Chapter 3 - The anguish behind Lorenzo’s anger finally broke through.
Tears blurred his eyes.
“I searched for you. I tore the city apart.”
“After you broke me!”
Vivian shouted back.
Tears were running down her own face.
“After you looked me in the eyes and told me I meant nothing to you.”
She took a breath.
“That you never loved me.”
Lorenzo lowered the gun slightly.
His shoulders sagged.
“I was wrong.”
The admission seemed to tear through him.
“I was drowning, Vivian. The syndicate. The Feds. The Morettis. Everything was eating me alive.”
He struggled for breath.
“I pushed you because I thought it would protect you.”
Vivian watched him.
“I thought if I didn’t care, they couldn’t use you against me.”
His voice cracked.
“I lied.”
He looked at her.
“I have always loved you.”
Silence filled the cottage.
“It’s too late, Lorenzo.”
Vivian shook her head.
“You destroyed us.”
Then she placed 1 hand on her stomach.
“And you almost destroyed him.”
Lorenzo’s eyes followed the movement.
They stopped at her swollen belly.
A sob tore from him.
He dropped the pistol.
The ruthless Falcone underboss collapsed to his knees amid pieces of broken porcelain.
He covered his face with both hands.
He wept like a child.
“Please.”
His words were barely audible.
“Please, Vivian. Let me fix it.”
Before Vivian could answer, the front window exploded.
Automatic gunfire tore through the living room.
Lorenzo reacted instantly.
Years of violence took control before thought could.
He launched himself toward Vivian.
His body struck hers and drove her to the floor as bullets ripped through the wall where she had been standing.
Leonardo dove behind the heavy oak kitchen island.
“Moretti hitmen!”
Gunfire filled the room.
“They must have tracked your jet, Lorenzo!”
Lorenzo pulled a backup pistol from an ankle holster.
The darkness returned to his eyes.
But the rage was different now.
“Stay down.”
He pressed a desperate kiss against Vivian’s forehead.
“I won’t let them take you.”
His eyes held hers.
“Not ever again.”
Lorenzo rolled away from cover and fired through the shattered window.
2 men in dark tactical gear advanced across the porch.
Lorenzo’s first shot struck 1 of them in the throat.
The man fell.
The 2nd gunman raised an assault rifle.
Lorenzo saw the angle.
Vivian was behind him.
He did not dive for cover.
He stepped directly into the line of fire.
He placed his body between the weapon and his wife.
3 cracks filled the cottage.
Lorenzo’s body jerked.
2 bullets struck his chest.
The impacts threw him backward.
Leonardo rose from behind the island and fired.
His shot struck the remaining gunman between the eyes.
The sudden silence was almost as violent as the gunfire.
Wind howled outside.
Vivian screamed.
She crawled through shattered glass and splintered wood.
She pulled Lorenzo’s bleeding body into her lap.
“No. No, no.”
Her hands pressed desperately over the widening red stains on his shirt.
“Lorenzo, stay with me.”
She looked toward Leonardo.
“Leo, call an ambulance!”
Lorenzo coughed.
Blood appeared at his lips.
He looked up at Vivian.
A strange calm settled over his face.
His bloody hand trembled as he lifted it toward her cheek.
He wiped away 1 tear.
“I kept you safe.”
His breathing was shallow.
“I kept you safe.”
“You’re going to be okay.”
Vivian’s tears fell onto his face.
“We can fix it. Just hold on.”
“I meant what I said.”
Lorenzo’s eyes began losing focus.
“I always loved you, Vivian.”
He struggled to breathe.
“From the moment I saw you.”
Authorities reached the cottage approximately 20 minutes later.
Matteo arrived soon afterward.
The building had been torn apart by gunfire.
The Moretti hitmen lay dead outside.
Inside the living room was a massive pool of blood.
But Lorenzo Falcone was gone.
So were Leonardo and Vivian.
Months later, the NYPD officially declared Lorenzo Falcone dead.
He became another presumed casualty of the violent syndicate war.
Without him, the Falcone empire collapsed.
Rival organizations divided its territory.
Federal indictments dismantled what remained.
The power Lorenzo once believed defined him disappeared.
Far away from New York, on a sunlit terrace overlooking vineyards in Tuscany, a man with a faint lingering limp carried a sleeping baby girl in his arms.
Lorenzo walked toward a table where Vivian sat reading.
He bent and kissed the crown of her head.
The world believed Lorenzo Falcone was dead.
The empire was gone.
His name was gone.
His power was gone.
Everything he once believed mattered had been taken from him.
Yet he still had Vivian.
He had their daughter.
The man who once ruled by fear had survived the bullets that struck him in Maine and disappeared from the world that had consumed nearly everything human inside him.
Vivian looked up.
For the first time in years, the warmth in her eyes was genuine.
Lorenzo had lost the empire he had tried so desperately to protect.
He had lost the status, violence, and power that once seemed more important than vulnerability.
But standing in Tuscany with his daughter asleep in his arms and Vivian beside him, Lorenzo understood that he had finally gained the only thing that mattered.
He had once believed love made him weak.
He had tried to destroy it before anyone else could use it against him.
Instead, the loss of that love nearly destroyed him.
Only after losing his empire, his old identity, and almost his life did Lorenzo understand what Vivian had represented from the beginning.
Not a liability.
Not a treaty.
Not a decorative wife waiting inside a fortified estate.
She had been the only person who saw the man behind the monster.
And when Lorenzo finally chose to put his own body between Vivian and the bullets meant for her, he demonstrated with action what his words had once denied.
He had always loved her.
The cruel words spoken in the Hudson Valley could never be erased.
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Vivian’s flight, the months of separation, the syndicate bloodshed, and everything that followed remained part of them.
But Lorenzo’s old life was dead.
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