Chapter 8 - Blood and Blueprints
The panic room was a subterranean vault lined with titanium plating, monitors, and encrypted communication arrays. The screens flickered with real-time tactical maps of London, showing police sirens converging on the building—though Dante’s fixers within Scotland Yard were already rerouting them to a decoy location across town.
I set the Beretta down on a steel console, my hands finally beginning to tremble as the adrenaline rush subsided. Dante stood by the master terminal, typing furiously with one hand while holding a secure satellite phone to his ear with the other.
"Status," Dante barked into the phone.
"Perimeter secure, Boss," Viktor’s gruff voice crackled through the speaker. "Moretti’s strike team is neutralized or contained. Julian is trussed up and waiting in the basement holding cells. But... we have a complication."
Dante paused his typing. "Specify."
"Victoria Carter-Moretti didn't go home," Viktor said grimly. "She drove straight to the central precinct. She’s currently filing an international arrest warrant for Elena, claiming she kidnapped the child and is harboring stolen syndicate bonds."
I gasped, pressing a hand to my mouth. "She’s insane. Leo is my son—"
"Under British family law, because Julian registered Leo’s birth certificate during your postpartum recovery under his corporate estate, legally, Julian is listed as the primary guardian," Dante said flatly, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek. "Victoria played a very clever legal game."
I stared at him in horror. "They can take Leo from me?"
"Not while I'm breathing," Dante growled, slamming his fist onto the steel desk with a force that rattled the monitors. He turned to me, his dark eyes burning with a terrifying, protective intensity. "Elena, listen to me. We don't have time for legal battles. Julian and Victoria have corrupted half the crown prosecutors in London. If we let the state get involved, they will weaponize the courts to strip your parental rights and hand Leo over to Julian as leverage."
"Then what do we do?" I asked, my voice cracking.
Dante reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a heavy, encrypted flash drive—the very ledger Julian had been searching for. "We take the fight directly to their doorstep. Victoria wants to play high-society games? We expose every single offshore account, bribe, and shell corporation the Moretti-Carter alliance used to steal your father’s estate."
"And if that doesn't work?"
May you like
Dante’s lips curled into a cold, dangerous smile. "Then we burn their empire to the ground, pack our bags, and disappear to a place where no court on earth can ever touch us."
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