Chapter 197 ~ Die Slowly

Chapter 197 ~ Die Slowly
{Daisy's POV}

"Adrian?"

The single word carried an unmistakable shake in it, a stiffness that hadn't been there thirty seconds earlier, and I understood then, all at once, exactly what DeLuca had actually done. He'd called from Nico's own number earlier, sent that quiet ping through the line before we ever sat down here, knowing his father would eventually call it back convinced he was still talking to the man who'd betrayed him rather than the son he'd betrayed first.

DeLuca held the phone with total, unbothered calm.

"Yes, father." His voice didn't waver at all. "Where do we meet?" A pause, and then, almost lazily, "I'm assuming you're not a coward. That you'd actually want to, if it came to it."

Another pause stretched from the other end before the voice returned, quieter now. "So I'm guessing you found out, huh?"

"Depends what you're asking." DeLuca's jaw was tight even though his voice wasn't. "Is it the part where I finally figured out you never wanted me to inherit anything, that I was just — what, a tool, a weapon you built and pointed somewhere. Or is it the other part. The part where you didn't just lie to me then. You've been lying since the night you actually killed her. Which part, Dad. Pick one."

"I guess both."

"Then yes." A beat, longer than it needed to be. "I see you."

He ended the call.

I stood there watching him rise to his feet, the men around us rising with him, and I shot up right after, tension flooding into me the second I understood what was coming.

He didn't look at me. "Stay close."

He started walking, and I hurried after him, my pace stuttering between too fast and too slow the entire way. Tension had been building for days now, weeks, months even, stacking on itself in layers I'd stopped fully tracking, and this felt like the exact moment it finally tipped over into something I didn't have a name for.

"I miss school," I muttered, mostly to myself, because apparently that was the one coherent thought my brain had left to offer.



The tarmac stretched wide and open around us by the time we reached it, concrete cracked in places, a scattering of jets parked far off in the distance. The sky had already started breaking apart into soft color at the edges, dawn creeping in slow and gentle, completely at odds with everything currently building underneath it. Airport lights still glowed against the brightening sky, and the whole scene had this strange, calm beauty to it that felt almost cruel given what it was actually about to witness.

A car rolled up. Black, expensive, unhurried, easing to a stop like whoever sat inside had never once in his life needed to rush for anything.

Two men climbed out first, both dressed in black, built like furniture that had learned to walk. They opened the rear door, and the last man stepped out.

I recognized him instantly, even though I'd never technically seen him before; a face that mirrored DeLuca's so closely it startled me, the same jaw, the same sharp calm, aged into something colder.

"Salvatore DeLuca," I murmured under my breath.

DeLuca stood in front of him now, me positioned slightly behind and to the side.

"I'm guessing you've already figured out the airport's surrounded." DeLuca didn't raise his voice at all. "No escape. Flight's not taking off. Not for you."

Salvatore studied him for a long moment. "Impressive," he said finally. "Genuinely. Defeating Nico — all those men he dragged along. Taking Volkov's whole empire out from under him. And now you're here, in front of me." His mouth curved, faint and cold. "But this– this is a mistake, son. Don't forget who taught you. Everything you know. I gave you that."

"I know." DeLuca's voice stayed even. "I know you've probably already found a way around this. Backup, some alternative, men you've got tucked away somewhere who might show up and flip this. I know what you're capable of, I do. That's not— I'm not here to argue who's smarter here." A short pause, like he was deciding how much to actually say out loud. "The police are coming too. So if I don't kill you here, you and I both still have to deal with that. Either way, there's no clean way out of this for you."

"Smart," Salvatore said.

My stomach dropped straight through the concrete.

"DeLuca." I grabbed his arm. "You called the police? They're hunting us."

He turned to me, steady, though something flickered behind his eyes too fast for me to name. "Relax, Daisy. It's going to turn out fine. I promise you that."

It did nothing to calm me. Not even slightly.

He turned back to his father before I could push further.

"So what's it going to be. You bow, face this, or we do it the hard way." A beat. "I'm giving you the choice. Because you're still my father, at the end of the day." Another pause, longer. "Even if you're not the right one."

The three men flanking Salvatore raised their weapons instantly.

Salvatore lifted one hand, and they lowered them just as fast, his own expression settling into something faintly amused, dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with fear. It scared me more than almost anything tonight, because I already knew exactly how dangerous the man standing beside me could be, and looking at his father now, I understood precisely where that had come from.

"Good proposal." Salvatore tilted his head slightly. "But you're still underestimating me. Depths in this business you haven't come close to touching yet. Kill me today. Go ahead; and you'll spend every day after wishing you hadn't. Wishing you'd never laid a hand on your own blood."

"Seems I need to give you more proof, then." DeLuca's shoulders dropped, almost bored. "Fine. No problem."

He turned to the side. "Fritzo!"

Every head snapped toward that direction, mine fastest of all, because I'd heard that exact name and felt something in my chest lurch before my brain even caught up.

A figure stepped out from the edge of the tarmac and started walking toward us.

Fritzo.

"You want proof, here it is." DeLuca's voice had an edge to it now, something that hadn't quite been there a minute ago. "You trusted him. Thought his loyalty was yours, permanently, no questions. I used that. Same way you used me, except I actually meant it when I say I used him. He's been reaching out — quietly, for a while now — to men who used to answer to your name. Making sure that name doesn't open doors anymore. Doesn't mean anything anymore. So that if you ever needed a hand, from anyone, in this entire business — nothing. No one comes."

