Chapter 5 - THE BLAST RADIUS
Five seconds.
Lorenzo did not think.
He lunged across the narrow student bedroom like a springing panther.
His massive frame collided with Amelia, knocking her backward out of the shattered doorway into the concrete hall.
Four seconds.
He wrapped his body around hers on the hallway floor.
He shielded her head with his forearms, locking her beneath his chest.
Three seconds.
Leo dove down the concrete stairwell.
Two seconds.
The world vanished into a deafening roar of orange fire and shattered plaster.
The shockwave tore through the doorway like a battering ram.
Heat, suffocating and blistering, rolled over Lorenzo’s back.
Bricks, splinters, and glass rained down in a violent torrent.
The drywall collapsed inward, burying them beneath a cloud of white dust and choking smoke.
The sprinkler system tripped overhead.
Freezing water began to pour from the ceiling in torrential streams, turning the falling plaster into gray sludge.
Lorenzo lay motionless for three seconds.
His ears rang with a high-pitched, piercing whine.
The smell of burnt cordite and scorched wool filled his nostrils.
He pushed the heavy debris off his back with a ragged groan.
“Amelia,” he coughed, his voice thick with dust.
He rolled off her.
Amelia lay beneath him, coughing violently, her hands tangled in the front of his shirt.
She looked up through the falling water.
Her face was smeared with soot and blood from a minor cut on her forehead, but her eyes were clear.
“Enzo... your back...” she gasped, reaching around his shoulder.
His heavy wool coat was shredded across the shoulders, the fabric smoking from the fireball.
“I’m fine,” he grunted.
He stood up, hauling her to her feet with one arm.
His ears were still ringing, but the adrenaline burned the pain away.
Leo scrambled back up the stairs, his face pale, holding his submachine gun ready.
“Boss! You intact?”
“Clear,” Lorenzo barked.
He wiped the blood from his brow with the back of his hand.
“Where is Marco?”
“Outside with the perimeter team,” Leo said, coughing on the smoke.
“The car is idling.”
Lorenzo pulled the silver pocket watch from his vest.
The crystal face was cracked, but the hands moved.
5:28 PM.
Thirty-two minutes until six o'clock.
The South Pier was nine miles south through a blinding lakefront blizzard.
“They set this up to kill me here,” Lorenzo muttered, his mind working with cold precision.
“Victor didn't expect me to survive the dorm.”
“He thinks I’m dead under this rubble.”
Amelia grabbed Lorenzo’s lapels with both hands.
Her knuckles were white.
“Enzo, you can't go to the pier alone!”
“It's a slaughterhouse!”
“Victor has fifty men stationed along the salt docks!”
Lorenzo looked down into her wide, panicked eyes.
“My sister is in a shipping container on that pier, Amelia.”
“I will walk through hell with a pocketknife to get her back.”
“Then you take me with you,” she said.
Her voice didn't waver.
The trembling had stopped.
The frightened runaway bride was gone.
In her place stood a woman who had survived an iron brand and fourteen days in the winter dark.
“No,” Lorenzo said flatly.
“You’re going to the safe house in Lincoln Park.”
“Victor wants me, Enzo!” she yelled against the rush of the sprinkler water.
“He expects his courier to deliver me to the pier!”
“If you show up with your soldiers, he executes Mia the moment your headlights hit the gate!”
“If I walk through that gate alone, claiming I escaped you,”
“I buy you four minutes to breach the perimeter.”
Lorenzo stared at her.
The rain from the ceiling soaked through his shirt.
“You’re asking me to send you back into Victor Moretti’s hands?”
“I’m asking you to trust me,” Amelia whispered, her hand rising to touch the rough stubble on his jaw.
“I left you once to protect your family, Lorenzo.”
“Don't make that sacrifice meaningless.”
A sharp siren began to wail in the distance.
Campus police and city fire trucks were converging on the dorms.
Lorenzo grabbed her hand.
His fingers locked around hers with a fierce, possessive grip that bruised her knuckles.
“Four minutes, Amelia,” he swore, his voice trembling with an emotion he had never allowed his men to see.
May you like
“If he lays a finger on you,”
“I will burn this entire city to the ground to find your ashes.”
