Her gray coat was too small, its zipper broken. Snow covered her worn boots, and a faded blue hat nearly swallowed her little face.

The heavy oak doors slammed against the brick walls with a sound like a grenade going off.

Inside the staging room, four Valenti guards spun around, their hands frantically reaching for their shoulder holsters.

THWIP! THWIP! THWIP! THWIP!

My suppressed submachine gun spat fire in tight, lethal bursts. Three of the guards dropped instantly, their bodies crashing over the steel prep tables, blood spraying across the plastic hanging dividers.

The fourth guard managed to clear his sidearm, but Marco stepped through the doorway, firing a high-caliber round straight through the man's throat. He collapsed onto the concrete floor, clutching his neck, choking on his own blood.

In the center of the room, strapped to a heavy iron chair beneath a swinging bulb, was Sarah Jenkins. Her face was badly bruised, her lip split wide open, her blonde hair matted with blood.

Standing behind her, holding a bloody brass-knuckled fist in the air, was Jimmy Varga.

Jimmy went pale as paper as he looked from the dead guards on the floor up to my face. His mouth opened and closed like a dying fish.

"Moretti...?" Jimmy stuttered, backing up until his spine hit the stainless-steel desk behind him. "What the hell are you doing here?! This is Valenti territory! You... you're breaking the treaty!"

"You touch a child's mother," I said softly, stepping forward, the barrel of my gun pointed squarely at his chest, "and you lose your territorial rights, Jimmy."

"She stole from Dominic!" Jimmy screamed, panic pitching his voice into a high-pitched squeal. He reached toward the desk, where a heavy black steel briefcase sat open, exposing rows of encrypted hard drives and stacks of bearer bonds worth tens of millions. "She took state secrets! She saw the ledgers!"

"She's a cleaner who wanted to buy her daughter a six-dollar sandwich," I snapped.

I didn't give him another second to speak. I raised my weapon and put two rounds straight through his kneecaps.

Jimmy shrieked in absolute agony, collapsing onto the bloody concrete floor, clutching his shattered legs, writhing like a worm.

Luca stepped forward with a pair of heavy wire cutters, cutting the plastic zip-ties binding Sarah's wrists to the chair. The moment she was free, she collapsed forward into my arms, sobbing uncontrollably, her body trembling with violent shock.

"My baby..." she gasped into my coat, her fingers digging into my lapels. "Emma... did they get my Emma...?"

"Emma is safe," I whispered into her hair, lifting her gently off the chair into my arms. "She's at my house. She ate a sandwich, she's drinking hot chocolate, and she's waiting for you."

Sarah let out a long, ragged sob of pure relief, closing her eyes and passing out cold from exhaustion and blood loss.

I looked down at Jimmy Varga, who was whimpering on the floor, bleeding out onto the concrete.

"Marco," I said, pointing at the open black briefcase on the desk containing Valenti's offshore ledgers. "Take the box. Burn the building."