Chapter 19 - The Sins of Our Blood
The library doors swung open with a heavy groan, revealing a massive, oak-paneled room surrounded by towering bookshelves and floor-to-ceiling windows that shook against the violent ocean gale.
Marco Moretti sat behind an antique desk, a bottle of bourbon half-empty beside him, his shirt heavily bandaged and soaked through with dark crimson. On the desk lay an antique pearl-handled revolver and an open case containing two silver chalices. He looked up at us as we entered, his eyes hollow, sunken, and burning with the madness of a man whose world had collapsed in a single evening.
He looked at Matteo and me, shaking his head with bitter, venomous disgust. He asked us if we felt proud of ourselves for destroying the grand dynasty our ancestors had bled for generations to construct. He sneered that we had traded a sovereign kingdom for the pathetic, mundane life of common peasants.
I stepped forward, my boots tracking wet sea spray across his Persian rugs, keeping my pistol locked on his heart. I told him that an empire built on the slaughter of its own children was never a dynasty; it was merely an abattoir ruled by cowards who were terrified of dying alone.
Marco laughed, a coughing, bloody sound that rattled in his throat. In a sudden, desperate burst of speed, he whipped the pearl-handled revolver from the desk, aiming straight at my face.
A deafening shot shattered the room.
The bullet did not come from Marco's gun, nor did it come from mine.
Matteo's assault rifle kicked back in his hands, firing a single, perfectly placed round through our father's chest. Marco's weapon slipped from his lifeless fingers, clattering uselessly against the polished floorboards. He slumped forward over his mahogany desk, his blood pooling over the centuries-old maps of the city he had tried and failed to rule.
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The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the rhythmic, indifferent roar of the Atlantic Ocean crashing violently against the cliffs below. Matteo lowered his rifle, letting out a long, shuddering breath that seemed to release twelve years of subterranean darkness from his chest.
I placed a steady hand on my brother's shoulder. It was over. The architects of our nightmare were dead, their empire was in ashes, and the bloodline of violence was broken forever.
