The surgeon disappeared through the double doors with his team, and the red light above the operating theater blinked on.
"But Dad, what if she doesn't..." Felix's voice cracked. He caught himself, pressed his knuckles against his mouth, and looked away.
Don Vittorio did not turn to face his son. He stared at the closed doors, his hands clasped behind his back, his posture rigid as iron.
"There are no 'what ifs.'" His voice was low, absolute, the voice of a man who had bent the world to his will for forty years. "Mia is my daughter. She will come through this. She has to. For us."
Donna Elena Valducci stood at her husband's side. She had arrived minutes after the motorcade, stepping from her own car with the composure of a woman who had been the matriarch of the most powerful crime dynasty on the Eastern Seaboard for over two decades. Her posture was immaculate. Her dark hair was pulled back. Her hands did not tremble.
But her eyes told a different story.
She clutched Don Vittorio's arm, her manicured fingers pressing into the fabric of his overcoat with a force that whitened her knuckles. Tears gathered along her lower lashes but did not fall. Beneath the grief, beneath the terror of a mother watching her child slip toward death, there burned something far more dangerous. Wrath. Pure, incandescent, Sicilian wrath. The kind that did not scream. The kind that waited, and remembered, and repaid every debt with interest compounded in blood.
"She called me," Don Vittorio murmured. His voice broke. It was the first time it had broken in years, perhaps decades, and the sound of it made Felix look away and Jake close his eyes. "Before the crash. She called me, and she sounded... terrified."
He paused. His jaw worked. The muscles in his neck tightened like steel cables.
"My precious daughter told me she was a disappointment." The words came out quiet, almost gentle, which made them infinitely more terrifying than any shout. "The bastard who made my daughter believe that. The man who treated her like she was nothing." He turned his head, just slightly, and the light caught the cold, ancient fury in his eyes. "I will make his life worse than death."
No one in the corridor doubted him.
On the other side of the city, in a penthouse suite above the Jade Quarter, Xavier Salvatore sat at his desk and felt something twist inside his chest.