Chapter 5 - The Mark of the Beast
Dante kicked the remaining fragments of the front glass door inward, his submachine gun scanning the wreckage before he lowered the muzzle.
“Clear!” he barked over his shoulder to the tactical team securing the parking lot.
He hurried toward the counter, stepping over the corpse of the hitman Dora had blinded.
He stopped when he saw his boss sitting on an overturned milk crate, holding Dora’s wrist while wrapping her burned palms in clean, dry gauze.
“Boss,” Dante gasped, taking in the blood soaking Leonardo’s sweater.
“We intercepted Angelo’s perimeter scouts two miles up the turnpike.”
“We came as fast as we could.”
“You’re four minutes late, Dante,” Leonardo said without looking up from Dora’s hands.
His voice was quiet, but it carried the weight of a death sentence.
“If this woman hadn't possessed more courage than my entire executive council, you would be scraping my brains off the pie display right now.”
Dante swallowed hard, his eyes dropping to the floor in genuine shame.
“I’m sorry, Don Leonardo.”
“Search the bodies,” Leonardo ordered coldly, tying off the gauze around Dora’s right hand with remarkable gentleness.
“Find their communication links.”
“Angelo wouldn't launch a direct strike on an interstate diner unless he had confirmed my presence from the inside.”
Dante moved quickly, dropping to one knee beside the dead shooter near the counter.
He reached into the man’s inner leather jacket pocket and pulled out a cracked, blood-stained burner phone and a folded piece of paper torn from a legal ledger.
Dante clicked the phone's screen awake, his eyes widening slightly as he read the incoming log.
“The call originated from the central warehouse dock,” Dante muttered.
“From Uncle Marco’s office.”
Leonardo’s jaw hardened, his pale eyes turning to absolute ice.
“My father’s own brother,” Leonardo whispered.
“The rot goes all the way to the root.”
“Boss,” Dante interrupted, his voice dropping into a tense, nervous whisper.
He held out the folded piece of legal paper.
“You need to see this.”
Leonardo took the paper with his right hand and unfolded it.
Dora, still trembling from the shock of the assault, leaned forward slightly and looked down at the ink markings.
Her heart instantly stopped beating.
The paper was not a hit contract for Leonardo Costas.
It was a handwritten dossier.
Written across the top in jagged, hurried handwriting was the name: Sofia Ramirez.
Beneath the name was the exact address of their dilapidated third-floor apartment on Elm Street.
Beneath the address was Sofia’s daily schedule: the hours she spent hooked to her home dialysis machine, the license plate number of Dora’s beaten-up Honda Civic, and the name of the specialty pharmacy where they picked up her dialysate bags.
At the bottom of the page, circled twice in red ballpoint pen, was a single chilling directive:
Take the sister first. Use her to force the waitress to poison his coffee. If the waitress refuses, hang them both from the bridge.
The air left Dora’s lungs in a violent, suffocating gasp.
The diner seemed to tilt sideways beneath her feet.
Sofia.
They knew about Sofia.
They knew about the machine keeping her alive.
While Dora had been standing behind this counter taking five-hundred-dollar envelopes, the wolves of the Costas syndicate had been watching her sick, helpless sister sleeping in her bed.
“No,” Dora choked out, scrambling to her feet as pure panic overtook the shock in her limbs.
“No, no, no!”
She lunged toward the exit, ignoring the glass crunching beneath her shoes and the searing pain in her burned palms.
“Sofia! I have to get Sofia!”
Leonardo moved with terrifying speed for a wounded man.
He caught her by the shoulders before she could clear the broken doorway, spinning her around and pinning her against the solid brick frame of the entrance.
“Dora, stop!” he commanded, holding her firmly despite her frantic struggles.
“Let me go, you monster!” she screamed, tears of terror and rage finally cutting through the soot on her cheeks.
She pounded her wrapped fists against his uninjured shoulder.
“This is because of you!”
“You brought them to me!”
“You brought your filthy blood and your filthy money into my diner!”
“They’re going to kill my sister!”
“Look at me!” Leonardo roared, shaking her slightly until her wild, panicked eyes locked onto his.
The sheer command in his voice cut through her hysteria like a blade.
“Nobody is going to touch your sister,” he said, his face inches from hers, every word carved from iron.
“Do you hear me?”
“I swear to you on the grave of my mother, if a single hair on that girl’s head is harmed, I will burn this entire city to ash.”
He turned his head toward Dante without releasing his grip on Dora’s coat.
“Dante!”
“Yes, Don Leonardo?”
“How many men did Angelo dispatch to the Elm Street address?”
Dante glanced at the burner phone screen, his thumbs flicking across the keypad.
“The text says a two-man snatch team was mobilized twenty minutes ago.”
“They’re driving an unmarked gray van.”
“They’re five minutes away from her building.”
Dora let out a strangled wail, her knees buckling completely.
Leonardo caught her, scooping her up against his chest despite the blinding agony ripping through his newly torn bicep.
He carried her straight toward the armored black SUV idling in the gravel lot.
“Dante, take the lead vehicle,” Leonardo commanded, his eyes blazing with a terrifying, lethal fury.
“Radio the second perimeter team.”
“If that gray van is on Elm Street when we arrive, ram it through the nearest brick wall.”
“Take no prisoners.”
He shoved Dora gently into the reinforced leather back seat of the SUV and climbed in immediately beside her, slamming the heavy ballistic door shut.
The glass was two inches thick, completely sealing out the sound of the rain.
The driver hit the accelerator before Leonardo’s coat cleared the threshold.
The four-ton vehicle surged forward, spraying gravel across the shattered remains of Rusty’s Diner as it roared up the on-ramp and launched onto Interstate 95 at ninety miles an hour.
Dora sat huddled against the leather door, her breath coming in jagged, dry sobs as she watched the speedometer climb.
The neon signs of the highway blurred into streaks of bloody red and cold silver against the rain-streaked windows.
In her pocket, the three thousand dollars she had earned over the last week felt like burning coals pressed against her thigh.
She looked at the man sitting beside her.
Leonardo was leaning forward, racking the slide of his .45 pistol with one hand against the back of the front passenger seat.
His face was completely devoid of mercy, humanity, or doubt.
The exhausted patron who had paid five hundred dollars for an hour of peace was gone.
In his place sat the supreme commander of a criminal empire, preparing to go to war for the life of an impoverished, sick girl he had never even met.
“Hold on,” Leonardo said softly, his pale eyes reflecting the dashboard lights as the city skyline loomed in the distance like a jagged black saw.
May you like
“We’re going to get your sister.”
And as the siren screamed through the predawn darkness, Dora realized with chilling clarity that the door to her old life had not just been broken.
