Chapter 7 - THE CRACK OF THE HAMMER
The six-ton steel door sheared off its vertical tracks.
It flew twenty feet across the concrete floor, crushing two guards instantly beneath its weight.
A customized armored SWAT transport roared through the breached opening.
Its massive steel plow was coated in snow and blood.
The roof-mounted halogen searchlights snapped on, blinding the warehouse in ten thousand lumens of pure white light.
“BIANCHI!” Victor shrieked, stumbling backward against the shipping container.
From the roof hatch of the armored transport, a high-caliber sniper rifle cracked.
BOOM.
The guard standing over Amelia took a heavy .50 caliber round through the chest.
The impact lifted him off his feet, throwing him ten feet into the shadows.
Lorenzo Bianchi leaped from the front passenger door before the vehicle had even stopped rolling.
He did not wear his coat.
He wore a dark tactical vest over a bloodstained black shirt, his sleeves rolled to his elbows.
In his hands, he held an automatic shotgun.
He racked the slide with a sound like a guillotine dropping.
CH-CHAK.
“GET DOWN!” Lorenzo roared.
Amelia did not hesitate.
She threw herself across the concrete floor, wrapping her body around Mia’s wooden chair, shielding the young girl with her own torso.
Gunfire erupted across the warehouse like a string of firecrackers in an iron drum.
Victor’s men scrambled behind crates, firing wildly at the armored transport.
Rounds sparked off the reinforced plating like hail.
Lorenzo did not seek cover.
He advanced across the open floor with the terrifying, unstoppable momentum of a juggernaut.
He fired the shotgun in rhythmic, devastating succession.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Wooden crates splintered into clouds of toothpicks.
Men screamed as heavy buckshot tore through the concrete barricades.
Marco and Leo leaped from the rear doors of the transport, laying down suppressing fire with suppressed carbines.
In forty seconds, the gunfire stopped.
Silence returned to the cavernous room, broken only by the hiss of water from a punctured radiator and the groans of dying men.
Victor Moretti was crawling toward the rear service door.
His fedora was gone, his silver hair matted with concrete dust, his cashmere coat soaked in dirty puddle water.
He was dragging his silver cane behind him like a broken branch.
A heavy boot planted itself directly onto Victor’s right hand.
The bones in Victor’s fingers cracked under the pressure.
Victor howled, the cane rolling away across the floor.
Lorenzo stood over him.
The barrel of the shotgun rested three inches from the back of Victor’s neck.
“You have five seconds to pray, Victor,” Lorenzo whispered.
His voice was dead.
Cold as the ice floating on the lake outside.
“Wait!” Amelia called out.
Lorenzo did not move the barrel.
He did not look away from the old mobster.
Amelia stood up from beside Mia.
She used a combat knife dropped by a dead guard to slice the zip-ties from Mia’s wrists.
She gently peeled the duct tape from the terrified girl’s mouth.
Mia threw her arms around Amelia’s neck, weeping hysterically against her torn poncho.
“Amelia... oh God, Amelia, he was going to burn us...”
“It's okay, Mia,” Amelia whispered, stroking the girl’s hair.
“You’re safe now.”
Amelia walked across the blood-soaked concrete until she stopped beside Lorenzo.
She looked down at Victor Moretti.
The man who had terrified her for five years.
The man who had burned her flesh with an iron stamp.
The man who had lied about her sister’s grave.
“Don't kill him yet, Enzo,” Amelia said quietly.
Lorenzo’s amber eyes flickered toward her.
“He branded you, Amelia.”
“He put a bomb beneath my sister.”
“He dies tonight.”
“He dies,” Amelia agreed.
Her voice had turned to pure, tempered steel.
“But not before he tells me where my sister Clara is.”
Victor looked up from the concrete floor, his face twisted in agony and venomous hatred.
A bloody sneer crossed his lips.
“Your sister is in a cell, you stupid bitch,” Victor wheezed, spitting blood onto Lorenzo’s boot.
“In the basement of the St. Jude Parish clinic in Cicero.”
“She’s been working as a forced courier for our syndicate for ten years.”
Lorenzo’s eyes widened slightly.
He looked at Marco behind him.
“St. Jude Parish?”
Marco stepped forward, his radio in his hand.
“Boss, St. Jude is Father Thomas’s parish.”
“Your family’s private chapel.”
Lorenzo looked back down at Victor.
A horrifying, sickening realization settled over the room like an icy shroud.
Victor Moretti hadn't just infiltrated the docks.
May you like
He had a mole inside the Bianchi inner sanctum.
And that mole was inside the church where Lorenzo was supposed to be married two weeks ago.
