Part 2: A WOMAN IN SILVER LUNGED TOWARD A PREGNANT HEIR BESIDE A CHAMPAGNE TOWER.

"Step back, Victoria!" Rocco yelled over the ringing silence of the stairwell, reloading with a crisp snap of his magazine. "You're outnumbered by estate perimeter teams!"

Victoria laughed—a crystalline, melodic sound that chilled the air more than the winter draft whistling through the stairwell.

"The perimeter teams?" she asked mockingly. "You mean the men whose pensions were tied to the maritime contracts my family financed? Check your radio, darling. They aren't coming up. They’re making sure nobody gets out."

Behind Rocco, inside the medical bunker, the monitors suddenly screeched. A prolonged, high-pitched alarm that signaled cardiac distress.

Maya’s voice crackled through the intercom, strained and panicked. "Rocco! The drug isn't working! The stress triggered full active labor. The baby's heart rate is dropping below eighty—cord compression! If I don't perform an emergency C-section right now, we lose both of them!"

Rocco felt a cold spike pierce his chest. An emergency delivery without full hospital power, under siege by an elite kill team.

"Do it, Maya," Rocco commanded into his lapel mic. "Cut."

"I can't without surgical lighting!" Maya shouted back. "The internal battery is dying!"

Victoria took a step up the stairs, her boots crunching over spent shell casings. "Give me the old man, Rocco. And give me Elena. Let me finish what should have happened on that yacht a year ago. Do that, and I might let you walk out of this city alive."

The Patriarch stepped out from behind the reinforced credenza. In his hand was an antique pearl-handled revolver he had pulled from a concealed drawer under the sideboard. His hands shook slightly, not from fear, but from a profound, boiling rage.

"You killed my son," the Patriarch whispered, his voice trembling with an old man’s grief. "Thomas didn't die from mechanical failure. It was you."

"Thomas was weak, Arthur," Victoria said, raising her rifle and aiming it directly at her husband’s chest. "Just like Elena. Just like that brat clawing its way out of her womb right now. This family needed steel. I brought steel. You brought sentimentality."

Rocco didn't wait for her to pull the trigger. He lunged sideways, tackling the Patriarch to the floor just as a hail of automatic fire chewed through the mahogany credenza, sending splintered wood and shredded velvet across the suite.

Rocco rolled to his feet, raised his weapon, and fired three rounds down the stairwell. One hit Victoria’s shoulder. She grunted in pain, stumbling back onto the landing as blood bloomed across her dark coat.