Chapter 68 The third eye

Chapter 68 The third eye
The first gunshot—the one that hadn't come from me—echoed through the warehouse. 

My heart slammed against my ribs, and instinctively, my free hand flew to my stomach.

I was still standing.

So was Elias.

Elias stiffened. His head whipping toward the door as he searched for the new threat. In that split second, he forgot the most dangerous person in the room was behind him. 

That I was still armed. 

That the gun in my hand was still pointed directly at his head.

I stared at the back of his head, my vision tunneling until all I could see was the man who had engineered every ounce of my suffering.

This was it.

This was the moment.

I could end it. Right here.

All the pain he had poured into my mother's life.

I thought of Kieran, a boy stolen from his mother and turned into a weapon for a man who didn't even share his blood. 

I thought of the woman on the floor, battered and bruised, robbed of thirty years of motherhood. 

All of it because of one man's fragile, misogynistic ego. 

A man who hated women simply for existing. 

A man who never deserved to breathe the same air as the rest of us.

My hands were shaking, the weight of the gun feeling like a mountain in my grip.

If you are the true heiress, a voice whispered in the back of my mind—a voice that sounded like my own—then you cannot hesitate. A Queen does not wait for permission to execute a monster.

Elias began to turn back toward me. His eyes were wide, a frantic realization dawning on his face as he saw my finger tightening on the trigger. He scrambled to raise his own weapon, his mouth opening to bark one last insult, one last command to the daughter he thought he owned.

He was too slow.

I didn't wait for him to speak. I didn't wait for him to fire. I pulled the trigger.

BANG!

The recoil kicked up my arm, but I didn't flinch. I watched as the bullet found its home. A clean, singular hole appeared right in the center of his forehead—the mark of a perfect shot.

Elias D'Angelo collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut. His gun slipped from his hand and clattered uselessly against the floor. His body hit the floor with a sickening thud. 

He lay there, his eyes popped open, staring up at me with a look of permanent shock. Even in death, he looked surprised that a woman had been the one to finally stop his heart.

I stood over him. 

I had done it.

I had killed him.

A soft, broken moan came from the corner.

Kieran's mother, her face pale, her eyes wide with horror and relief all at once. Her lips parted, as if she wanted to scream, or cry, or say her son's name one last time. 

But her body couldn't take it.

Her dull eyes rolled back, and she slumped forward, falling unconscious against her restraints.

"I'll come back for you," I whispered to the unconscious woman, my voice cracking. I couldn't send help if I was trapped here. "I'll send someone. I promise. But I have to find my son."

If Adrien wasn't with Elias… then who had my baby?"

I turned away, stepping carefully over Elias's body. I forced myself to look at him one last time. 

I gripped my gun and moved toward the exit. I braced myself for a shootout, for Elias's men, for the chaos I had expected to follow that first mysterious gunshot.

But the yard was a graveyard of rusted shipping containers and overgrown weeds. No black SUVs. No shouting guards. The silence was more terrifying than the noise would have been.

"Who fired?" I whispered, my eyes darting across the perimeter. "Where are you?"

I began to turn, my finger back on the trigger, sensing a presence behind me. I spun around, the gun leveled, a scream of "Where is my son!" rising in my throat.

The scream died before it could leave my lips.

I gasped, the sound caught in the back of my throat, as the reality of who was standing before me crashed down like a tidal wave.

"You..."

Standing there was a man from a night I had tried to bury. 

He was undeniably handsome, but in a way that felt like a warning—messy, dirty-blonde hair that looked like he'd just rolled out of a high-end bed, and ash-grey eyes that were as cold as the steel in my hand. Even with the grit of the warehouse district clinging to him, he looked expensive.

Kieran still took the cake when it came to looks—his beauty was soulful and intense, whereas this man's was just... toxic.

What the hell, Aurielle? I scolded myself, a flare of disgust hitting my stomach. The man is a threat, and you're cataloging his bone structure? Find your son!

The man's lips curled into an amused, slow-burning smile. "So... you remember me, darling?" he asked, his voice a low, gravelly hum with a thick German accent.

Of course I remembered him. He was the man from the club. The one who hadn't known when to keep his hands to himself. The one Kieran had nearly beaten to death to protect me.

"You," I hissed. . "The pathetic rat from the club."

He chuckled, but his eyes remained flat. "I've been waiting for the perfect moment to strike," he said, pacing slowly. "To take revenge for what was done to me. Kieran humiliated me because of you. I've been watching. Waiting for the family to fracture. It's a pathetic bloodline you came from, Aurielle. Everyone around you is a secret. Everyone causes you nothing but pain."

He knew. He'd been lurking in the shadows of the D'Angelo empire. 

"Where is my son?" I roared. "Where is Adrien? I know you have him. Tell me where he is, or I'll put a bullet in you just like I did Elias!"

I stepped forward, my finger tightening on the trigger, ready to end this—but I never got the chance.

Without warning, a pair of powerful arms wrapped around me from behind, pinning my elbows to my sides.

"No!" I screamed, struggling against the hold, but the man behind me was a wall of muscle. My gun slipped from my hand, clattering onto the dirt out of reach.

The German man just watched, his hands tucked casually into his pockets, looking thoroughly entertained. "You've got fire, I'll give you that. But fire burns out."

I opened my mouth to scream for help, for Kieran, for anyone, but a thick, sweet-smelling cloth was suddenly pressed over my nose and mouth.

No. Not like this.

I thrashed, my mind racing to my baby. Please, let the chemicals stay away. Please don't let this hurt my child. My vision began to blur. 

"Easy now, Aurielle. I used a small dose. I'm not a monster... I need that baby of yours healthy."

I tried to fight it. I tried to claw at the arms holding me. 

"Oh," his voice whispered, light and amused, as if he were just remembering a polite detail at a dinner party. "I almost forgot to introduce myself. My name is Valentin."

The name meant nothing to me. It didn't matter. 

I couldn't hold on any longer. My head fell back, before I was pulled down, deep into a cold, suffocating ocean of darkness.

The silence of the warehouse district was broken by the aggressive roar of a customized engine. A black SUV screeched to a halt, kicking up a cloud of dust that choked the air.

Kieran stepped out before the vehicle had even finished settling. 

He didn't know Aurielle had been there. He didn't know about the screams, the confession, or Valentin. 

He moved toward the open warehouse door. "Elias!" he barked, his voice echoing off the rusted rafters. "Enough with the games! Come out and face me!"

There was no answer. Only the low, agonizing creak of a high-backed chair swaying in the breeze.

Kieran pushed deeper into the building, his senses on high alert. He reached a door. 

He stopped.

For the first time in his life, the air was knocked out of him.

Elias lay sprawled like a doll in a widening lake of crimson. The sight was gruesome; a single, precise bullet hole occupied the center of his forehead, a dark "third eye" that stared blankly at the ceiling. 

Elias was dead. How?

But his gaze didn't stay on the body for long.

A few feet away, slumped against her restraints on the floor, was a woman. She was battered. 

He took a step forward. He recognized the hands that had served his tea, the eyes that had always watched him with a strange, quiet sorrow from the corners of the D'Angelo mansion. She was his father's head maid. 

He whispered, "Delphine?"

If Delphine was here, bound and tortured... and Elias was dead...

The realization hit him like a physical blow