogance completely drained from his pale face, replaced by the sheer, paralyzing horror that every man who had ever crossed Dante Moretti eventually experienced. "Wait... Moretti... this was... business..."
"You do not do business with me," Dante said, pressing the blade just deep enough to draw a single, bright bead of scarlet. "I built this city’s peace on the bones of men far smarter, far crueler, and far more powerful than you. If you ever breathe my daughter’s name again, if your shadow falls across Mulberry Street, or Grand Street, or the shores of Red Hook, I will not simply kill you, Cassel. I will systematically erase every warehouse, every vessel, and every man bearing the name of Saint-Malo from Montreal to Marseilles."
Dante leaned closer, his dark eyes boring into the dying embers of Cassel’s defiance. "Who gave you the ledger?"
Cassel shuddered, his breath rattling against the bloody steel. "It... it came from inside New York... a lawyer... a man with a ring..."
"What ring?" Dante demanded.
"Bitter almond..." Cassel choked out, his eyes widening in sudden, inexplicable panic. "He... he wore the ring of the Palermo Tribunal... the old council... they never died, Dante... they went into banking... they want the docks back..."
Before Cassel could say another word, his entire body seized in violent convulsions. A horrifying spasm arched his spine; his eyes rolled backward into his head, showing only whites, and white frothy foam tinged with yellow erupted from his lips. A sharp, sickly-sweet scent filled the air between them—the unmistakable odor of bitter almond. Cyanide.
Dante released his grip and stepped back instantly, wiping the spray of blood from his cuff with a linen handkerchief.
Cassel collapsed sideways off the stool, crashing onto the concrete floor, his limbs twitching once, twice, before going limp and lifeless in a widening puddle of blood and foam.
"Cyanide capsule in a false crown," Marco said, stepping forward, his weapons still trained on the two petrified bodyguards. "He was on a timer the moment he sat down with you."
Dante looked down at the dead Frenchman, his jaw clenched tight. The two bodyguards dropped their weapons to the concrete with clattering thuds, raising their trembling hands high above their heads.
"Who do you take orders from?" Dante asked them, his voice echoing through the silent, cavernous warehouse.
"We don't know, signore!" one of them wept in broken Italian. "We swear by the Virgin! We were hired at the port in Newark three days ago by an attorney named Castiglione. He paid cash. He told us Henri was just delivering a message!"
Dante turned slowly toward Marco. "Castiglione died seven years ago in a hospital in Milan."
"Then someone is using a dead man’s name to pull the strings of an empire," Marco whispered grimly.
May you like
"Clean this up," Dante ordered, turning his back on the corpse and striding toward the exit. "Burn the ledger, search the pier, and double the guard around Bellanote. The ghosts of Sicily have come to collect a debt that was never ours."
***