I watched something crack across Salvatore's expression, subtle but real, and even without fully understanding the weight of what DeLuca had just described, I could tell it had landed somewhere deep.

"That's the thing about loyalty, you know." DeLuca said it almost gently, which somehow made it worse. "You don't get to command it. You earn it. And then you keep earning it. Which means not turning into… " he gestured, vague and dismissive, at the whole of his father “…whatever this is now."

"You." Salvatore's voice cracked with fury as his eyes locked onto Fritzo.

Fritzo didn't so much as glance at him. He just crossed to stand beside DeLuca and me, unbothered, like he was arriving late to something mildly interesting.

I stared at him, still catching up to the fact that he was actually here, alive, upright. I'd assumed the worst weeks ago and never let myself say it out loud, because losing someone that close felt like more than I could carry on top of everything else, so I'd buried the question instead of asking it. Now here he was, apparently having spent this whole time exactly where DeLuca needed him, quietly dismantling his father's reputation from the inside.

"Good to see you too, troublemaker," Fritzo said, catching my expression.

I smiled, small and genuinely relieved, before DeLuca's voice pulled my attention back.

"So this is it, then." He said it plainly, almost flat. "This is the end. For you, father."

He brought the pistol out, and Salvatore's men tensed instantly, weapons half-raised, caught somewhere between panic and hesitation.

"I could let you walk out of here with them." DeLuca tipped his head slightly toward the three men. "But you'd call that weakness. You would. So either way, this ends as a win for me."

I didn't understand what he meant by them until I heard it— sirens, distant but growing fast, and my stomach did something complicated and unpleasant in response.

Cars poured onto the tarmac moments later, four of them, police cruisers cutting across the open concrete with lights flashing hard against the brightening sky, and I had approximately four seconds to think, oh good, more people who want us in handcuffs, before the actual scale of it registered. 

Onlookers pressed against the terminal windows in the distance, tiny and useless from here, while the planes just sat there in the background, completely unbothered, like none of this qualified as their problem.



DeLuca raised his gun, and the three men flanking his father raised theirs in response, weapons trained on him instantly. Behind us, our own men matched the motion in a single, fluid wave, guns rising until the numbers on our side made the standoff look almost laughable — we outnumbered them completely, even with the police cars still closing the distance across the tarmac, sirens wailing louder with every second.

"I'd put those down, if I were you." DeLuca's voice carried easily over the noise. "Unless you want to join him."

A shot rang out.

Salvatore dropped to one knee, and I understood, in the cold, dreadful half-second it took to register, that DeLuca had put a bullet straight through it. The three men flanking him threw their weapons to the ground immediately, hands shooting into the air, all their earlier composure evaporating into pure, trembling self-preservation.

The sirens kept building. The police kept coming. None of it slowed DeLuca down at all.

Salvatore knelt there, groaning, one hand braced against the concrete. "You idiot." His voice came out strained, half-swallowed by pain. "This doesn't — this doesn't end well. Not for you."

"Long as it ends worse for you." DeLuca's tone hadn't moved an inch. "I can live with that."

He kept going, like the pause hadn't happened at all. "Here's the interesting part. I got shot once. Recently. Bullet went in, stayed there a while." A short, humorless breath, almost a laugh. "First time in my life I actually understood what pain was supposed to feel like. So. Let's see if you catch up."

Another shot cracked out, and Salvatore's body twisted sideways, blood already spreading fast and dark across his side, soaking into his shirt. He clutched at it, teeth gritted, whatever composure he'd been clinging to shattering completely under the pain.

By now the police had fully arrived, doors slamming, officers spilling out with weapons drawn, shouts of "Hey! Hey!" cutting through the chaos from every direction. DeLuca didn't so much as glance toward any of it.

"Actually — no." He tilted his head, like he'd only just reconsidered. "Let's make it worse."

He fired again.

I watched it happen in real time, too fast to look away from — the bullet tearing straight through the hand Salvatore had pressed against his own bleeding side, punching clean through his palm and burying itself back into the wound beneath it. His scream ripped through the air, raw and total, every last trace of control finally gone.

"Not killing you." DeLuca said it low, almost to himself. "Letting you die slow instead."

Everything around us dissolved into total chaos. Police officers advancing with guns raised, shouting orders that layered over each other until they became one continuous wall of noise. 

Salvatore collapsed fully now, bleeding out into a widening pool beneath him, groaning through gritted teeth. Every direction I looked held some new piece of the disaster, and I couldn't settle my focus on any single part of it long enough to actually process what I was seeing.

"No doctor fixes this. No amount of money either." DeLuca said it almost conversationally, ignoring the officers still closing in around us. "You're going to die slow, and it's going to hurt the whole way there. Call it — I don't know. A new skill of mine."

"Get down! Hands behind your head!"

The orders kept coming, sharper now, closer, dozens of voices overlapping until they blurred into a single demand.

DeLuca turned to me. "Trust me. Just — do what I say. Exactly what I say."

His voice cracked slightly on the last word, the first real unsteadiness I'd heard from him all night, and I nodded because I didn't have anything else left to offer him besides that. I watched him lower his gun to the ground, the same as the men around us, hands rising slowly behind his head.

My own hands went up a moment later, shaking hard enough that I barely registered the motion as mine.

Officers reached us within seconds, bodies crowding in fast, hands grabbing hard and forcing us into position. Two of them seized DeLuca on either side, pulling him roughly, and through the noise and the chaos and the blinding press of bodies, he found my eyes one last time.

I stared back at him as they pulled us apart…