Page 106 of Fractured Empire

Bound, gagged, and secured into two metal chairs, the two of them immediately start struggling to escape when they see Apollo and I emerge from the night. Their living room has been covered in thick plastic sheets, laying atop all their tacky furniture. Bright standing lights like you’d keep in a garage to work on cars have been placed in all four corners around them, giving me a perfect view of my victims.

Clicking my tongue, I approach them with a casual stride. “Sara, Ezio. I’m almost offended. You don’t look happy to see me at all. Weren’t we family once? What’s with the hostility?”

Ezio grunts into his gag, trying to talk back.

Lifting a hand to Gino, I silently give him permission to let their mouths free. As much as I’d rather not hear either of them ever speak again, it’s a vital part of my plan to converse before ending them.

Cleo’s father hisses as the tape keeping his gag in place is ripped off, and her mother cries out when the same treatment is shown to her.

“You were saying?” I drawl, looking down at Ezio.

“I was saying,” he growls, “that if anyone is being hostile, it’s the person who had us ripped out of bed and tied up like captives in the middle of the night.”

“Guilty,” Gino snarks, snickering at himself.

“Not a fan of your accommodations?” I tsk, tilting my head. “How sad.”

“What’s this about?” he snaps, looking around the room like he’s attempting to suss out his odds.

“Don’t play the fool,” I scoff, refusing to allow him to act ignorant. “You know exactly why we’re here, Ezio. I think you should be surprised that we haven’t come sooner after everything you’ve done.”

“My daughter gave you an heir,” he grits out, trying to squirm out of the rope that’s probably digging into his skin at this rate. “That’s all that you should care about. We’re the reason Bastian exists.”

“You’re also the reason that his mother is dead,” I counter, temper rising. “He could have inherited his mother’s disease too. You know that, don’t you? And then where would we be?”

“But he didn’t,” Sara bursts out, finally getting ahold of herself enough to speak.

Apollo pins her with a look that makes her shrink, replying darkly, “Something you had no way of knowing would be the case.”

“The point still stands,” Ezio tries to argue, but my brother isn’t done.

“Do you know what happens to people who lie to our family? To those sorry souls who think they’re clever enough to pull one over on the Moretti family?”

Sara shakes her head rapidly, trying to deny it. “We didn’t.”

She can’t even clarify what she means to deny. Tsk tsk.

“Oh, but you did.” I look between the two of them, trying to imagine how good it will feel to do the same thing once they’re lying bloody and unconscious at my feet. “You forced your daughter to pretend to be a perfectly healthy woman so she could win you the connection you so desperately wanted to score. How does it feel to be so close to the rulers of The Outfit now, hmm?”

“What are you going to do to us?” Sara finally asks. No, pleads.

She’s dying to know if I’m going to end their lives, and if I am, how merciful I’m willing to be in the process. Some men won’t kill women brutally, even if they’ve earned it. They’d offer them a pill, or an equally soft method. Something that allows them to drift into sleep only to never wake up again. But something tells me Sara Sala wouldn’t offer her daughter that kindness if the roles were reversed, and so I’ll follow her example.

“I thought about giving you both cancer, like they do to lab rats so they can try to cure them,” I muse, crossing my arms as I step closer. Cleo’s mom flinches so hard that her chair rocks and the legs click hard against the floor. “There’s no realistic way to give you both Huntington’s to force you into living with what your daughter had to go through, so cancer seemed like the next best thing. Aches and pains, confusion, cognitive decline…But even if I could give you her condition and force you to live with it, I could never recreate her circumstances.”

“Leon, please⁠—”

I ignore her mother’s pleading and continue, “I can’t make you children again, so that you can grapple with your life expectancy before you even mature into your teens. I can’t pressure you into hiding your condition for the benefit of others, and I can’t recreate the fear your daughter felt when she thought she may have passed her genes onto our son.”

“Cleo knew what she was doing,” her father growls. “She agreed.”

“Is that what you tell yourselves?” My lip curls up in a sneer. “That you had her consent to shackle her with this life?”

Cleo agreed under duress at best. She was manipulated and molded into the woman she came to be, and no other choices were presented to her. How can you agree to something when it’s actually the only option?

“You chose for her,” I counter. “She agreed because you didn’t allow her to object.”

“If we hadn’t shackled her to you, your son wouldn’t exist,” Sara snarls, finally letting her anger show through her scared little wife act. I knew she couldn’t hide behind fabricated fear and surprise for long. She had to have known this was coming. She’s a cruel woman, but not an ignorant one.