Chapter 6 - The North Gate Siege
The rain began to pour as we rushed up from the holding cells into the main courtyard, the sky splitting open with jagged flashes of lightning.
The sprawling Moretti estate was under full-scale assault. Heavy machine-gun fire crackled from the perimeter stone walls, tracer rounds cutting brilliant red lines through the dark, stormy night. The rival syndicate—the Rossi family—had finally made their move, using the chaos of the nursery incident as the opening salvo in a full territorial war.
Adrien moved with terrifying precision, sliding into a tactical vest handed to him by a senior enforcer while issuing rapid-fire orders over his encrypted comm-link.
"Hold the inner courtyard! Do not let them breach the main house!" Adrien barked, checking the magazine of his rifle.
I stayed close to the heavy oak double doors of the master suite, where Sophie and my mother were huddled with the sleeping triplets inside the reinforced safe room.
Adrien caught my eye through the flashing strobe of emergency lights. He crossed the wet courtyard in three long strides, grabbing my arm to pull me out of the line of fire.
"Get inside the safe room and lock the biometric bulkhead," Adrien ordered, his voice urgent and intense. "Do not open it for anyone unless you hear my voice giving the security passphrase."
"What about you?" I asked, seeing the raw tension in his face.
"I have a war to finish," Adrien replied, his dark eyes burning with fierce determination. He pressed a heavy, encrypted satellite phone into my hand. "If anything happens to the perimeter, use this to activate the secondary extraction tunnel beneath the floorboards. Promise me, Elena."
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I nodded, gripping the phone tightly. "Be careful."
Adrien gave a sharp nod, turned away, and plunged into the thick of the gunfire alongside Marco and his enforcers as the iron North Gate blew open with a deafening explosion.
