Chapter 17 - The Fall of the Fixer
Before Damian could swing his weapon toward the pillar, Julian lunged forward out of the darkness with the speed of a striking viper.
He clamped his left hand over the slide of Damian’s pistol, forcing the barrel upward toward the ceiling just as the traitor pulled the trigger.
The shot deafened the narrow hallway, blowing a hole through the decorative plaster molding above their heads with a shower of white dust.
Julian drove his right knee brutally into Damian’s midsection, forcing a wet, agonizing gasp of air from the fixer's collapsing lungs.
He twisted the weapon out of Damian’s numb fingers, tossing the automatic pistol across the carpet into the darkness beyond their reach.
Damian stumbled backward into a mahogany display cabinet, shattering the glass doors as he scrambled desperately to draw his secondary backup knife.
“Julian! Wait!” Damian screamed, holding the tactical blade out in front of him with shaking, blood-stained hands as he backed against the wall.
“She made me do it! Rosalind approached me! She told me the Calabrese family would kill us both if we didn't cooperate with their takeover!”
Julian didn't speak a single word; he simply dropped his own pistol onto the carpet, choosing to face his betrayer with his bare hands.
He stepped into Damian’s guard, sidestepping a wild, desperate lunge of the tactical knife with effortless, veteran martial discipline.
He caught Damian’s wrist mid-thrust, twisting the joint with a sickening, audible snap of breaking cartilage that made the man shriek in agony.
Julian grabbed his former brother by the throat with both hands, lifting him six inches off the floor and slamming him against the gallery wall.
“You ate at my table for ten years, Damian,” Julian growled, his voice vibrating with ten years of shared history turning to ash.
“I gave you wealth, I gave you power, and I trusted you with the lives of every single soldier who wears our family colors.”
Damian’s face turned deep purple as his airway was completely crushed beneath the iron grip of the syndicate boss's hands.
“I... I deserved... the throne...” Damian choked out, his eyes bulging with a final, pathetic spark of jealous resentment toward his master.
“You were never a king, Damian,” Julian whispered coldly, staring deep into the fading eyes of the man who had plotted his murder.
“You were only ever a ledger clerk who forgot his place.”
Julian tightened his grip, applying a final, decisive surge of pressure until the vertebrae in Damian’s neck snapped with a sharp, echoing crack.
He released his hold, allowing the lifeless body of his former second-in-command to slide down the gallery wall onto the carpet.
He stood over the corpse for three seconds, his chest rising and falling slowly as he wiped a smear of Damian’s blood from his cuff.
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He turned toward the end of the hallway, where the weak beam of the dropped flashlight was illuminating the open door of the master bedroom.
Rosalind was inside that room, trapped like a spider inside the very web she had spent three years spinning to catch him.
