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Chapter 4

مؤلف: Grace
Dante looked down at me.

He held the diamond between his fingers, and his thumb moved slowly back and forth across one of its edges. Once. Again. He didn't stop.

"Caught in the act."

He kicked a small chip of diamond out of his way.

"A million-dollar necklace. What are you going to pay with?"

I lifted my head. My eyes went past his shoulder to the clock on the wall.

Forty minutes until the hospital pulled her off the tube.

I let go of his trouser leg.

I turned and dropped onto my knees on the concrete.

I touched my forehead to the floor. Again. Again.

The sound was a dull thud.

The blood on my forehead left smears on the concrete.

"Dante, this is all on me! All of it!"

I was shouting. My throat was full of iron.

"I'm begging you. Let me go to the hospital first. Let me put down that three million."

"My daughter's waiting for the money. She's two years old."

I reached for the toe of his shoe.

"As soon as she's out of surgery I'll come back. I'll owe you my life. Cut me, kill me, whatever you want—I'll take it."

His fingers curled.

Sabrina was clutching her throat, sobbing harder.

"Dante, don't let her play you!" she cried. "You got that paternity test with your own two hands. Official seal from the hospital—that kid isn't yours!"

"Now she's conjuring up a daughter because she's got her back to the wall. You really can't see through that?"

Dante's jaw locked. The veins in the back of his hand stood up.

He gave the order.

"Strip her of anything worth money."

He pointed at the hand I had folded against my chest.

"That three-million card. Confiscate it."

"And those busy little hands of hers—break them. Then throw her out."

In his eyes, those were the hands that had been around Sabrina's throat. The hands that were guarding the card.

"No—!"

I shrank back and jammed the card between my teeth, deep into my mouth.

Two of his men moved in and pinned me down on either side.

They pried my jaw open and dug the bloody card out.

I fought. I bit at their wrists.

"Filthy bitch. Still biting—"

One of them cursed me and grabbed my right hand. He forced it flat against the edge of a step.

He lifted his foot—a hard dress shoe—and brought it down on my fingers.

Crack.

My index and middle finger bent ninety degrees backward.

Cold sweat soaked through my clothes.

The bloody card was put into Sabrina's hand.

She held it up and smiled at me.

I dragged my broken fingers along the floor. A red streak followed me.

I crawled toward Dante's back.

"Dante… that's Emily's life…"

I was begging.

"Give it back. Please give it back…"

I stared at the back of him.

Every time he used to walk away from me, he'd turn his head after a few steps and look for my eyes. If I was still there, he'd keep walking.

This time he just kept walking. He didn't turn around.

I didn't move either.

I just watched him go.

As he stepped through the fire door—

The phone on the floor a few feet away lit up.

A message came through with the hospital's highest-priority alarm.

The screen read, in one clean line:

County General Hospital, Hematology. Patient account in arrears, treatment suspended. Patient Emily Moretti, age 2, suffered cardiopulmonary collapse at 14:02 today. Resuscitation unsuccessful. Clinical death declared. Please come to claim the remains.

I braced my left hand on the floor and pushed myself up.

I stared at his back. He'd gone rigid where he stood.

I started to laugh.

"Hahahaha…"

The stairwell was empty. My laugh echoed off the concrete.

I looked at him and spoke one word at a time.

"Dante. Congratulations."

"You just confiscated the last money that could have saved your own daughter's life."

"You killed her. With your own hands."
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  • When I Became the House’s Chip   Chapter 10

    A month later.Los Angeles. A small walk-up apartment.I was packing to go home.The porcelain urn with Emily's ashes sat in the middle of the table.Knock knock knock.At the door.The Castellano Group's legal team, in full suits, filling the hallway outside.Their senior counsel took off his glasses and delivered it."Ms. Moretti. Mr. Castellano, last night at the federal penitentiary in Las Vegas—attempted to drive a sharpened toothbrush handle into his own carotid."The lawyer paused. His voice was unsteady."A guard found him in time. They kept him alive. But his mind's gone. He's in the psychiatric lockdown wing now. When he's lucid, he spends the day weeping and beating his head into the wall. Day and night he hallucinates you and Emily. He screams, he sobs. He can't even manage to die. It's worse than death."My hand, folding a shirt, paused for less than half a second."Oh."I kept packing."Death really was too cheap for him. This sounds about right."The lawyer produced a no

