Chapter 9 - Blood on the Limestone Stairs
The tactical radio on my belt erupted with static and the deafening clatter of automatic gunfire the second I stepped out of Courtroom 402.
“Dominic! They hit the southern perimeter with an armored utility truck!” Gabriel’s voice screamed through the speaker, distorted by explosive feedback.
“They bypassed the main gate by blowing the granite retaining wall with commercial breaching charges!”
“We are falling back to the second floor corridor outside the vault!”
I did not wait for the courthouse elevator; I took the emergency stairs down four flights, Evelyn running directly behind me with her phone to her ear.
“I just contacted the regional office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Dominic,” Evelyn shouted over the echoing clatter of our footsteps.
“I sent the surveillance recording and the financial money-laundering files directly to the Special Agent in Charge.”
“Federal tactical units are mobilizing from the Glenview airfield right now!”
“The feds will be twenty minutes too late to save my nephew, Evelyn,” I replied, bursting through the fire exit into the subterranean parking garage.
The Land Cruiser was already idling with Gabriel’s secondary driver at the wheel, its heavy engine rumbling against the concrete pillars.
I climbed into the passenger seat, racking the bolt of an assault rifle while the tires squealed against the slick garage floor.
We tore out of the parking structure onto Wacker Drive, hitting the Kennedy Expressway against the flow of morning rush-hour traffic.
The winter storm had cleared, leaving behind a blinding, arctic sun that bounced off the snowbanks like shattered glass.
Every mile felt like an eternity, the speedometer needle buried deep past one hundred miles an hour as our sirens cleared the lanes.
Forty miles to the north, inside the darkened panic shelter of the Lake Forest mansion, eleven-year-old Mia Campbell sat in the corner of the vault.
The floor beneath her trembled with the shockwaves of heavy breaching charges detonating in the grand entrance hall downstairs.
In her lap, baby Leonardo was wrapped in two cashmere blankets, his tiny fingers clutching the silver eagle medallion she had hung around his neck.
Mia’s wrists throbbed with agony where the splints pressed against her fractured bones, but she did not shed a single tear.
She had lived through eleven years of beatings, cold basements, and cruel commands from men who thought she was invisible.
Today, she had been entrusted with a sacred task by the only man who had ever treated her like a human being.
She held a heavy brass fire poker in her good right hand, her knuckles white as chalk, her eyes locked on the circular vault door handle.
Outside in the hallway, the heavy sound of combat boots echoed against the walnut floors, accompanied by the cold, metallic voice of Victor Cross.
“Blow the hinges with the shaped linear charges!” Cross commanded his men through the smoke.
“We don't need the vault intact; we just need what’s breathing inside it!”
Two loud metallic clacks indicated that magnetic explosive strips were being attached directly to the outer seams of the reinforced door.
Downstairs on the grand curved staircase, Gabriel lay against the limestone balustrade, his shoulder soaked in crimson blood from a rifle graze.
Beside him, two of our estate guards were empty on ammunition, their sidearms locked back on empty slides.
Cross’s remaining eight mercenaries were advancing up the marble steps, their weapons raised to deliver the final executions.
That was the precise moment the front oak doors of the mansion were pulverized into a thousand splintered projectiles.
Our heavy armored Land Cruiser did not stop in the driveway; it smashed through the decorative pillars of the portico and straight into the grand foyer.
The two-ton vehicle plowed through the marble statues, crushing two mercenaries against the heavy limestone fireplace with a sickening crunch.
I jumped out of the shattered passenger window before the vehicle had even stopped moving, my rifle firing from the shoulder.
The first mercenary on the landing dropped instantly as three rounds punched through his tactical armor.
The second turned to return fire, but Gabriel gathered his remaining strength and put two rounds through the man’s throat from the floorboards.
The grand foyer was transformed into an abattoir of drifting plaster dust, gunpowder smoke, and screaming men.
Victor Cross scrambled backward down the second-floor gallery, tossing his empty rifle aside and pulling his combat knife from his chest rig.
I climbed the blood-spattered limestone stairs two at a time, discarding my empty rifle and drawing my father’s forty-five pistol.
Cross lunged at me from behind the velvet drapes of the gallery, his heavy blade slashing downward in an arc meant to sever my jugular vein.
I caught his wrist with my left hand, the impact driving the air from my chest as his momentum slammed us both against the balustrade.
He was fifty pounds heavier than me, trained in hand-to-hand combat by foreign militaries, his face twisted in a feral, murderous grin.
“Vance will buy his way out of every charge, Dominic!” Cross spat, his saliva flecking my cheek as he forced the knife toward my eye.
“And when he walks out of that courthouse, he will finish what he started with your family!”
“Vance isn't walking out of anywhere, Victor,” I growled through clenched teeth.
I drove my steel-toed boot into Cross’s right knee with all the force in my body, feeling the joint snap with a wet, sickening pop.
Cross roared in agony, his grip on the combat blade slipping as his leg gave out beneath his massive weight.
I twisted his wrist until the bones in his forearm splintered, tearing the knife from his fingers and driving my fist into his scarred jaw.
He collapsed onto his back on the Persian runner, gasping for air, his nose shattered and blood pouring from his split lips.
I stood over him, my chest heaving, the barrel of my forty-five pressed firmly against the bridge of his broken nose.
“Don't pull the trigger, Dominic,” Cross wheezed, raising two bloody, trembling hands into the air.
“I was just an employee... I just took the contract...”
“You threatened an eleven-year-old child and tried to murder my sister’s baby in his cradle,” I said, my finger tightening on the smooth trigger.
“In my world, there is no contract that pays for that.”
“Wait! Listen to me!” Cross screamed, his eyes dilating with pure, primal panic.
“If you shoot me, you will never find her!”
My finger froze against the curved metal trigger, my heart stopping dead in my chest.
“What did you just say?” I demanded, the room spinning around me.
Cross swallowed a mouthful of blood, coughing against the floorboards as he looked up into my eyes with a desperate, bargaining leer.
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“Sophia...” Cross wheezed, clutching his shattered knee with both hands.
“Sophia Moretti didn't die at the bottom of Lake Michigan, you arrogant bastard.”
