Chapter 7
If loving her made me a traitor, then I would burn the entire world to ash.
"Eight."
I didn't draw the Kimber to aim at Elena.
I spun, shoving her toward the recessed masonry alcove ten feet down the landing—a deep, load-bearing stone archway built of solid granite that framed the gallery window.
"Get behind the pillar!" I ordered, my voice rough as gravel.
With my left hand, I tore open the front of my duster and pulled the prepped demolition block from my tactical vest. I jammed the master override card into the maintenance diagnostic slot beside the jamb, forcing the electronic interlocks into an open circuit state, and slapped the adhesive magnetic charge directly over the primary hydraulic locking spindle on the door's seam.
"Seven."
"Dante," the synthesized voice rasped, a sudden sharp spike of static hitting the line. "Step away from the target."
"No," I snarled into the ceiling.
It was the first time I had ever said that word to Don Bellandi.
The static on the intercom exploded into a high-pitched scream. "Execution protocol authorized! Vents deploying—"
I lunged back into the granite alcove, throwing Elena flat against the reinforced masonry floor. I dropped over her, pinning her beneath my chest and hauling the heavy ballistic duster over both our heads, using my Kevlar backplate and the thick stone corner of the archway as an angled shield against the blast corridor.
"Brace!" I roared.
My thumb drove the pin into the remote detonator.
*BOOM.*
The world shattered into deafening thunder, flame, and overpressure.
The shockwave hammered into the stone pillar, the backblast tearing at the hem of my coat and scouring the exposed skin of my neck with burning grit. Even sheltered behind the load-bearing granite, the concussion punched the air straight out of my lungs. Plaster rained down like hail, mixed with sheared rivets and pulverized drywall. A horrific screech of tearing metal tore through the corridor as the focused shaped charge punched through the hydraulic pins, shearing the locks clean off their mounts and blowing the four-ton vault door inward on its shattered tracks. It hit the floor of the inner chamber with a ground-shaking crash that rattled the chandeliers on the floor below.
Smoke rolled across the landing, black, acrid, and reeking of burnt sulfur, vaporized hydraulic fluid, and cordite.
I pushed myself up onto my palms, coughing violently. My ears rang with a shrill, deafening whine, and a hot trickle of blood ran down from my left nostril onto my lip.
Beneath me, Elena was trembling, her face streaked with white plaster dust and soot. But her emerald eyes were wide, staring up into mine through the gloom. There was no terror in them. Only a fierce, unholy light that set my blood on fire.
"Stay here," I rasped, my throat raw from pulverized stone.
I drew my Kimber .45 from its leather holster. My hands were rock-steady. I racked the slide, chambering a hollow-point round with a heavy, lethal snap.
I was an oath-breaker now. A dead man walking. To kill the Don was the ultimate syndicate sin, an atrocity that carried an automatic execution mark from every family from New York to Palermo. But as I rose to my feet, stepping through the blackened, buckled wreckage of the threshold, I felt completely, terrifyingly free.
I was going to put a bullet through the throat of the tyrant who had terrorized her. I was going to finish what the car bomb had started.
I stepped through the smoking breach, raising the Kimber with both hands, clearing the corners and aiming directly through the rolling clouds of dust into the center of the dark, air-conditioned vault.
"It's over, Boss," I growled, my finger tightening on the trigger.
The smoke thinned.
The red emergency strobes from the shattered hallway sliced through the gloom of the inner sanctum, illuminating the center of the vast, windowless room.
My finger froze on the trigger.
My breath stopped dead in my throat.
There was no tyrant waiting for me with a gun. There was no scarred patriarch glaring from a leather throne.
Sitting in the dead center of the room, illuminated only by the faint green glow of a dozen electronic monitors, was something that made the blood in my veins turn to solid ice.
