All Chapters of THE MORETTI PROTOCOL : Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

The rain in the city never washed anything clean; it just made the blood slicker on the asphalt.Valerie Cruz adjusted the collar of her leather jacket, her eyes scanning the crowd inside The Obsidian Room. The high-end, neutral-ground lounge catering to the city’s elite was a fortress of tinted glass and velvet ropes. Tonight, it was also a hunting ground.Valerie was there for a ghost. She had just taken a massive, anonymous contract to eliminate Alessia Moretti, the fierce young queen who had recently inherited the Moretti Syndicate. But Alessia was a phantom; she never allowed her face to be photographed, used body doubles in public, and hid behind a wall of security. Valerie’s handler had only been able to provide a vague description: Dark hair, devastatingly beautiful, guarded by a ring of suits.Near the VIP section, Valerie spotted her target. A stunning brunette surrounded by four stone-faced bodyguards in identical tailored suits. Perfect. Valerie anchored her eyes on the wo

The sky on Tuesday morning was the color of a bruised lung.Valerie sat motionless on the rusted steel beam of an abandoned shipping warehouse, a hundred feet above the cracked pavement of the industrial canal district. Her heavy-caliber sniper rifle was anchored on a sandbag, its barrel aiming down like an iron finger pointing at the crossroads below. Through the high-powered optics of her scope, the world was cast in a cold, electronic green.She breathed in for four seconds, held it for four, and exhaled. Her pulse was a flat, icy sixty beats per minute. The woman from the lounge—Alia—was tucked away in a locked compartment of her mind. Right now, Valerie was only a firing mechanism. A weapon waiting for its cue.Her earpiece crackled with static. "Phantom One, the package has entered the kill zone," her handler’s synthesized voice reported. "Three-car convoy. Black armored SUVs. Target is in the middle vehicle. Eliminate the asset and vanish.""Copy," Valerie whispered, her finger

The crimson glow of the terminal pulsed against the walls, counting down the seconds they had left before the perimeter was breached."They found the car," Valerie said, her voice dropping into her default, icy tactical cadence. She stood up, leaving the vulnerability of the floor behind, and moved toward the hidden armory wall. She slapped her palm against a biometric scanner, and a hidden panel slid open, revealing racks of black-market rifles, tactical gear, and neatly stacked magazines. "The tracker must have had a hidden secondary relay. We have maybe three minutes."Alessia braced her good arm against the table, forcing herself to stand. The fresh stitches in her shoulder throbbed with a white-hot intensity, but her eyes were entirely clear. The vulnerable woman from the safehouse floor was gone. The Iron Queen was back."They won't just bring a standard hit squad," Alessia said, walking over to the armory rack with a steady, commanding stride. She looked at the weapons, her eye

The blood had long been scrubbed from the marble floors of the Moretti Estate, but the scent of ozone and copper still lingered in Alessia’s mind.It was three in the morning, and the grand office was entirely dark save for the amber glow of the city skyline cutting through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Alessia sat at her mahogany desk, her fingers tightly rubbing her temples. Spread across the desk were financial ledgers, logistics reports, and the asset sheets of the Ferro family, which she had systematically absorbed over the last forty-eight hours.Maddie Ferro was dead, but the vacuum her betrayal left behind was chaotic.A soft click echoed in the silence of the room. Alessia didn't look up, nor did her hand reach for the pistol resting on her blotter. She knew that specific, entirely soundless stride.Valerie stepped out from the shadows near the balcony door, shedding her heavy leather jacket and tossing it onto a leather armchair. She wore a simple black tank top, her arms be