Chapter 12 - The Wrath of the Mountain Titan
"Positions! Kill him! Kill him at the door!" Dante shrieked, scrambling behind a stack of wooden shipping crates, his voice pitching into hysterical terror.
The four mercenaries raised their automatic rifles, aiming directly at the heavy corrugated steel roll-up door of the warehouse.
They expected a man to knock. They expected a negotiator.
What they got was a battering ram.
BOOM!
The reinforced steel doors exploded inward in a shower of flying metal, rivets, and concrete dust as the armored Moretti tactical truck smashed clean through the entrance at forty miles per hour, crushing two perimeter barriers and sliding sideways across the slick floor.
Before the dust could even settle, the driver’s door was kicked completely off its hinges.
Luca emerged from the smoke.
He had stripped off his tuxedo jacket, wearing a tactical vest over his torn white shirt, his sleeves rolled up, his scarred face twisted into a mask of pure, apocalyptic fury. He didn't look like a businessman, or a mafia boss, or even a man.
He was the terrifying, unstoppable force of nature that every syndicate in Europe had warned their children about.
The lead mercenary opened fire with an assault rifle.
Luca didn't even duck. The high-caliber rounds sparked uselessly against his Kevlar vest as he closed the twenty-foot distance in three thunderous strides.
Luca grabbed the mercenary by the tactical vest with both hands, lifted the two-hundred-pound man clean over his head, and hurled him with terrifying force through the glass office partition twenty feet away. The man crashed through the wood and glass, motionless.
The second mercenary attempted to draw a sidearm.
Luca slapped the weapon away with his left arm, grabbed the man by the throat with his right hand, and slammed him down against the concrete with enough raw power to crack the floor.
"Sophia!" Luca roared, his voice shaking the metal rafters like rolling thunder.
"Luca! Behind the crates!" I screamed at the top of my lungs.
Dante’s two remaining rogue capos fired from behind the wooden crates, their bullets grazing Luca’s left arm.
Blood blossomed across Luca’s white shirt, but he didn't even slow down. The wound only seemed to fuel his primal rage. He grabbed a heavy steel engine block resting on a wooden pallet and shoved it with a single, devastating thrust. The two-ton steel mass crushed through the wooden crates like kindling, pinning both capos beneath the debris.
In less than ninety seconds, Dante’s entire private strike team had been dismantled into blood, splintered wood, and shattered concrete.
Luca stood in the center of the devastated warehouse, his chest heaving, his dark eyes sweeping through the dust until they landed on me tied to the chair.
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The murderous wrath in his eyes vanished in an instant, replaced by pure, desperate relief.
"Sophia," he gasped, dropping his weapons and sprinting toward me.
