Chapter 10: The Gun Beneath the Table

“You’re Vincent Moretti’s daughter,” Cassian whispered, his words dripping with lethal accusation. “You were raised around spilled blood and burning cordite. You don’t need fucking weather patterns to cover a simple hit.”

Emma stared at him, her chest rising and falling rapidly as her perfect, icy composure began to actively fracture.

“You waited all these months because you hesitated, Emma,” Cassian stated, stating it as an absolute, undeniable fact. “And I don’t hesitate.”

“I didn’t hesitate,” she spat, her green eyes flashing with intense, defensive rage.

“You absolutely did,” Cassian challenged smoothly, sliding his large hands slowly onto the tabletop and casually interlacing his scarred fingers. “You let yourself get entirely too close to the target.”

He watched her pupils dilate as he verbally dissected her mind.

“You spent eight agonizing months telling me all your fake, tragic stories,” Cassian murmured, his voice softening into a hypnotic rumble. “But you listened to mine. You genuinely listened to me.”

Emma swallowed hard, her throat visibly working.

“You realized that the terrifying monster your father sent you to blindly execute was just an exhausted man looking for a quiet cup of coffee,” Cassian said softly, striking the final psychological blow. “You didn’t want to shoot me in the muddy street like a rabid dog. You wanted to do it quietly. In an empty diner. To give us one last, intimate conversation.”

Emma’s cold facade cracked just a fraction of an inch, but to Cassian, it was as loud as shattered glass.

“You don’t know anything about me, Cassian,” she hissed, her voice trembling with raw fury.

“I know that you’re totally bluffing right now,” Cassian said gently.

He didn’t break eye contact as he deliberately, agonizingly reached his right hand into the inner pocket of his faded denim jacket.

Emma panicked. She instinctively dropped her right hand beneath the diner table.

CLICK.

Cassian heard the distinct, heavy metallic click of a revolver hammer being manually pulled back. She had a heavy-caliber gun pointed directly at his stomach through the thin wood of the table.

Cassian didn’t stop moving. He didn’t even flinch. He calmly pulled out his heavy, encrypted burner phone and casually slid it across the laminated table toward her.

“Call him,” Cassian commanded, his voice echoing in the empty room.

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