Chapter 8 - Ghosts from Marseille
“Vittorio,” Cassian said, his voice flat, devoid of a single ripple of human
warmth.
“Boss?”
“Take Mrs. Gable to the lower courtyard. Have the medical team stabilize her
burns. I want her fully conscious when Don Moretti arrives from Naples to
witness her confession.”
“Understood, Mr. Vance.”
Two guards dragged the weeping, blistered housekeeper out of the room, leaving
the study smelling of spilled tea, ozone, and the bitter almond scent of poison.
Cassian walked over to the Persian rug, knelt down, and pulled Mia into his
arms. The little girl buried her face in his tactical vest, sobbing against his
neck.
“You’re safe, Mia,” Cassian whispered into her hair, rocking her gently with a
tenderness that seemed impossible for a man with blood on his hands. “Papa has
you. Nobody is ever going to hurt you again.”
“Sarah saved me, Papa,” Mia wept softly, reaching out blindly with one small
hand until her fingers found the hem of my cardigan. “Sarah broke the teapot.
She wouldn't let her touch me.”
Cassian turned his head, his dark eyes looking up at me from where he knelt on
the floor.
There was an emotion in his gaze that stole the breath from my lungs—a raw,
unguarded reverence, a profound debt of blood that no amount of gold could ever
repay.
“Sarah,” Cassian said softly.
“Yes, Mr. Vance?”
“Come here.”
I knelt down beside them on the rug.
Cassian reached out his broad, scarred hand and placed it over mine where I was
holding Mia’s fingers. His grip was warm, strong, and unshakeable.
“You saved my daughter twice in twenty-four hours,” Cassian murmured, his eyes
searching mine with devastating intensity. “In Rome, I was too late. I was forty
miles away when the bomb detonated. I spent eighteen months living in the ashes
of my own failure. But today... today you gave me my life back.”
“I love her, Cassian,” I whispered, using his first name for the first time
without realizing it. “I would die before I let anyone hurt her.”
A muscle jumped along Cassian’s strong jawline. He leaned closer, his deep voice
dropping into an intimate, velvet murmur:
“You are never going to die for this family, Sarah. You are going to live for
it.”
Before the moment could stretch further, the tactical radio on his vest crackled
to life with Vittorio’s urgent voice:
“Boss! We have a breach at the lower sea wall! The inflatable Zodiacs just
landed at the cove! It’s not just French intelligence contractors, sir... it’s
the Marseille faction. They have forty men advancing up the cliffside path!”
Cassian’s eyes darkened into pitch black.
The ghosts of Marseille had arrived at the gates of Amalfi.
He stood up from the floor, pulling Mia gently to her feet and guiding her
toward the reinforced steel safe room hidden behind the study’s central
bookcase.
“Go inside, sweetheart,” Cassian told his daughter. “Sarah will be right beside
you.”
He turned to me, his hands resting gently on my shoulders, his gaze burning into
my very soul.
“The men who murdered your parents are on that cliff, Sarah,” Cassian said, his
voice laced with the cold promise of annihilation. “They came here to collect
your head for sixty million euros.”
I looked at him, feeling the cold fury that had slept inside my chest for three
months finally waking up, burning bright and hot.
“Don't let them leave this mountain, Cassian,” I said, my voice steady as stone.
Cassian smiled—a dark, breathtaking, predatory smile that belonged to the Reaper
of Naples.
May you like
“None of them,” Cassian replied, “are ever going to see the sun set on this
coast.”
