Chapter 15 - The Devil's Vow
Elena felt the world shatter beneath her feet. She held Mia tighter, instinctively stepping backward into the cover of the tree line. The child whimpered, confused and scared by the tension crackling between the adults.
"You're lying," Matteo snarled, taking a threatening step forward, his knuckles turning white on the pistol. "I identified the body. The dental records—"
"—Were forged by the Russian Federal Security Service," the woman interrupted smoothly. "My father, Victor, gave me a choice: stay chained to a crumbling Italian mobster playing at shipping legitimate cargo, or come home and inherit the entire Eurasian syndicate. You were going soft, Matteo. You were turning my daughter into a domestic weakling."
Sophia's eyes drifted past Matteo, locking onto Elena and the little girl in her arms. The maternal tenderness Elena had hoped to see was completely absent; there was only the cold, evaluating calculation of an oligarch appraising an asset.
"Give me the child, Matteo," Sophia commanded, stepping away from the sedan. "My extraction helicopter lands in three minutes at the clearing down the hill. Hand her over, and I will let you walk away with your pathetic little nanny. Keep resisting, and my father's gunships will level this entire peninsula."
Matteo stood motionless between the woman he had once loved and the child who was his entire world. The wind whipped his soaked clothes against his skin, the scar over his eyebrow pulsing with silent fury.
Elena watched him, her breath caught in her throat. She saw the agonizing fracture in his soul—the memory of a wife he had mourned for eight brutal months colliding with the monster standing before him.
Slowly, deliberately, Matteo lowered the gun.
Sophia smiled, triumphant, extending her gloved arms toward Mia. "Smart boy. Come to Mama, Mia."
Matteo took three slow steps forward, closing the distance until he was inches from Sophia's face. He looked down into her emerald eyes, searching for a trace of the woman who had once held his hand on their wedding day.
"You abandoned her," Matteo whispered, his voice dangerously soft, vibrating with a quiet, lethal certainty. "You left her to scream in the dark for eight months."
"I did what was necessary for empire," Sophia sneered. "Now hand her over."
Matteo’s left hand shot out like a steel trap, wrapping around Sophia’s throat, lifting her heels completely off the wet gravel. In the same motion, his right hand leveled the pistol directly beneath her chin.
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"You gave up the right to be her mother the moment you chose blood over her heart," Matteo hissed, his dark eyes ablaze with demonic fury.
Before Sophia could scream, a heavy military helicopter tore over the treeline, its spotlights blinding them instantly, the roar of its rotor blades whipping the rain into a violent frenzy as sniper barrels emerged from its open bay doors.
