Chapter 5
The chapel no longer resembled a place meant for vows; it looked instead like a cathedral to ruin, with smoke curling through shattered stained glass and the marble saints decapitated by bullets, their stone heads rolling across the floor like relics of a faith that had failed to protect its believers.
Victor Salazar stood framed in the doorway, flanked by men whose eyes were empty and efficient, and he smiled as if this were a dinner invitation instead of an invasion.
Seraphina did not step back.
If she stepped back, she would never stop.
“You’re dramatic,” she said, her voice steady despite the tremor in the air.
Salazar chuckled softly, adjusting the cuffs of his coat as if he had all the time in the world. “I prefer decisive.”
Adrian moved to her side, gun raised, posture relaxed in a way that was almost insulting.
“Walk away,” Adrian said evenly, “and you leave with your life.”
Salazar’s pale eyes slid toward him.
“You misunderstand,” Salazar replied gently. “I did not come for my life. I came for hers.”
Luca shifted slightly to Seraphina’s right, his presence a wall of muscle and rage, his weapon trained directly at Salazar’s chest.
“You’re not touching her,” Luca growled.
Salazar tilted his head, studying Luca as if he were an interesting specimen under glass.
“Ah,” he said. “The loyal dog.”
Luca fired.
He did not wait for another insult.
The bullet struck Salazar’s shoulder—
—but it did not slow him.
Because the man standing in the doorway was wearing armor beneath his tailored coat, and the impact only staggered him half a step before his men opened fire.
The chapel exploded into motion.
Gunfire ripped through pews and marble columns, splintering wood and stone into lethal confetti, and Seraphina felt Adrian’s hand close around her wrist, pulling her down behind the cracked altar as bullets chewed into the space where she had been standing seconds before.
“Stay down!” Luca shouted, firing in controlled bursts.
Adrian leaned out from behind the altar and shot twice, clean and precise, dropping two of Salazar’s men with lethal efficiency.
Sera pressed her back against cold stone, heart pounding so hard it felt like it might split her ribs.
She had imagined war as something distant, something strategic and controlled, a board of pieces she could move with calculated calm.
This was not a board.
This was teeth and smoke and the taste of blood in the air.
Salazar’s voice rose above the chaos.
“Seraphina!” he called, as if inviting her to tea. “Come willingly, and I will spare your groom!”
Adrian’s jaw tightened.
Luca’s voice came sharp and furious. “Don’t you dare listen to him!”
Another explosion rocked the chapel, this one closer, blowing out what remained of the eastern wall and sending a cascade of stone raining down around them.
Through the dust, Salazar advanced.
He walked through gunfire like a man who had already accepted the possibility of death and found it boring.
“Your father thought he could outmaneuver me,” Salazar said, his voice almost conversational despite the carnage. “He believed he could sever our alliance and suffer no consequence.”
Adrian leaned out and fired again.
Salazar’s men returned fire, bullets striking the altar and forcing Adrian back down.
“And now,” Salazar continued, “you believe you can choose your own fate.”
Seraphina felt something inside her snap.
She rose from behind the altar before either man could stop her.
“Enough!” she shouted.
The gunfire faltered, not completely, but enough.
Salazar’s gaze locked onto her.
There was satisfaction there.
“You see?” he said softly. “She understands.”
Adrian grabbed her arm. “Get down.”
She pulled free.
“If you want me,” she said clearly to Salazar, “come and take me.”
Luca’s head whipped toward her. “Sera—”
“Don,” she corrected automatically, even now.
Salazar smiled wider.
“I prefer willing brides,” he said.
“I prefer dead enemies,” Adrian replied coldly.
The moment shattered.
Salazar lifted his hand.
His men surged forward.
And then everything went wrong.
A sniper’s shot cracked from somewhere unseen.
It did not hit Salazar.
It hit Adrian.
The bullet struck high in his chest, just below the collarbone, punching through fabric and flesh with a wet, violent sound that seemed to echo louder than any explosion.
For a fraction of a second, Adrian simply stared at Seraphina as if surprised.
Then blood bloomed across his black shirt like a second heart opening.
He staggered.
Time fractured.
“Adrian!” she screamed.
He fell to one knee.
Luca roared and fired blindly toward the direction of the shot, dropping another of Salazar’s men in a spray of red.
