Chapter 11 - The Abduction and the Lion Unleashed Across the State
“Step away from him, little girl,” Marco Falcone sneered, his silver hair wild in the coastal wind, a cruel, triumphant smile stretching across his lined face.
Dante attempted to raise his sidearm with his uninjured right hand, but two mercenaries rushed forward, slamming the butt of an assault rifle against his injured shoulder. Dante let out a low, guttural roar of agony as he was forced to his knees on the wet concrete.
“Dante!” Khloe screamed, raising her small pistol, but Falcone stepped forward and slapped the weapon from her grip with a backhand that sent her sprawling onto the stone floor.
Falcone grabbed Khloe by the hair, hauling her upright. “You called me swine at the gala, didn't you? Let’s see how sharp your tongue is when I hand you over to Jared Vance in the basement of my Tacoma processing plant.”
“Touch her and I will skin you alive with my bare hands, Marco!” Dante snarled from the floor, his obsidian eyes burning with a demonic, unholy fury that made even the hardened mercenaries take an instinctive step back.
“You won’t be skinning anyone, Dante,” Falcone laughed coldly, gesturing to his men. “Plant the thermite charges on the boat and collapse the sea cave ceiling on top of him. Let the Sound be his tomb.”
“No! Dante!” Khloe fought violently, biting Falcone’s wrist and kicking at the mercenaries, but a heavy cloth soaked in chloroform was pressed firmly over her nose and mouth.
The world began to spin in dizzying circles of darkness.
The last thing Khloe saw before she lost consciousness was Dante, bleeding on the concrete floor, his eyes locked onto hers with a promise of absolute, apocalyptic vengeance.
Forty minutes later, beneath the smoking ruins of the collapsed sea cave, a massive slab of granite shifted.
Dante Varga dragged himself out from beneath the rubble.
His left shoulder was torn, blood soaked his entire side, and his face was streaked with soot and concrete dust. But in his eyes, all human restraint had been burned away.
Paulie and six surviving Varga enforcers scrambled down the cliff trail, their weapons at the ready.
“Boss!” Paulie gasped, rushing to support Dante’s weight. “Jesus Christ, boss, you’re bleeding out!”
“Get the medic to stitch the shoulder right here,” Dante commanded, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that sounded like grinding tectonic plates. “Do not give me anesthesia.”
“Boss, Falcone took the girl on a high-speed coastal cruiser heading south toward Tacoma,” Paulie reported urgently.
Dante stood upright, ignoring the agonizing pain in his shoulder as the field medic began stitching the bullet wound with heavy surgical thread. He didn't even flinch as the needle pierced his flesh.
“Call every captain from Vancouver to San Francisco,” Dante ordered, his voice echoing across the misty waters like thunder. “Empty the armories. Put five hundred men on the streets of Tacoma. Tell the state police commanders we own to seal every highway, every port, and every airstrip.”
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He looked toward the dark southern horizon, his fists clenching until his knuckles turned pure white.
“Marco Falcone wanted a war. I am going to give him the end of the world.”
