Chapter 13 - The Siege of Sovereign Tower
The sound of the skylight detonating was not a clean break; it was a concussive shockwave that blew the heavy mahogany doors off their hinges and filled the corridor with blinding white smoke.
Flashbang grenades popped in rapid, deafening succession—bang, bang, bang—sending rhythmic pressure waves through the air that rattled my teeth in their sockets.
Dante shoved me down behind the solid obsidian desk, shielding my head and shoulders with his entire body.
The rain of glass shards cascaded over his cashmere coat like frozen hail, slicing the heavy fabric but failing to penetrate the ballistic liner beneath.
Automatic gunfire erupted immediately.
High-velocity rounds shredded the plaster walls, tearing through priceless oil paintings and punching fist-sized holes in the drywall above our heads.
The smell of cordite, burning gypsum, and ozone flooded the room, choking my lungs.
“Marco! Suppressive fire on the western balcony!” Dante roared over the din, leaning around the edge of the obsidian slab.
He brought the short-barreled shotgun up with brutal efficiency.
BOOM.
The heavy 12-gauge slug punched through the thick drywall twenty feet away, catching a mercenary in full tactical gear as he rounded the shattered doorframe.
The man was lifted off his boots, thrown backward into the smoky corridor like a broken mannequin.
Marco fired two disciplined, suppressed bursts from his sidearm, taking down a second operative attempting to set a breaching charge on the server cabinet.
“They cut the main power grid!” Marco yelled, his voice strained as bullets chewed into the doorframe above his head. “The secondary generators kicked in, but the private elevators are locked on fifty-eight!”
“Good,” Dante replied, his face completely calm, an eerie, terrifying smile playing on his lips. “That means they have nowhere to run when I run out of patience.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a compact, steel-cased radio transmitter.
He slapped it into my hand, closing my fingers over the trigger toggle.
“Listen to me, Eliza,” he commanded, his baritone cutting clean through the deafening roar of automatic weapons. “This controls the blast shutters on the northern emergency stairwell. If I go down, you toggle that switch, run to the forty-fourth floor, and lock yourself in the mechanical vault.”
“I’m not leaving you!” I screamed back, clutching the transmitter against my chest.
“You are not a soldier, Eliza! You are the asset!”
“I am your wife!” I yelled, the words ripping from my throat before I could filter them. “And I am not watching another person I care about die on the floor while I run away in the dark!”
Dante froze for a fraction of a second, his amber eyes locking onto mine through the drifting smoke.
Something profoundly powerful shifted behind his gaze—a fierce, untamable fire that shattered the cold, clinical mask of the mafia boss.
“Then hold the line with me,” he whispered, his hand briefly gripping the back of my neck with ferocious devotion.
He reached into his waistband, pulled a compact Glock 19 with a carbon-fiber slide from a concealed holster, racked the slide, and placed it firmly in my right hand.
“Two hands on the grip,” he said, his voice steady as a surgeon’s. “Index finger along the frame until you see the target. Front sight on center mass. Squeeze, do not pull.”
A heavy boot slammed into the remnants of the office door.
A mercenary wearing a matte-black ballistic helmet and night-vision goggles leveled an assault carbine straight at Dante’s chest.
Before Dante could swing the heavy shotgun around, instinct took over my body.
The memory of my mother scrubbing floors, the memory of Silvio’s sneering face, the memory of twenty-five years of fear exploded in my chest.
I raised the Glock with both hands, brought the front sight onto the contractor’s chest, and squeezed the trigger.
Crack.
The recoil snapped through my wrists, but my stance held.
The hollow-point bullet struck the mercenary directly in the high chest, penetrating the seam of his tactical vest.
The man gasped, stumbling backward into the corridor.
Dante didn't waste half a breath.
He stepped out from behind the desk, leveled the shotgun, and fired two consecutive slugs down the center of the hall, obliterating the remaining two operatives advancing behind the fallen point-man.
The corridor fell into an abrupt, ringing silence.
The smoke drifted slowly toward the shattered skylight, carried away by the freezing Chicago wind and falling snow.
Seven dead mercenaries lay strewn across the chevron oak floor, their weapons smoking, their blood mixing with the melting slush.
Marco stepped out from the side alcove, his left shoulder bleeding where a bullet had grazed the muscle, but his grip on his weapon never wavered.
“The roof is clear,” Marco reported, panting heavily. “The chopper tried to lift off, but our sniper team on the neighboring building put three rounds through the pilot’s engine block. It crashed into the rail yard two miles south.”
Dante slowly lowered the shotgun, the barrel smoking in the cold draft.
He turned to look down at me.
I was still kneeling behind the desk, both hands locked around the grip of the Glock, the slide locked back on an empty chamber.
My breathing was ragged, my hands trembling violently now that the adrenaline was beginning to purge from my system.
Dante walked over, knelt in front of me, and gently placed his large, warm hands over mine.
He carefully guided my index finger away from the trigger, engaged the slide release, and took the empty weapon from my grip.
He set it on the floor, gathered my shaking hands into his own, and pulled me up into his arms.
I buried my face into his shoulder, clutching the torn cashmere of his coat as a violent sob tore through my chest.
Dante wrapped his arms around me, holding me against his broad, muscular frame with an intensity that bordered on painful.
“You saved my life,” he murmured against my hair, his voice vibrating with raw emotion.
“I killed a man,” I whispered, tears of shock soaking into his collar.
“You protected your family,” Dante corrected softly, his lips pressing firmly against the crown of my head. “There is no sin in surviving.”
He gently lifted my chin until my eyes met his.
The amber flecks in his dark eyes were blazing with an absolute, uncompromising resolve.
“Silvio crossed the final threshold,” Dante said, his voice dropping into that chilling, subterranean register that signaled an irrevocable death sentence. “He brought foreign guns into our home. He tried to murder the last daughter of the Bellisario bloodline.”
He turned toward Marco, who was wrapping a field dressing around his wounded shoulder.
“Marco.”
“Yes, Boss?”
“Call every capo from Evanston to Joliet,” Dante commanded, his voice cold as the falling snow outside. “Mobilize every crew. Tell them the peace treaty signed in nineteen-ninety-nine is officially terminated.”
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He looked back down at me, his fingers tightening around my waist.
“Tonight, we do not defend,” Dante said. “Tonight, we take the North Side.”
