Chapter 6 - The Blood on the Pavement
The gunfire that erupted outside the SUV sounded like ripping canvas.
Pop-pop-pop!
Dante joined the barrage, shouting tactical commands, but the sheer volume of incoming fire was deafening. Inside the footwell, Leo was screaming bloody murder, his small body trembling so violently I thought his ribs might crack.
“Cover your ears, baby! Look at me! Look at my eyes!” I screamed over the chaos, pressing my hands over Leo’s ears and pulling him deeper beneath the leather seat.
“Mommy! Daddy!” the boy sobbed into my shoulder.
A heavy, metallic thud hit the side of the Suburban, followed by a groan of pain that made my blood run cold.
“Dante!” Ricardo’s voice roared from outside, thick with fury.
I couldn't stay down anymore. Ignoring the screams in my head telling me to cower, I shoved myself up from the floorboards and peered through the shattered, spiderwebbed windshield.
Ten feet away, Dante Russo was down on one knee, clutching a bleeding shoulder, firing his sidearm with his left hand.
And Ricardo Moretti was a whirlwind of lethal, terrifying violence.
He had already emptied his first magazine. Two masked men in tactical black gear lay motionless on the slick concrete. A third man was lunging toward Ricardo with a combat knife.
With a brutal, fluid motion, Ricardo ducked the blade, drove his elbow into the attacker’s throat, and swept his legs out from under him. As the man hit the ground, Ricardo jammed his boot onto the assassin’s chest, raised his pistol, and fired twice into the concrete inches from the man's head.
“Who sent you?!” Ricardo bellowed, his voice echoing off the tunnel walls like thunder. “Who’s the inside man?!”
The assassin spat a mouthful of blood onto the pavement, grinning with broken teeth. “You’re already dead, Moretti. The board voted this morning. The empire belongs to…”
Crack.
Before the man could finish his sentence, a high-caliber sniper round zipped through the dark tunnel from the upper exit ramp, punching clean through the assassin’s chest and silencing him forever.
Ricardo’s head snapped up toward the ramp. He raised his weapon, scanning the shadows.
“Boss! Sniper on the overpass! We’ve got to move right now or we’re fish in a barrel!” Dante yelled, staggering to his feet while clutching his bleeding shoulder.
Ricardo sprinted back to the Suburban, tearing open the back door. His chest was heaving, a smear of fresh blood staining the sleeve of his tactical vest.
“Get out! Now!” Ricardo ordered, grabbing Leo and hauling him into his arms.
I scrambled out of the vehicle behind them, my legs shaking so badly I nearly tripped over my own feet. The acrid stench of cordite and copper filled my lungs, making me gag.
“This way! Into the maintenance hatch!” Dante pointed toward a heavy steel door set deep into the concrete foundation of the building.
We threw ourselves through the door just as another flurry of automatic gunfire chewed up the brickwork where we had been standing a second before. Dante slammed the heavy steel bolt shut, locking us inside a narrow, dimly lit maintenance corridor that smelled of rust and damp earth.
We ran for three straight minutes through the maze of concrete pipes and subterranean tunnels until we reached a rusted iron ladder leading up to a street-level storm grate.
Pushing the heavy iron grate open, Ricardo hoisted Leo out first, then reached down, grabbing me by the waist and hauling me up onto the rain-slicked pavement of a deserted side street in the West Village.
We collapsed against the damp brick wall of an old brownstone, panting, bleeding, and utterly surrounded by the quiet drizzle of the Manhattan night.
Leo was crying softly into Ricardo’s chest, completely exhausted from terror.
Ricardo held his son tight, his dark eyes scanning the empty street with the paranoid vigilance of a hunted animal. Then, slowly, he turned his gaze down to me.
His face was streaked with soot and sweat. A shallow cut bled sluggishly along his jawline. But as he looked at me—standing there in my mud-stained coat, shivering in the cold rain—something in his expression shifted from cold survival instinct into something raw, fragile, and utterly consuming.
“You stayed,” Ricardo whispered, his voice cracking. “When the shooting started… you didn't run.”
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“I told you,” I whispered back, my voice shaking as I reached out to gently wipe a streak of soot from his cheek. “I’m not leaving him. And I’m not leaving you.”
Ricardo closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against mine in the middle of a war zone, breathing me in like oxygen.
