Chapter 3 - Blood on the West Side Highway
The kitchen smelled of burnt rosemary, stale frying oil, and high-velocity lead.
Marcus fired three rhythmic shots through the swinging service doors, the suppressed reports sounding like heavy books dropped onto concrete.
A muffled grunt echoed from the dining room, followed by the wet thud of a heavy body collapsing against the champagne display.
“Rear delivery exit!” Marcus yelled, ejecting an empty magazine and slapping a fresh one home with the heel of his palm.
“There are two vehicles blocking the alley! Black Suburbans, no plates!”
Dominic kept his arm locked firmly around my ribs, literally lifting me off my feet as we navigated the narrow, slippery aisle between the stainless-steel prep tables.
Victoria ran ahead of us, her heels clattering wildly against the greasy quarry tiles.
She had abandoned her silk wrap, her crimson gown torn along the left seam, revealing her pale, trembling leg.
“Dominic, they're going to kill us!” she sobbed, stumbling against an industrial meat slicer.
“Shut up and move!” Dominic commanded, never slackening his pace.
We burst through the heavy steel emergency doors into the freezing New York downpour.
The rain hit us like a bucket of ice water, instantly plastering my hair to my forehead and soaking my thin white server’s blouse.
The alley was narrow, claustrophobic, boxed in by fire escapes and towering brick walls that seemed to swallow the city’s yellow light.
Fifty feet away, across a sea of shimmering puddles, the headlights of a black SUV flared to life, blinding us with high-beam halogen glare.
The engine roared like an enraged beast, tires spinning against wet cobblestones with a high-pitched shriek of burning rubber.
“Get behind the grease bins!” Dominic shouted, shoving me hard into the narrow recess between an industrial dumpster and a brick pillar.
He shoved Victoria right behind me.
Marcus stepped directly into the path of the oncoming vehicle, planted his feet shoulder-width apart in the pouring rain, and leveled his pistol with both hands.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.
Four rounds struck the laminated windshield of the charging Suburban in an immaculate four-inch cluster right over the driver’s seat.
The SUV swerved violently to the left, its front bumper clipping a row of metal trash cans with a deafening crash of tearing sheet metal.
The vehicle spun sideways across the narrow alley, slamming into a fire escape support beam and stalling out in a cloud of radiator steam and white smoke.
Before the passengers could kick open their doors, the low, throaty rumble of a customized V8 engine thundered from the street entrance.
A heavily armored, gunmetal-grey Mercedes-Maybach reversed into the alley at fifty miles per hour, its reinforced rear bumper smashing into the second blocking vehicle and shoving it three feet aside with brute, mechanical force.
The Maybach’s passenger door flew open.
A young man with slicked-back hair and a leather jacket leaned out into the rain.
“Boss! Get in! Move, move, move!”
Dominic grabbed me by the forearm, his grip firm and immovable, hauling me out of the alcove.
“Get in the back, Casey!”
I scrambled across the wide leather bench of the Maybach, my waterlogged shoes leaving dark puddles on the plush sheepskin floor mats.
Victoria threw herself in immediately after me, her teeth chattering so hard they made a rhythmic clicking sound.
Dominic slid in last, slamming the reinforced steel door shut with a heavy, vacuum-sealed thud.
Marcus dove into the front passenger seat, pulling his door closed just as a hail of automatic gunfire raked across the exterior of the vehicle.
The bullets sounded like handfuls of gravel thrown against an iron furnace, leaving spider-web cracks in the thick bulletproof glass, but failing to penetrate the reinforced cabin.
“Floor it, Leo,” Dominic ordered, his breathing steady, terrifyingly controlled.
The driver slammed his foot down.
The Maybach lurched forward, its twin-turbo engine roaring as it surged down the narrow alley, clipping the side mirrors off parked sedans and bursting out onto the rain-slicked expanse of Tenth Avenue.
The city lights blurred past the water-streaked windows in long streaks of neon red and yellow.
Victoria collapsed into the leather upholstery, hyperventilating, her hands clawing at her ruined hair.
“Who were they?” she gasped, her eyes wild with terror.
“Dominic, who were they? Was that the Moretti family? Did the Castellanos do this?”
Dominic ignored her completely.
He picked up an intercom receiver from the center console and dialed a single digit.
“Dante,” Dominic spoke into the receiver.
“I am listening, Boss,” a cold, gravelly voice replied through the car’s surround speakers.
“Arthur Vance is dead,” Dominic said.
“His office was burned forty minutes ago.”
“I want a total lockdown on the Red Hook terminal.”
“No cargo leaves the yard.”
“No ship unties from the pier.”
“If any customs inspector, coast guard cutter, or corporate representative shows up with an emergency court order, hold them at the gate at gunpoint.”
A brief silence hummed over the encrypted line.
“Does this involve the Vance signatures?” Dante asked.
