Chapter 16 - The Final Confrontation
I grabbed a customized Remington tactical shotgun from the study weapons locker, racked a round into the chamber, and moved toward the mezzanine balcony overlooking the main foyer. Below me, the heavy oak front doors of the safehouse were splintered inward under the relentless battering of a heavy tactical ram.
Through the drifting clouds of gray breaching smoke and the strobe of tactical flashlights, five men dressed in heavy body armor and carrying automatic rifles flooded into the grand entryway. The moment they crossed the threshold, Mark Davis and my security detail opened fire from their concealed positions behind the marble pillars.
The foyer erupted into a deafening, chaotic cacophony of gunfire, shattering glass, and echoing shouts. Two of the Valetti operatives were dropped instantly by Mark’s precision marksmen, their heavy armored bodies crashing onto the Italian marble floor. The remaining operatives scrambled for cover behind the overturned reception furniture, laying down a suppressing hail of automatic fire that chewed through the plaster walls and shattered the multi-million-dollar chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling.
Through the smoke and the flashing gunfire, I saw him.
Julian was being dragged into the foyer by a massive, scarred man in a tactical vest—Dominic Valetti himself. My brother’s orange jail jumpsuit was torn and stained with grease, his face bruised and bleeding from the transport crash. Valetti had a heavy silver revolver pressed directly against Julian’s temple, using my brother as a human shield as he looked up toward the mezzanine balcony where I was crouched behind the stone railing.
“Marcus Vance!” Valetti’s voice boomed over the gunfire, deep, guttural, and dripping with lethal menace. He fired a round into the ceiling to punctuate his shout. “Hold your men's fire right now, or I blow your brother’s brains out onto your nice clean floor!”
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I stood up slowly from behind the stone railing, keeping my shotgun aimed square at Valetti’s chest, though my finger remained outside the trigger guard. I looked down at the bleeding, pathetic wreck of a man who had shared my childhood home—the brother who had sold my nine-year-old son’s life to pay off his gambling markers.
“Why would I tell my men to stop shooting, Valetti?” I called back, my voice echoing coldly through the smoke-filled atrium, entirely devoid of familial hesitation. “He’s a convicted murderer who tried to poison my kid. If you want to shoot him, go right ahead. You’d just be saving the federal government sixty years of incarceration expenses.”