  • When I Became the House’s Chip   Chapter 9

    Steel groaned as it twisted.The hydraulic press let out a long hiss of brakes.One second before the Porsche would have gone flat, it stopped.The cabin had closed up around her.Her arms, her legs, her spine—pinned between folded steel.Crack. Crack.Bones snapping inside the small space.A scream tore out of her.Dante had held back just enough. He'd missed every vital.She lost control of her body. Warm fluid and blood soaked through the seat.Boom.The gate of the scrapyard blew in.Searchlights swept up to the control deck and found him.Dozens of rifle lasers came to rest on his chest and forehead.A SWAT captain raised a bullhorn."Castellano! Hands up! You're surrounded!""Stand down! Surrender, now!"Medics ran in toward the wreck.They brought in cutters and started prying Sabrina out of the metal, blood all over her.He didn't resist.He reached over and killed the power to the control deck.He stood up.In his hand, the bank card—broken in half—and a crayon drawing Emily h

  • When I Became the House’s Chip   Chapter 8

    West Las Vegas.An abandoned auto-scrapping yard.Sabrina had tried to run. A suitcase of gold bars, a private jet to South America.Dante's men took her off the tarmac and drove her straight here.In the open dirt at the center of the yard.A white Porsche.Two of his men forced her into the driver's seat. A welder's torch fused the doors shut.A crane lifted the Porsche and set it under the jaws of a hydraulic car crusher.Dante was at the control deck on the second level.The wound in his chest was loosely bandaged. It was still bleeding through.In his other hand: my three-million bank card. He'd pulled it off Sabrina when they grabbed her.Inside the Porsche, she was pounding on the bulletproof glass. Her face was torn up.The car's speakers came on.Dante's voice came through them."Sabrina. You like playing with other people's lives.""Today it's your turn."He pushed the first lever.A heavy rumble.The steel plate came down onto the roof of the Porsche.The roof screamed and c

  • When I Became the House’s Chip   Chapter 7

    Three days later.A cemetery on the west edge of Las Vegas.A storm had opened up over the desert. Wind was driving the rain sideways.I was in black.Marco stood beside me, holding a large black umbrella over us.It was a funeral with no mourners.Only a priest, reading the service into the wind and the rain.Out beyond the cemetery gate, on the asphalt—Dante, mud to the bone.He lifted his head, and the first thing he saw was Marco holding the umbrella over me.The same man. At the hospital. Here. Always next to her.He looked for a long time.Then he lowered his head and kept crawling.He had no umbrella. He let the rain strip his face.From the gate.Three steps, and his forehead to the ground.Every time, his head hit the concrete hard.Blood and rain ran down his face.He came up on his knees, one length at a time, until he reached Emily's new stone.From inside his jacket he took out a notarized document."Sienna…"His voice was cracked open."This is the transfer of every asse

  • When I Became the House’s Chip   Chapter 6

    The ICU floor, top of the hospital.The doctors had forced a sedative into me.I was lying in the bed with my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.Dante was on his knees outside the window of my room.His face was painted in blood.He pressed his face against the glass, muttering."I was wrong, Sienna. I know I was wrong…""I shouldn't have stopped the treatment… it's fine, we have the money, we'll use cloning, Emily will come back, she'll come back…"At the other end of the corridor, Marco had changed out of the casino uniform.He was in a long black coat, walking toward them.In his hand, a yellowed manila envelope with a red classified seal on the flap.He stopped in front of Dante."Mr. Castellano. Stop the performance."His voice was even."For two years I've been keeping an eye on the hospital for her. When they pulled Emily's tube, she was so oxygen-starved she couldn't fight. They cut her off from her medication and she suffocated on that bed."Dante came up off the floor an

  • When I Became the House’s Chip   Chapter 5

    He stood frozen. Then he lunged for the phone on the floor.He read the notice.The lock screen was a small girl in an oxygen mask.The eyes and brow were stamped straight from his own face.His breathing stopped."No… that's not… no…"He shook his head and turned and roared at the bodyguards waiting down the corridor."Get a car! To the hospital! Fly in the best medical team in the country, right now—move!"I didn't look at him.I didn't look at Sabrina, whose face had gone the color of paper.I dragged my broken fingers along the floor and started down the stairs.Marco was at the far side of the fire door.He shrugged out of his long black coat and wrapped it around me.He said nothing. He picked me up in his arms and carried me fast toward the garage.Dante was at the other end of the corridor.He saw it.A man. Carrying me. Walking fast.In the way his mind worked, there was only one explanation for that.---County General. Basement level two.The corridor outside the morgue.Dan

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