Chapter 5 - The Blood on the Marble
The man holding the gun to my head pressed harder, the steel biting into the skin behind my ear.
“Drop it, Romano. Now,” he snarled, his breath smelling of stale coffee and gunpowder.
I didn't drop the gun. Instead, I let my knees buckle slightly, feigning panic—a trick I had used a hundred times in back-alley shakedowns across Brooklyn.
The assassin shifted his weight, leaning forward to pat down my right pocket for a secondary weapon. That microscopic shift in balance was all I needed.
I spun on my heel, bringing my left elbow up with bone-shattering force into his solar plexus. The man let out a sharp, gasping wheeze as the air exploded from his lungs. Before he could recover, I gripped his wrist, twisted it inward until the bone snapped with a sickening crack, and ripped the submachine gun out of his hands.
Before he hit the concrete, I planted the butt of his own weapon into his jaw, dropping him cold.
I didn't pause to check if he was breathing. I turned, sprinting back toward the stairwell door, leaping down the spiral steps three at a time, my lungs burning, the adrenaline pumping liquid fire through my veins.
Vincent thought he had won. He thought he had left me stranded on the roof while he made his escape to his offshore accounts in the Caymans.
He didn't know about the secondary transponder I had installed in the landing gear of every single corporate aircraft and helicopter associated with our logistics network six months ago—a paranoid precaution I had taken after discovering a leak in our aviation division.
I burst through the study doors, slammed my hand onto the hidden console beneath the mahogany desk, and brought up the tactical tracking software on my private terminal.
A glowing red dot was blinking steadily on the map, moving south toward JFK International Airport at two hundred knots.
“You’re not getting out of the state, Vincent,” I whispered to the empty room.
I grabbed my secure satellite phone from the desk drawer and dialed a direct, encrypted frequency.
“Boss?” a gruff, loyal voice answered on the second ring. It was Marcus, my captain in charge of the Queens docks and the only man in the entire organization whose loyalty had been tested in blood.
“Marcus, mobilize the intercept team,” I ordered, my voice hard as granite. “Get three unmarked interceptors on the Van Wyck Expressway. Vincent Moretti is heading for a private hangar at JFK in a Eurocopter, tail number Juliet-November-Nine-Zero-Four. I want him alive. If he so much as scratches his own nose, I want him brought to me in pieces.”
“Consider it done, Boss,” Marcus replied, the sound of a shotgun being racked echoing over the line. “Where are you?”
“At the estate. I’m securing my daughters.”
I hung up the phone, pocketed my pistol, and turned toward the service stairs leading down to the wine cellar.
The house was deadly quiet. The kind of quiet that precedes a hurricane.
When I reached the heavy iron door of the panic room behind the wine racks, I knocked twice, paused, and knocked three times more—the family signal Isabelle and I had established the day we bought the estate.
A metallic click sounded from inside. The heavy steel door swung inward by an inch.
Grace Bennett’s face appeared in the gap, her eyes darting anxiously around the dark cellar before locking onto mine.
“Is it clear?” she whispered.
“The roof is clear,” I said, stepping into the small, well-lit panic room.
Olivia, Sophie, and Nora were huddled together on a leather sofa in the corner. Nora was fast asleep, her head resting in Olivia’s lap. Sophie looked up at me, her big brown eyes filled with a terrifying, adult awareness that no child should ever have to carry.
“Daddy?” Sophie asked softly. “Did the bad man go away?”
I knelt down on one knee in front of them, ignoring the dirt and blood smeared across the knees of my trousers. I looked at my three daughters—the three girls I had failed to protect for fourteen months, the ones I had left in the care of monsters while I chased shadows.
“He went away for a little while, sweetheart,” I said, my voice shaking slightly as I reached out and gently brushed a stray curl from Sophie’s forehead. “But Daddy is going to make sure he never comes back. Ever.”
Grace stood quietly by the door, watching us. In the warm light of the panic room, the tension in her shoulders finally eased just a fraction.
“You’re bleeding, Mr. Romano,” she said quietly, pointing to a scratch on my cheek where the assassin’s ring had grazed me.
May you like
“It’s nothing,” I stood up, looking at Grace with a completely new perspective. The young woman who I had barely noticed two months ago, the one who had unlocked my daughters’ voices with nursery rhymes and roasted chicken, was the only reason they were still breathing tonight. “Grace… thank you.”
She met my gaze steadily. “Don't thank me yet. We still have to survive the rest of the night.”
