Chapter 8 - The Fall of the Vances
At midnight, the penthouse suite of the Grand Plaza Hotel was filled with loud music and flowing champagne. Celeste Vance stood on the balcony overlooking the glowing city skyline, raising her glass in a toast with her father, Don Vance.
"To the death of Matteo Moretti," Celeste laughed, her red satin dress shimmering in the moonlight. "The great Don is finally food for the worms."
"You did well, my daughter," Don Vance smirked, taking a sip of his whiskey. "Using that pathetic waitress to distract him gave us the opening we needed."
BANG!
The heavy double doors of the penthouse burst open in a cloud of splinters!
Before the guards in the room could draw their weapons, a storm of suppressed gunfire swept through the suite. Within ten seconds, every single one of Don Vance's bodyguards lay motionless on the floor.
Celeste screamed, dropping her champagne glass as it shattered on the marble.
Out of the smoke stepped Matteo Moretti, calm, immaculate, and entirely unscathed. Behind him stood a small army of heavily armed men.
Don Vance turned pale, his whiskey glass slipping from his hand. "M-Matteo... how are you alive?!"
"You sent boys to do a man's job, Vance," Matteo said coldly, stepping over a fallen guard as he walked toward the balcony. "And you made the fatal mistake of threatening the people I care about."
Celeste backed up against the balcony railing, her hands shaking hysterically. "Matteo... please! It was my father's idea! I didn't want to do it!"
Matteo stopped a few feet away, looking at Celeste with utter disgust. "You offered a desperate girl ten thousand dollars to humiliate me, planning to have her murdered minutes later. You are a coward, Celeste."
He turned to Luca. "Take Don Vance to the docks. Stripped of all assets, all territories, and banish him from this city forever. If he steps foot in state lines again, execute him."
"And her?" Luca asked, pointing a gun at Celeste.
May you like
"Seize everything she owns," Matteo ordered smoothly. "Her accounts, her jewelry, her cars. Let her live in the poverty she so deeply despised in others. Let her see what it feels like to struggle for a piece of bread."
Celeste sank to her knees, weeping bitterly as guards dragged her and her father away into the night. The Vance empire had fallen without Matteo even shedding a drop of his own blood.
