Chapter 8 - THE PRICE OF AN OATH
Damian Cross stood three feet from the physician.
His muscular frame filled the narrow stairwell, casting a suffocating shadow over the trembling doctor. Damian’s face was an unreadable mask of dark stone, his light stubble catching the gold sconce light, his dark wavy hair undisturbed.
He reached out. With infinite care, his large, tattooed hand reached up and gently adjusted Dr. Valenti’s crooked spectacles, settling them back onto the bridge of the man’s sweating nose.
The gentleness of the gesture was a thousand times more terrifying than a closed fist.
“Your son, Thomas?” Damian asked, his baritone voice smooth, melodic, and dead. “The boy studying law at Columbia? The boy whose tuition I paid for three weeks ago?”
Valenti began to weep, tears streaming down his flabby, pale cheeks, his teeth chattering against his lip. “The Moretti family… Damian, they took him from his apartment on Tuesday night. They sent me his finger in a silver box! They said… they said if I didn't switch the compounding batch with the concentrated aconite synthesis, they’d send me his head!”
Marcus’s jaw dropped. Aconite. The monkshood root. A lethal neurotoxin that mimicked massive ventricular failure, nearly undetectable in post-mortem toxicological screens for a patient with severe cardiovascular history.
Valenti had not merely betrayed them; he had concocted a masterpiece of invisible assassination.
“They told me… they said you’d take the pill at seven like you always do,” Valenti sobbed, his voice cracking into a ragged wail. “They said you never check. They said you just swallow it with the water! I was supposed to come in at seven-thirty to find you… declare it natural arrest… sign the death certificate before the state examiners could touch the body…”
Damian didn't flinch. He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out the small, white counterfeit pill.
He held it between two scarred fingers, holding it directly in front of the doctor’s weeping eyes.
“Aconite,” Damian murmured softly. “Tell me, Doctor… does it hurt?”
Valenti’s eyes widened in sheer, catastrophic horror. He began to thrash against Marcus’s grip, his feet kicking out against the stair runners, choking on his own vomit. “No! Damian, no! God, please! I’ve served your family for twenty years! I saved your life in Queens!”
“And I gave you an empire’s protection in return,” Damian replied, his voice dropping into a register that felt like earth falling into an open grave. “If you had come to me on Tuesday night… if you had walked into my office and told me the Morettis took your boy… Thomas would be home eating breakfast right now, and five Moretti captains would be floating in the East River.”
Damian leaned down, his eyes boring into Valenti’s shattered soul.
“Instead… you chose to trade my life for his.”
Damian turned his back on the weeping doctor.
“Marcus,” Damian commanded quietly.
“Yes, Boss?”
“Call Leo and the Brooklyn crews. Thomas Valenti is to be located and extracted from the Moretti warehouse in Red Hook within two hours. Alive.”
Valenti gasped, looking up through his tears in stunned, incomprehensible disbelief. “You… you’re saving my son?”
Damian paused at the corner of the corridor, looking back over his broad, tattooed shoulder.
“Your son is innocent, Doctor,” Damian said coldly. “You, however, made a professional transaction. Marcus… take him to the basement. When Thomas is safe… feed him his own medicine.”
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“No! Damian! Nooooo!”
Valenti’s screams were cut short as Marcus clamped a heavy, gloved hand over the doctor’s mouth and dragged his thrashing, weeping body down the rear service stairs into the soundproof concrete depths of the estate.
