Chapter 6 - The Elevator Ambush
The red digital display above the private elevator blinked from ground level to thirty.
Team Alpha wasn't waiting for Dr. Vale’s radio confirmation anymore.
They were coming up with suppressed submachine guns and body bags.
“The freight elevator is locked down from the master console,” Luca said, checking the surveillance monitor behind the kitchen island.
“They bypassed the floor lockout with a maintenance override key.”
“How many men?” Gabriel asked, his voice growing stronger with every pulse of the IV fluid.
“Four on the elevator camera,” Luca muttered, chambering a round into his Sig Sauer.
“Probably two more holding the basement staging area.”
“Four armed mercenaries against a retired boxer and an invalid,” I noted, securing the IV line to Gabriel’s bicep with medical tape.
“You forgot the nurse with a lethal disregard for self-preservation,” Gabriel said, a dark smirk playing on his lips.
“Can you stand, Gabriel?” I asked, ignoring his remark.
He swung his heavy legs over the edge of the mattress.
His bare feet touched the cold hardwood floor.
He gripped the bedside table until the polished mahogany groaned under his fingers.
A sharp gasp escaped his lungs as the deadened nerves in his spine flared with burning agony.
“My legs feel like liquid lead,” he ground out through clenched teeth.
“That is the neurotoxin releasing its grip on your peripheral nervous system,” I explained, supporting his left shoulder with my body.
“It hurts because your spinal cord is waking up.”
“Pain is useful,” Gabriel rasped, straightening his broad back.
“Pain means I’m not in the morgue.”
The elevator chime sounded down the long corridor, echoing through the hollow penthouse like a gunshot.
“Luca, kill the main breaker,” Gabriel ordered quietly.
Luca reached inside the utility panel beside the master bedroom door and pulled the master breaker.
The penthouse plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness.
The only illumination came from the ambient neon glow of Chicago’s skyline filtering through the fifty-eighth-floor glass windows.
I guided Gabriel behind the reinforced steel door of the walk-in gun vault built into his bedroom wall.
“Stay here until the shooting stops,” I whispered.
“I don't hide in closets in my own home,” Gabriel replied, his eyes gleaming in the dark.
“You do when you can barely balance on two legs,” I countered, shoving him firmly inside.
“Do not make me sedate you, Mr. Moretti.”
For half a second, I thought he might strangle me.
Then he let out a low, dangerous chuckle and pulled a heavy Colt .45 from the rack inside the vault.
“You are the most infuriating woman I have ever encountered,” he whispered.
“I hear that often from stubborn men who are trying to die,” I said, pulling the heavy steel vault door until only a crack remained.
Out in the hallway, the elevator doors slid open with a soft metallic hiss.
Four tactical flashlights sliced through the pitch-black corridor like twin pairs of laser beams.
Soft, deliberate footsteps moved across the imported Italian marble.
“Vale is down in the foyer,” a muffled voice whispered through a tactical comms headset.
“Check his pulse.”
“He’s alive, but his skull is fractured.”
“Where is the target?”
“Master bedroom down the hall.”
“Shoot anything that breathes.”
Luca didn't wait for them to clear the foyer.
From behind the kitchen island, Luca opened fire.
The suppressed crack of his pistol tore through the silence, followed by the deafening shatter of luxury glass.
The lead mercenary took two rounds to the center chest plate and stumbled backward into the elevator doors.
Return fire ripped through the kitchen cabinets, shredding fine china and exploding bottles of vintage wine into red mist.
Wood splinters and shattered crystal rained down across the corridor.
I crouched behind a marble pillar near the master bedroom hallway, my medical scissors held tight in my right hand.
I wasn't a soldier, but I had worked seven years in a South Side trauma unit during the bloodiest gang wars of the decade.
I knew how men moved when they were hunting, and I knew how they panicked when their prey refused to die quietly.
One of the operatives broke away from the main fireteam, sliding along the wall toward the bedroom corridor.
His rifle barrel was raised, sweeping the shadows with a tactical flashlight.
He stepped past the marble pillar, unaware that I was coiled in the darkness behind him.
I didn't try to wrestle his gun.
I drove the blunt end of a heavy bronze statuette from the hallway console directly into the nerve cluster behind his knee.
His leg buckled instantly with a sickening pop.
Before he could cry out or raise his rifle, I drove the hardened stainless-steel shears straight through his tactical glove, pinning his trigger hand to the floor.
He opened his mouth to scream, but the heavy steel vault door swung wide open behind him.
Gabriel Moretti leaned against the doorframe, his Colt .45 raised in two massive, steady hands.
The gunshot sounded like thunder inside the enclosed hallway.
The mercenary collapsed instantly, motionless against the blood-spattered baseboard.
Down the hall, Luca finished the remaining two men with brutal, close-quarters precision.
The penthouse fell back into an eerie, suffocating silence, broken only by the hum of the city wind against the cracked glass windows.
Gabriel lowered his weapon, his chest heaving as sweat poured down his hollow cheeks.
He looked down at the dead operative at his feet, then looked at me holding the bloodied bronze statuette.
“You didn't flinch,” Gabriel said, his voice laced with genuine awe.
“Blood doesn't scare me, Mr. Moretti,” I said, wiping a speck of plaster from my forehead.
“Stupidity does.”
“And right now, standing in the open with a compromised spine is exceptionally stupid.”
Luca jogged up the hallway, his suit torn and dusted with white drywall powder.
“The elevator is locked on this floor now,” Luca reported, panting.
“We have about twenty minutes before Vincent realizes his hit squad went dark.”
Gabriel looked at his chief of security, his dark eyes colder than the winter air outside.
May you like
“Then we leave before the sun comes up,” Gabriel said.
“And we make Vincent pay for every drop of blood he spilled in this room.”