“Yes,” Dominic replied.
“The translation was a landmine.”
“Julian Russo’s office is the domestic hub.”
“Have three teams encircle Julian’s penthouse in TriBeCa immediately.”
“Nobody enters.”
“Nobody leaves.”
“If he attempts to step onto the fire escape, put a zip-tie around his throat and throw him in the basement.”
“Understood, Boss.”
The line went dead.
Victoria let out a strangled shriek, lunging across the console toward Dominic.
“You cannot do that to my brother!” she screamed, her fingernails aiming for his face.
“He is blood! He is your family!”
Dominic caught her wrists in mid-air with one hand, his fingers clamping down like iron shackles.
He didn't yell.
He didn't even raise his chin.
He simply stared into her wide, panicked eyes with a gaze that held enough zero-degree cold to freeze seawater.
“Your brother signed my execution notice tonight, Victoria,” Dominic whispered.
“And you sat across from me at Maison Étoile, watching me hold that pen, waiting for me to put my name on that paper.”
Victoria’s face drained of every drop of blood, her pupils dilating in pure, unadulterated terror.
“I... I didn't know!” she stammered, her voice shaking violently.
“Julian told me it was just a financial transfer! He told me we were protecting the money from the federal prosecutors!”
“He told me it would secure our future!”
“He told you it would secure his future,” Dominic said, shoving her back into her seat with enough force to bounce her shoulders against the window.
“And you were stupid enough to trade my empire for a handful of foreign art galleries.”
Dominic turned his gaze away from his wife, as if looking at her caused him physical disgust.
He looked across the wide cabin at me.
I sat shivering against the door, my apron soaked through, my doctoral research notebook still miraculously tucked inside the waterproof inner pocket of my coat.
He pressed a button on the side panel.
A warm stream of climate-controlled air began circulating through the rear cabin, and a hidden compartment opened, revealing clean white towels and a bottle of mineral water.
Dominic pulled out a towel and handed it to me.
“Dry yourself,” he said gently, his tone contrasting sharply with the venom he had just directed at Victoria.
“You’re going into shock.”
“I’m not in shock,” I said, my teeth chattering slightly despite my efforts to control them.
“I’m angry.”
Dominic’s lips twitched slightly.
“Angry at what?”
“At the sheer incompetence of whoever drafted that trap,” I said, taking the towel and wiping the rain from my neck and face.
“They used a 1994 European Union regulatory appendix to cross-reference a 1958 maritime convention that was superseded by the Hamburg Rules in 1978.”
“If they had simply filed a secondary admiralty lien in a federal court in Delaware, you would have lost the case in forty-eight hours without ever realizing the jurisdiction had changed.”
Marcus turned his head from the front seat, his eyebrows raised in utter disbelief.
Leo, the young driver, glanced into the rearview mirror with his jaw practically hanging open.
Dominic let out a low, rumbling laugh that seemed to originate from the bottom of his chest.
It was not a pleasant laugh; it was the laugh of a general who had just discovered that his enemy had marched their infantry into a swamp.
“She is criticizing their legal grammar while five men with submachine guns are hunting her across Manhattan,” Dominic muttered to Marcus.
“She is Mary Miller’s daughter, all right,” Marcus replied, a faint trace of nostalgia softening his stone face.
I paused, my towel hovering an inch from my cheek.
I looked directly at Marcus.
Then I looked at Dominic.
“What did you say?” I asked, my voice suddenly very small, very cold.
“How do you know my mother’s name?”
The cabin of the Maybach went dead silent.
The only sound was the rhythmic hum of the heavy tires slicing through the standing water on the West Side Highway.
Dominic didn't look away from me.
His gray eyes held an ancient, heavy secret that had nothing to do with maritime law or stolen ships.
“Do you really believe it was an accident that you were hired at Maison Étoile three weeks ago, Casey?” Dominic asked quietly.
“Do you really think the best table in the house was assigned to an inexperienced doctoral student on the exact night my most critical international contract was presented for signature?”
My heart stopped beating.
A cold, suffocating weight settled into the pit of my stomach.
“What did you do?” I whispered.
Dominic leaned back against the leather seat, crossing his legs with calm authority.
“Your mother didn't work in a pharmacy because your father ran away, Casey,” Dominic said.
“Your father didn't run away at all.”
“He died twenty years ago in a private jet crash outside of Zurich.”
“Along with my father.”
“And the seven-dollar fountain pen you are holding in your pocket right now…”
Dominic paused, reaching into his beige suit vest and withdrawing an identical Montblanc Meisterstück fountain pen, its gold clip bearing the exact same microscopic manufacturer's flaw near the cap.
“…belonged to the founding partner of Aurelia Maritime Holdings.”
May you like
“It belonged to your father, Thomas Miller.”
“The man whose legal name was on fifty percent of every vessel in my fleet before the world forgot who he was.”
