Chapter 7 - The Interrogation
The rain began after midnight, a cold, driving autumn downpour that lashed against the stone walls of the manor and turned the manicured lawns into slick, muddy bogs.
In the soundproof interrogation bunker beneath the east wing, the air smelled of ozone, damp wool, and copper. Lorenzo sat on a steel folding chair, watching as Dante splashed a bucket of ice-cold well water over the face of the mercenary they had dragged from the perimeter watchtower.
The man gasped, choking on the water, his eyes darting wildly around the windowless concrete room. He was young, built like a linebacker, wearing tactical black gear stripped of all insignia.
“You have three ribs broken and a dislocated shoulder,” Lorenzo said calmly, his voice cutting through the ringing silence of the room. He was cleaning his Colt .45 with a oiled rag, his movements slow and methodical. “My associate Dante can fix the shoulder, or he can break the remaining nine ribs. That depends entirely on how clearly you answer my next question.”
“I’m just a contractor!” the mercenary spat, blood trickling from his split lip. “I get orders through an app! I don't know who owns the contract!”
Lorenzo didn't look up from his slide assembly. “Dante. Break his right thumb.”
There was a sharp, wet snap, followed by a guttural scream that bounced off the acoustic tiles of the bunker.
“Let's try again,” Lorenzo said, reassembling the pistol with a series of clean, metallic clicks. He loaded a single magazine into the grip and racked the slide. He walked over to the shivering mercenary and pressed the warm, oiled suppressor against the man's forehead. “Who gave the order to breach the master suite tonight?”
The mercenary swallowed hard, his eyes crossing as he stared at the barrel of the gun between his eyes. “Thorne! It was Victor Thorne! He told us to wait for the signal at three a.m.! We were supposed to disable the thermal optics on the east lawn and let the extraction team in!”
“Who is the extraction team coming for?” Lorenzo demanded, pressing the barrel a fraction of an inch deeper into the man's skin. “Me?”
“No!” the man sobbed, trembling violently. “Not you! The orders were to bypass the master bedroom entirely! We were supposed to extract the girl and the little boy from the guest wing and bring them to the docks! Thorne said the kid was the real prize! He said once they had the brat, Don Vance would trade the entire city of Chicago just to get his brother’s kid back!”
Lorenzo’s expression remained stone, but inside his chest, a cold, murderous rage expanded like a supernova. They weren't coming to assassinate him in his sleep. They were coming to steal Leo. They were going to drag a four-year-old child into the damp, freezing darkness of a Romano cargo ship and use him as a bargaining chip to strip the Vance family of everything they had built over three generations.
Lorenzo withdrew the gun from the man's forehead. He turned to Dante.
“Put him in the holding cell. Zip-tie his wrists and ankles,” Lorenzo ordered.
May you like
“What about the extraction team?” Dante asked, wiping blood from his leather gloves. “It’s two o’clock now. If Thorne’s strike team is hitting the east lawn at three, we have less than an hour to set a defensive perimeter around the guest wing.”
“We aren't setting a defensive perimeter,” Lorenzo said, slipping his customized Colt into his shoulder holster and grabbing a heavy tactical shotgun from the wall rack. “We’re going to open the front gates and invite them in. When wolves come hunting in my house, Dante, I don't hide the sheep. I bait the trap and slaughter the pack.”
