He ran toward the narrowing gap beneath the shutter.
His foot hit the spreading water.
He slipped.
Hard.
The gun flew one way. Dominic crashed shoulder-first against the track lip and went down with a raw sound I had never heard from him before, an animal sound, shocked and pained and stripped of dignity.
The shutter kept descending.
He tried to rise and couldn’t.
For one surreal second, all I had to do was nothing.
Nothing.
Stay where I was.
Let the man who betrayed me, used me, humiliated me, tried to frame me, and threatened to close every door in my life lie there pinned in floodwater as the world he built finally closed on him.
It would have been easy.
It would also have remade me into something I had spent ten years refusing to become.
I looked at Dominic.
He looked back.
And for the first time since I had known him, there was no arrogance in his face.
Only fear.
Not noble fear. Not regret.
Just the brute understanding that consequences had finally learned his name.
I moved.
Gabriel cursed and lunged with me as we grabbed Dominic under the arms and dragged him backward just as the shutter slammed fully down. Metal struck concrete with a force that shook the passage. Water sprayed over us. Dominic cried out, half from pain, half from disbelief.
He stared at me as if he could not comprehend what I had done.
I was breathing hard, soaked to the knees, hair half fallen loose, rage still alive in every nerve.
“I didn’t save you because I love you,” I said. “I saved you because I won’t carry another Bellucci corpse through the rest of my life.”
Then federal agents poured into the passage.
The next hour fractured into bright pieces.
Vincent in handcuffs, cursing blood and saints in the same breath.
Serena wrapped in an emergency blanket upstairs, answering questions with a steadier voice than I expected.
Board members in shock.
Donors pretending they had always distrusted Dominic.
City officials suddenly very eager to discuss compliance.
Paramedics loading Dominic onto a stretcher with one arm restrained because apparently even concussed, he still thought he could issue orders.
As they wheeled him past me, he turned his head.
For a second I thought he might apologize.
Instead he said, hoarse and furious, “You think this makes you one of us?”
I looked down at him.
“No,” I said. “That’s exactly the point.”
By sunrise, Chicago had the story.
Not all of it. Not yet. But enough.
Business heir under federal investigation.
Corruption allegations tied to redevelopment corridor.
Foundation gala disrupted by emergency board action.
Internal documents suggest long-running concealment.
What the papers did not know was the thing Rosa had understood better than any of the men in her family.
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