Chapter 3 - Ashes, Smoke, and a Traitor's Tears
The rain hissed against the burning metal of the overturned transport.
Dominic crawled through the shattered passenger window of the second SUV, his face blackened with soot and engine oil.
A deep gash ran along his left temple, spilling bright red blood into his eyebrow and down his cheek.
Matteo was beside him, dragging a wounded soldier by the collar of his tactical vest into the cover of a steel shipping crate.
"Dominic, keep your head down!" Matteo shouted over the thunder of high-caliber rounds ricocheting off the corrugated metal.
Dominic raised his weapon and fired three controlled shots into the upper catwalk of the cold storage facility.
A man screamed and tumbled twenty feet down into the muddy gravel below.
"Where is the perimeter security?" Dominic roared, wiping blood from his eyes with his soaked sleeve.
"They aren't answering the radio frequencies," Matteo yelled back, ejecting a spent magazine and slamming a fresh one home.
"The outer gate was open when we arrived."
"Somebody cut the padlocks twenty minutes before our convoy cleared the avenue."
Four Moretti soldiers lay motionless in the mud beside the burning lead truck.
They had been cut down the second they stepped onto the tarmac.
Dominic looked at the burning wreckage of his most trusted men, his chest heaving with murderous fury.
His mind flashed back to the penthouse forty minutes ago.
He remembered the cold plastic burner phone clutched in Madeline’s delicate hands.
He remembered the Brooklyn number glowing on the screen.
He had believed she was merely unhappy with the isolation of their life.
Now he was convinced she had sold his operational coordinates to Lorenzo Castiglione for a bag of clean cash.
"She set us up," Dominic snarled under his breath, his knuckles turning white around the grip of his pistol.
"She gave Castiglione the arrival schedule."
"Dominic, we don't know that for certain," Matteo shouted, firing another burst toward the crane.
"She had the phone in her hands, Matteo!"
"She looked me in the eye and tried to lie about Pier Fourteen before I even knew we had a shipment diverted here!"
Before Matteo could reply, the heavy sound of approaching engines rumbled from the main entrance of the dockyard.
Three black sedans tore through the broken chain-link gate, their high beams cutting through the gunsmoke and rain.
Dominic leveled his weapon at the lead sedan, preparing for the final assault.
The doors flew open, and a dozen men clad in black tactical jackets poured out into the yard.
"Hold your fire!" a voice bellowed through the rain.
Salvatore Moretti stepped into the glare of the headlights, an automatic shotgun resting in the crook of his arm.
"Dominic! Dominic, where are you, nephew?"
Dominic lowered his weapon an inch, the adrenaline draining from his limbs, leaving a hollow ache in his chest.
"Salvatore! Over here behind the freight containers!"
Salvatore rushed across the muddy ground, his expensive cashmere coat dragging through the bloody sludge.
His face was twisted into a mask of pure, frantic anguish.
He threw his arms around Dominic’s shoulders, pulling his bloodied nephew into a tight embrace.
"Thank God," Salvatore wept openly, his tears mixing with the falling rain.
"Thank God you are breathing."
"I was at the downtown club when the alarm triggered on my secure line."
"I gathered every available man in the borough and drove like a madman."
Dominic let his uncle hold him, his body shivering from the shock of the blast.
"They were waiting for us, Uncle."
"Four of our boys are gone."
Salvatore pulled back, his eyes scanning the carnage with theatrical horror.
"Who did this to our family?"
Geno, Salvatore’s chief enforcer, stepped forward from the shadows near the burning truck.
He bent down beside one of the fallen shooters who had dropped from the catwalk.
Geno reached into the dead man’s jacket and pulled out a heavy silver medallion on a steel chain.
He walked over and dropped it into Salvatore’s outstretched palm.
The silver medallion bore the crest of the Castiglione family: a roaring lion beneath an iron crown.
"It was Castiglione’s Brooklyn crew," Geno said, his voice flat and deliberate.
"This is their frontline muscle."
Salvatore turned the silver coin over in his hand, his expression turning to stone.
"Lorenzo," Salvatore whispered, loud enough for Matteo and the surviving guards to hear.
"That bastard broke the five-year truce."
"He couldn't have known the arrival time unless someone opened our vault from the inside," Dominic said, his voice dropping into a register that made Matteo shiver.
Salvatore placed a heavy, comforting hand on Dominic’s soaked shoulder.
"We found a burner phone registered to an apartment in DUMBO ten minutes ago, Dominic."
"My cyber technicians tracked the outgoing signals from your residential tower."
"The calls were made from your private floor between ten and eleven tonight."
Dominic felt the world tilt on its axis.
Every doubt he had tried to harbor for his wife evaporated into cold, murderous certainty.
"She killed my men," Dominic whispered, looking at the burning wreckage.
"She tried to put me in the ground beside my father."
Matteo stood five feet away, watching Salvatore’s face under the harsh glare of the headlights.
Matteo noticed something that made his blood run cold.
Salvatore’s men were carrying specialized close-quarters carbines that took at least thirty minutes to draw from the armory vault.
Salvatore’s club in downtown Manhattan was forty-five minutes away in dry weather.
Yet Salvatore had arrived at Pier Fourteen twelve minutes after the first detonation.
Matteo kept his mouth shut, but his fingers loosened on the grip of his sidearm.
A mile down the access road, hidden behind the rust-covered hull of a dry-docked barge, Lorenzo’s Escalade idled in the dark.
I watched through the rain-streaked windshield as the emergency lights of the police and fire departments began flashing in the distance.
Dominic was alive; I had seen him standing under the floodlights with his uncle.
Yet as I watched Salvatore wrap his arm around Dominic’s shoulders, I realized my husband was now walking into an even deadlier trap.
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He thought he had been saved by his father’s brother.
In reality, he had just handed the executioner the keys to the kingdom.
