Chapter 3 - Blood on the MarbleThe heavy oak doors of the chapel burst inward with a splintering crash that sent echoes rolling off the vaulted stone ceiling.
Father Thomas gasped, stumbling backward into the shadows of the altar and clutching his silver crucifix to his chest. Elena froze by the doorway, her hand flying to her mouth as her eyes widened in pure, unadulterated horror. She had warned Sophia that the killers were coming, but she hadn't expected them to breach the gates twenty minutes after the vows were spoken.
Four armed men poured into the chapel. They wore tactical black gear, their faces hidden behind reinforced ceramic masks, holding suppressed submachine guns trained dead center on the altar.
Luca didn't flinch.
In a fraction of a second that defied human logic for a man of his immense size, Luca moved. He grabbed Sophia by the waist and physically hoisted her behind the massive stone pillar of the altar, shielding her entirely with his own body before the first bullet had even left the muzzles.
Crack-crack-crack!
Suppressors hissed like angry vipers as rounds chewed into the ancient wooden pews, showering the stone floor with deadly splinters.
"Stay down!" Luca roared, his voice vibrating with a lethal, demonic fury that made the air in the room drop ten degrees.
Sophia’s heart hammered against her ribs, but her baking training—the split-second decisions required when a five-hundred-pound industrial mixer blew its gasket or a tray of boiling sugar tipped over—kicked in with terrifying clarity. She wasn't paralyzed. She was furious. They had interrupted her wedding dinner before the cake was even cut.
From the shadows near the back, Marco didn't wait for an order. He drew a suppressed automatic pistol from his shoulder holster with greased lightning speed, dropping to one knee behind a stone font and firing twice.
One of the tactical intruders staggered backward, his shoulder blossoming with dark blood before crashing hard against the stained-glass wall.
"Moretti!" the lead gunman shouted, his voice distorted through a tactical comms unit as he advanced down the center aisle, his weapon locked onto Luca’s position behind the pillar. "The girl's father owed us a blood debt! Hand her over, and we walk away leaving you and your estate intact!"
Luca slowly stepped out from behind the pillar.
He didn't have a gun in his hand. He didn't need one.
Standing at six-foot-six, with his broad shoulders filling the aisle and his dark eyes burning with murderous intent, Luca Moretti looked less like a mafia boss and more like an executioner summoned straight from the underworld. The sheer physical presence of him filled the chapel, choking out the oxygen in the room.
"You broke into my house," Luca said, his voice dropping into a register so dark and lethal that even the armed mercenaries hesitated for a microsecond. "You ruined my wedding. And you brought weapons into a consecrated chapel."
The lead gunman raised his submachine gun, aiming straight for Luca’s chest. "She's a target, Moretti! She’s nothing to you—"
He never finished the sentence.
Luca lunged forward across the aisle with terrifying, explosive speed. He closed a ten-foot gap in half a second, batting the barrel of the submachine gun aside with a sweep of his massive forearm that sounded like a baseball bat hitting a side of beef.
Before the gunman could recover, Luca’s massive hands closed around the man’s tactical vest. With a guttural roar, Luca lifted the two-hundred-pound mercenary completely off the ground and hurled him thirty feet down the stone aisle. The man smashed into the heavy oak doors with a bone-crunching impact that shattered the wood and knocked him instantly unconscious.
The remaining two mercenaries panicked, opening fire wildly in the confined space.
Rat-tat-tat!
Bullets sparked against the stone pillars, chewing up the altar cloth. One stray round grazed Luca’s left shoulder, tearing through his expensive wedding suit and drawing a dark line of blood across his white shirt.
Luca didn't even blink. He charged the second gunman like a freight train, slamming him into a stone pillar with an impact that shook the dust from the rafters. The man’s weapon clattered uselessly to the floor.
The last mercenary dropped his gun, turning to sprint toward the shattered doors.
Before he could take two steps, Marco’s pistol cracked once. The man dropped face-first onto the gravel outside the threshold, motionless.
Silence descended upon the chapel as heavy and absolute as a tomb. The smell of cordite, gunsmoke, and spilled blood instantly replaced the scent of beeswax and old stone.
Luca stood in the center of the aisle, breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling beneath his ruined, blood-stained shirt. A dark red stain was spreading across his left shoulder, but he ignored it completely, his dark eyes darting frantically back toward the altar.
"Sophia!" Luca shouted, his voice cracking with sudden, raw panic as he rushed past the fallen bodies. "Sophia, are you hit?"
He rounded the stone pillar, half-expecting to find her cowering, bleeding, or terrified out of her mind.
Instead, he found Sophia standing calmly behind the altar, holding a heavy, solid-brass altar candlestick like a baseball bat, her emerald-green dress slightly rumpled, her dark curls tumbling over her shoulders.
She lowered the candlestick slowly, blinking at him.
"I was waiting for one of them to round the pillar so I could introduce them to heavy church furnishings," Sophia said matter-of-factly. Then her eyes dropped to his shoulder, where blood was rapidly soaking through his white shirt. Her professional, clinical calm instantly shattered. "Oh, my god. You're bleeding."
Luca stared at her—at the woman who had just watched a deadly gunfight break out six feet from her wedding dress and was currently more concerned about a bullet graze on his shoulder than the dead mercenaries bleeding out on his floor.
"It's nothing," Luca rasped, reaching out to gently touch her face, needing the physical confirmation that she was alive and unhurt. "Just a scratch."
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"A scratch?" Sophia snapped, her baker’s instinct for disaster management completely overriding her fear. She grabbed his uninjured arm, hauling him toward the vestry door with surprising strength. "Sit down before you pass out from internal hemorrhaging, you giant idiot. We have first-aid kits in this house, don't we?"
Luca Moretti, the most feared mafia boss in northern Italy—a man who had just dismantled a four-man tactical hit squad bare-handed—allowed himself to be dragged by his new bride toward the vestry without uttering a single word of protest.
