Chapter 4 - The Shattered Altar
Niko Valente stepped between the two sisters, his face twisted in a sneer of violent, entitled arrogance.
He was thirty-two, raised on private jets and the belief that the Valente name made him untouchable. He reached out with an aggressive, heavy hand, aiming to shove Mara back toward Dante.
“Get your hands off my bride, you little—"
Niko never finished the sentence.
Dante Ralli moved with the blinding, terrifying speed of a striking viper.
Before Niko’s hand could travel four inches through the air, Dante’s left palm caught the young groom by the throat, driving him backward five feet through the orchid arch, slamming his spine into the marble altar with a concussive, bone-rattling CRACK that knocked the breath from his lungs.
The four-tier wedding cake shuddered on its pedestal; two crystal champagne towers collapsed, sending three hundred glasses crashing onto the parquet floor in an explosion of sparkling wine and pulverized glass.
Niko gagged, his feet dangling three inches off the floor, his hands clawing uselessly at Dante’s iron fingers.
“DANTE!” Carmine Valente roared, raising his silver cane.
Ten armed Valente security men drew their weapons from beneath their tuxedos, the sharp clack-clack of semi-automatic slides chambering rounds echoing through the ballroom.
Simultaneously, the double doors at the rear of the hall banged open.
Twelve men in dark tactical windbreakers, wearing the discreet gold lapel pins of the Ralli Executive Security Division, stepped into the ballroom. They did not shout. They did not take cover. They raised customized short-barreled carbines, their red laser sights instantly painting thirty bright crimson dots across the chests of Carmine Valente’s shooters.
The standoff was absolute. One stray breath would turn the St. Regis ballroom into an abattoir.
Dante did not look at the guns. He didn't look at the laser sights.
He leaned in, his scarred face inches from Niko’s purple, gasping features, his voice dropping into a register so dark, so quiet, and so utterly unyielding that it vibrated through the young man’s teeth.
“You touched her wrist in the hallway twenty minutes ago, Niko,” Dante whispered. “I saw it on the security monitor in the foyer. You thought because she arrived on my arm, she was just another piece of decorative jewelry you could intimidate.”
Dante squeezed his fingers half an inch tighter, cutting off the young man’s airflow until Niko’s eyes rolled back in their sockets.
“If your fingers ever cross her perimeter again, boy... I will not freeze your father’s docks. I will take an acetylene torch to your family’s container fleet while you are locked inside the hold. Do you understand me?”
Niko managed a frantic, spastic nod, his heels kicking uselessly against the marble.
Dante released his grip.
Niko collapsed into a pathetic, wheezing heap amidst the shattered crystal and white orchid petals, clutching his bruised throat, weeping openly in his ruined wedding tuxedo.
Dante turned slowly, brushing an invisible speck of plaster from his midnight-blue sleeve, and looked at Don Carmine.
“The wedding is canceled, Carmine,” Dante said, his voice flat and sovereign. “Take your son, take your men, and get out of this hotel before my federal associates decide to unseal the tax fraud indictments on your Atlantic City casinos.”
Don Carmine looked at his choking son on the floor.
He looked at the thirty red laser dots glowing on his bodyguards' chests.
He looked at Dante Ralli—an apex predator who had just dismantled two crime families in thirty minutes without breaking a sweat.
Carmine slowly lowered his silver cane.
May you like
“Pick him up,” Carmine rasped to his men, his voice broken and defeated. “We’re leaving.”
The Valente family retreated through the side service exits, their boots crunching over the broken crystal, leaving Allegra Beluchcci standing completely alone amidst the wreckage of her empire.