Salazar’s smile faltered for the first time.
Adrian looked down at the spreading stain on his chest, then back up at her.
The world narrowed to his eyes.
Not cold now.
Not calculating.
Alive.
Too alive.
He swayed.
She lunged toward him, catching him before he hit the floor completely.
Her hands pressed against his wound instinctively, feeling warm blood spill between her fingers.
“Stay with me,” she said, the words ripped from somewhere raw and terrified inside her.
He tried to speak.
Coughed instead.
Blood touched his lips.
The chapel collapsed further around them, Luca shouting orders into his radio, Moretti soldiers finally pushing in from the rear entrance and engaging Salazar’s men in brutal close combat.
But none of it mattered in that moment.
Adrian’s hand closed weakly around her wrist.
“You always… did like chaos,” he murmured faintly.
“Shut up,” she choked.
His eyes softened.
“You were never… going to be safe,” he said, each word costing him something.
“I don’t care about safe,” she snapped, pressing harder against the wound as if force alone could reverse physics.
His gaze flickered briefly toward Luca, then back to her.
“Trust… no one,” he whispered.
The words landed heavy.
Then his grip slackened.
His eyes lost focus.
And Adrian DeLuca—the billionaire, the groom, the man who had stood beside her when the world tilted—went still in her arms.
The chaos around her continued.
But something inside her stopped.
The second biggest piece on the board had just fallen.
And it had fallen because of her.
Because she had stood up.
Because she had challenged Salazar.
Because she had believed she could control the tempo of war.
A scream tore from her throat, animal and unrestrained.
Luca reached her seconds later, dragging her backward as bullets tore through the space where they had been kneeling.
“We have to move!” he shouted.
She did not want to move.
She wanted to sit in the blood and hold the body and undo everything.
But she was Don.
And Dons did not collapse.
Luca hauled her toward the back corridor as Moretti soldiers flooded the chapel, forcing Salazar’s men to retreat in a tactical withdrawal that was not defeat but repositioning.
Salazar himself lingered just long enough to meet her gaze across the carnage.
He tapped his chest, just above his heart.
Then he vanished into smoke.
—
Adrian’s body lay on a steel table in the estate’s underground medical wing, and the white sheets looked obscene against the red that had dried across his skin.
Seraphina stood beside him in silence.
Luca waited at a distance, blood on his knuckles, eyes hollow.
“It wasn’t supposed to be him,” Luca said quietly.
She did not answer.
Because there was no version of this that had been supposed to happen.
The marriage had been strategic.
Calculated.
Useful.
But somewhere between contract and gunfire, something else had formed.
Not love.
Not yet.
But possibility.
And possibility had just been shot through the chest.
“He told me to trust no one,” she said softly.
Luca’s jaw tightened.
“He was right.”
She looked down at Adrian’s face.
Even in death, he looked composed.
As if he had anticipated this outcome.
As if he had known he was stepping into a kill zone and done it anyway.
Her phone buzzed in her hand.
Another message from Salazar.
A single line.
One groom down.
Her vision went red.
She turned to Luca.
“Lock down the city,” she said.
He nodded once.
“No shipments move without my approval,” she continued. “No money transfers. No meetings. Anyone even suspected of contact with Salazar gets dragged into the basement.”
Her voice was calm.
Too calm.
“And the wedding?” Luca asked quietly.
She looked at Adrian’s body.
Then at the chapel, half-destroyed above them.
Then at the city burning beyond the estate walls.
“There will still be a ceremony,” she said.
Luca stared at her.
“You can’t mean—”
“I won’t be a bride,” she interrupted. “I will be a widow.”
He inhaled sharply.
She stepped closer to Adrian’s body one last time.
And in a voice only he could hear, she whispered, “You wanted to stand beside me when I burned it.”
She straightened.
“Now you can watch.”
She turned away.
There was no going back now.
Her alliance was shattered.
Her enemy emboldened.
Her father missing.
Her body potentially carrying something that would complicate everything further.
And the man who had represented her path to stability was lying cold on steel.
The snowball had become an avalanche.
And she had just lost the second biggest piece on the board.
The war was no longer strategic.
It was personal.
And Seraphina Moretti was about to become something far more dangerous than a virgin mafia daughter.
She was about to become a woman with nothing left to lose.
