Chapter 9 - Blood on the Slate
At exactly three o’clock in the morning, the eastern thermal sensors went dark.
Lorenzo stood in the shadows of the grand marble foyer on the ground floor, his tactical shotgun loaded with alternating slugs and buckshot. Beside him, Dante and six of his most elite, battle-hardened enforcers knelt behind heavy mahogany pillars and overturned antique tables, their night-vision goggles lowered, their rifles trained on the massive glass French doors leading to the east terrace.
Outside, the storm was raging, thunder rattling the window panes and lightning illuminating the courtyard in blinding, strobing bursts of white light.
“They’re bypassing the lawn sensors,” Dante whispered through his tactical headset. “Breaching the terrace doors in three... two... one...”
A synchronized blast of shaped thermal explosives shattered the reinforced glass of the French doors. A shower of diamonds and burning frame shards exploded into the foyer, followed instantly by the hiss of smoke canisters rolling across the polished slate floor.
“Hold fire!” Lorenzo commanded through the comms, his voice ice-cold. “Let them enter the kill zone.”
Through the thick, swirling gray smoke, twelve figures in advanced tactical gear moved into the foyer with military precision. They carried suppressed submachine guns and wore infrared goggles designed to cut through the smoke. They moved in a diamond formation, their weapons sweeping the staircase leading to the upper residential wings.
They thought they had caught the Vance house sleeping. They thought Victor Thorne’s betrayal had stripped the Don of his fangs.
Lorenzo waited until the lead point-man reached the base of the grand staircase—the exact center of the marble foyer.
“Light them up,” Lorenzo said into his mic.
From the second-floor mezzanine, two high-intensity halogen floodlights—salvaged from the estate’s construction yard and wired to independent marine batteries—surged to life, flooding the foyer with ten thousand lumens of blinding white light. The infrared goggles of the Romano strike team instantly overloaded, blinding the mercenaries and causing them to stumble backward in panic.
Before they could strip their goggles off, Lorenzo stepped out from behind his mahogany pillar and racked his shotgun.
The sound was thunder inside the house.
The ensuing firefight lasted less than four minutes, but to the men inside the foyer, it was an eternity of calculated slaughter. Lorenzo moved through the smoke and light like a vengeful phantom, his shotgun barking with rhythmic, devastating precision. Every round he fired found a gap in tactical body armor; every step he took pushed the intruders back toward the shattered terrace doors.
Dante and his veterans laid down a solid wall of suppressive fire from the flanks, cutting off any retreat into the side corridors. The polished slate floor of the foyer, imported from Italy by Lorenzo’s grandfather, became slick with rainwater, shattered glass, and blood.
When the last mercenary dropped his weapon and fell to his knees by the shattered terrace doors, Lorenzo raised his hand, signaling for a ceasefire.
The sudden silence in the foyer was deafening, broken only by the crackle of burning door frames and the heavy, ragged breathing of the surviving intruder.
Lorenzo walked over to the man, his boots crunching on broken glass. He kicked the mercenary’s submachine gun across the room, grabbed the man by his tactical vest, and hauled him up against the stone archway of the terrace.
“Where is Thorne?” Lorenzo demanded, his shotgun barrel pressed firmly under the man’s chin.
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“At the docks!” the mercenary spat out, blood bubbling from his nostrils. “He’s at the private yacht club on the north shore! He’s waiting for us to bring the boy! If we don't check in by four a.m., he’s boarding a seaplane for Montreal with Romano’s underboss!”
Lorenzo checked his tactical chronometer. It was three-fifteen. He had forty-five minutes to cross ten miles of storm-slicked mountain roads and stop the man who had murdered his family from escaping into the sky.
