Chapter 6 - THE ANATOMY OF A LETHAL ANOMALY
The pill rested in the center of Damian’s palm, right along the dark black ink of a serpent’s coiled tail.
It was round, flat-faced, and scored with a single groove across the center, appearing almost identical to the twenty-five-milligram tablets he had swallowed every morning for seven hundred days.
Damian stepped closer to the Calacatta marble table, bringing the tablet directly into the beam of morning light. He brought the plastic bottle up beside it, comparing the pill to the text on the label.
To the naked eye, it seemed immaculate. But Damian’s senses were hyper-tuned now, vibrating with the primal paranoia of a hunter who has spotted a snare in the grass.
He pinched the tablet between his thumb and index finger.
The texture was wrong.
A genuine pharmaceutical tablet from St. Jude’s had a smooth, compressed glaze designed to withstand humidity. This tablet was slightly chalkier, the edge around the perimeter microscopically uneven, as if pressed by a hand-turned rotary dye in a makeshift basement laboratory rather than an industrial cleanroom. When he applied a fraction of pressure, the edges shed a faint dusting of white powder onto his dark skin.
A beta-blocker overdose for a man with a damaged heart muscle would not look like murder. It would look like sudden, catastrophic arrhythmia. A heart attack. A tragic complication of an existing pathology. No entry wounds. No gunshots. No poisoned tea. Just an ambitious don collapsing over his marble breakfast table at seven-fifteen in the morning, leaving his vast empire leaderless and vulnerable to a hostile takeover.
Damian closed his fingers slowly around the pill, his knuckle bones turning white beneath his skin.
He turned his head. His eyes locked onto Marcus.
The look on Damian’s face was not anger. Anger was an emotion for weak men who were surprised by betrayal. What burned in Damian’s eyes was a cold, absolute, subterranean void—the look of an emperor preparing to level a province.
“Who touched my medication?” Damian asked.
The question was spoken in a low, dead tone that made the hairs on the back of Marcus’s neck stand up.
Marcus took a step forward, his jaw set, his voice tight with an agonizing mixture of fury and shame. “The delivery was brought in at four yesterday by Enzo from the transport crew. It was placed in the private pantry safe on the second floor, code-locked. Only four people have that code, Boss. Me, you, Enzo… and Dr. Valenti.”
“Enzo is at the gatehouse,” Damian murmured, his voice flat as a frozen lake. “And Valenti?”
“Valenti was in the clinic yesterday evening. Said he had an emergency consultation.”
Before Marcus could finish his sentence, a small, tugging sensation pulled at the hem of Damian’s black trousers.
Damian looked down.
Sophia was looking up at him, her hazel eyes completely calm. Without a word, she raised her small, pale hand and pointed her finger toward the open archway of the east corridor.
Footsteps.
Faint, muffled, hurried footsteps suddenly stopped somewhere beyond the mahogany paneling of the hallway.
May you like
Someone had been standing just around the corner, waiting in the shadows to see if the morning ritual would conclude with a glass of water and a collapsing body. And now, realizing the routine had stalled, they had frozen in the dark.
Damian Cross slowly, deliberately turned his head toward the sound.
