Chapter 11 - THE FRACTURED KINGDOM
Gunfire ripped through the dark warehouse in violent, rhythmic strobes.
Dante didn't dive for cover.
He moved forward with terrifying, mechanical precision.
His Kimber .45 roared three times in half a second.
The two mercenaries closest to Lorenzo’s chair dropped to the concrete before their rifles cleared their hips.
Marco and Frankie advanced from the flanks, their weapons spitting suppressed fire into the shipping containers.
Muzzle flashes revealed screaming men falling behind barrels and crates.
Isabella sprinted toward her uncle.
Bullets chewed through the concrete at her heels, throwing sharp stone splinters into her skin.
She reached the chair, dropping to her knees.
"Uncle Lorenzo!" she cried, pulling a utility knife from her pocket.
She sawed through the heavy zip-ties binding his wrists.
Lorenzo opened his swollen eyes, coughing weakly.
"Bella..." he wheezed, his voice faint as dry leaves.
"You shouldn't have come..."
"Hold onto me," she said, cutting his ankles free.
She hauled his frail weight over her shoulder.
Across the room, Carlo Moretti was scrambling toward the rear loading dock.
He was bleeding from a shrapnel wound on his forearm, clutching a black leather briefcase.
Dante pursued him like an avenging demon.
A mercenary lunged from behind an oil drum to tackle Dante.
Dante caught the man by his throat with his left hand, slammed him face-first into the iron chassis of a forklift, and fired a single round downward without breaking stride.
Carlo reached the heavy metal exit door.
He shoved it open into the blinding blizzard.
Dante burst through the doorway a second later.
The icy wind tore at their clothes.
Carlo stumbled into the knee-deep snow between two stationary freight train cars.
He turned, raising his pistol with shaking hands.
"Stay back!" Carlo shrieked.
"I'll blow the yard! The fuel tanks are rigged!"
Dante stopped five paces away.
The snow swirled between them in violent white gusts.
Dante’s face was smeared with carbon, gunpowder, and blood.
His eyes were completely black, stripped of all humanity.
"The detonator was in your truck, Carlo," Dante said.
His voice was so low it barely carried over the howling storm.
"Marco cut the wires ten minutes ago."
Carlo looked at his empty left hand.
The realization settled into his bones like terminal frost.
His gun hand began to tremble violently.
"Dante... please," Carlo whimpered, tears freezing on his cheeks.
"We're blood."
"Uncle Paulo raised us together."
"You wouldn't kill your own cousin."
"My cousin died three days ago," Dante said, stepping closer.
"When you put that poison in my father's grappa."
Carlo’s breath stopped.
"You... you knew?"
"My father told Isabella," Dante whispered, raising his weapon.
"And Isabella told me."
"You killed my father for a chair in an empty room."
Carlo’s face twisted into one last, desperate snarling mask of hatred.
He raised his gun to shoot.
Dante did not fire his pistol.
He lunged forward with blinding speed, swatting Carlo's gun arm aside with a sickening snap of bone.
The weapon flew into the snowdrift.
Dante grabbed Carlo by the throat and slammed him against the steel side of the freight car.
The impact dented the rusted metal with a loud boom.
Dante’s fingers crushed into Carlo's windpipe.
Carlo gagged, his heels kicking uselessly at the snow.
"Dante!"
A voice cut through the howling storm.
Isabella stood at the edge of the warehouse door.
She had wrapped her wool sweater around her shivering uncle, who was being supported by Marco.
She looked through the driving snow at Dante.
She saw the murderous fury in his hands.
She saw the monster he was about to become.
"Dante, stop!" she shouted.
Dante did not look back.
His fingers tightened on Carlo's throat.
Carlo's face was turning purple.
"If you kill him in the dirt like a dog," Isabella yelled, her voice breaking against the wind, "you prove his point!"
"You prove to the Commission that you are just another butcher who rules by fear!"
"Let him face the council!"
"Let him crawl before the families and watch his name get erased!"
Dante’s chest heaved in violent, jagged breaths.
His knuckles were white as bone.
Carlo was choking, his eyes rolling back into his head.
Dante looked at the terrified, pathetic man pinned beneath his hand.
Then he looked back at Isabella.
The woman who had survived the night without losing her soul.
Dante opened his fingers.
Carlo dropped like a sack of wet flour into the freezing snow, gasping and retching for air.
Dante stepped back.
He pulled a pair of heavy steel handcuffs from his tactical belt and threw them at Carlo's head.
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"Cuff yourself, Carlo," Dante commanded.
"Because in two hours, you are going to tell the High Council every single lie you ever told."
