Chapter 1 - The Blood Lineage in the DarkThe harsh fluorescent lights of Lakeview University Medical Center hummed with an eerie, rhythmic buzz. Outside the glass window of the fourth-floor operating room, the Chicago blizzard slammed against the reinforced windows, but inside, my pulse thundered louder than the storm.
I stood beside the blood donation chair, ripping the IV catheter clean from my arm. The clear plastic tube, carrying my rare AB-negative blood directly into a thermal unit for seventeen-year-old Elena, swung violently.
My broad six-foot-four frame towered over the sterile room. Beneath my unbuttoned dark charcoal suit, the black tattoos stretching over my neck and muscular chest flexed with absolute, lethal tension.
"Boss!" my security chief, Marco Vitali, hissed, pulling his suppressed sidearm from beneath his tailored jacket, stepping between me and the hallway door. "The elevator banks on the third floor just went dark. Five armed men belonging to the D'Amico Syndicate bypassed hospital security. They aren't looking for Enzo anymore. They are coming straight up the east stairwell for the girl!"
My cold gray eyes didn't stray from the glass panel.
Inside the operating theater, seventeen-year-old Elena lay unconscious beneath surgical sheets. Her dark hair was splayed across the white pillow, her pale face holding the exact, exquisite curve of her mother’s cheekbones—and right beneath her left eye, the tiny, distinct crescent-shaped scar caught the overhead spotlight.
"Marco," I commanded, my baritone dipping into a subsonic, terrifying register that made the young nurse shrink back against the counter. "Who is the woman downstairs?"
Before Marco could answer, the silver double doors of the trauma unit slid open with a sharp, pneumatic hiss.
Standing between two of my armed guards, wearing a wet navy wool coat, her hands trembling violently as she clutched a leather handbag, was Sofia Bennett.
Seventeen years had passed since the rainy night she had kissed me in my family's Lake Forest mansion before vanishing into thin air. At forty, her brown eyes were still as deep and beautiful as I remembered, though framed by faint lines of exhaustion and years of hard work.
The moment her gaze traveled past Marco and locked onto my six-foot-four figure, she stopped dead in her tracks.
"Luca...?" Sofia whispered, her voice trembling like a fallen leaf. "Dear God... Luca..."
"Sofia," I rasped out, taking three heavy, uncoordinated steps forward, my calloused hands reaching out unconsciously as if touching a ghost. "The girl... Elena... she has AB-negative blood. She has your scar."
Sofia’s lips parted in a sharp, choked gasp. Tears welled up in her eyes, spilling freely down her pale cheeks as she looked from my face to the collection bag filled with my blood.
"I didn't leave because I stopped loving you, Luca!" Sofia wept, falling flat onto her knees on the linoleum floorboards, pulling a wrinkled envelope from her coat pocket. "Your uncle, Dominic Mancini, came to my room the night after you left for Miami! He showed me photos of your father's enemies... he swore that if I stayed, they would kill me and the baby! He forced me to sign a fake farewell letter and paid a rogue clinic to forge your infertility records!"
My mind reeled. The doctors fifteen years ago... the fake diagnosis... my uncle's sudden rise in the family hierarchy...
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The reinforced glass doors of the main hallway shattered outward in a rain of flying glass!
"PROTECT THE DON!" Marco roared, firing three rapid suppressed rounds down the smoke-filled corridor as two D'Amico hitmen charged through the smoke!
Sofia shrieked, but before the shattered glass could touch her hair, I moved with terrifying, predator-like speed. I swept Sofia off her feet into my broad arms, pulling her behind the reinforced steel pillar of the nurse's station while my men opened fire.
"Marco!" I thundered over the deafening gunfire, my storm-gray eyes burning with an absolute, apocalyptic rage as I looked down at the mother of my child. "Lock down the floor! Call Marcus Vance! Tell him to bring forty operatives and lock down every exit in Chicago!"
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I looked into Sofia’s weeping eyes, my thumb gently tracing the line of her cheek.
"Seventeen years ago, I let your letter drive you away, Sofia," I swore, my voice an absolute, iron promise that shook the room. "Tonight, anyone who steps within ten feet of our daughter dies."
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