Chapter 7 - Through the Secret Walls
"They're going to breach the ceiling vents with thermite and flood this room with smoke!" I barked, immediately wheeling my mother’s gurney toward the walk-in wardrobe at the back of the suite.
From the corner, handcuffed to the radiator, Sofia laughed hysterically. "Unbolt the door, Lorenzo! If Matteo uses thermite on the air ducts, we’ll all suffocate in three minutes!"
"You aren't suffocating, Sofia," I said coldly, tossing the handcuff key down on the marble nightstand five feet out of her reach. "When your brother blows that vent, he’ll find his beloved sister waiting right here for him. Let’s see if he checks his targets before throwing flashbangs."
Sofia’s face paled instantly, and she began yanking frantically at the radiator pipe.
Inside the massive cedar-lined wardrobe, I pushed aside a row of my mother’s fur coats, placed my palm flat against a carved wooden family crest, and pressed my thumb into the lion’s eye.
A biometric scanner beeped green, and a four-foot section of the back wall swung inward, revealing the hidden Prohibition-era service tunnel and a manual freight elevator built into the central chimney stack.
"Marco, Dante," I ordered my two bodyguards. "Help me get my mother’s gurney onto the platform. Elena, get inside with Sister Agnes."
Above us, a deafening hissing sound erupted from the bedroom ceiling vent, showering white-hot sparks of molten metal onto the Persian rug as the thermite burned straight through the titanium grate.
"Go! Go!" I shouted, pushing the gurney onto the iron elevator platform.
Just as I stepped backward into the hidden passage, carrying Mia in my arms, the bedroom door exploded off its hinges from a breaching charge in the hallway.
Smoke poured into the room. Through the haze, a tall silhouette stepped over the shattered oak door.
Matteo Conti.
The left side of his jaw and neck was a web of scarred tissue, and in his scarred left hand, he held a gold-plated Desert Eagle.
Our eyes locked through the closing gap of the wardrobe wall for two lethal seconds.
"Run, Duca!" Matteo roared, raising the heavy pistol and firing three massive .50-caliber rounds directly at the closing wooden panel. "There's nowhere left to hide!"
The heavy bullets punched into the bulletproof Kevlar lining inside the hidden door just as the magnetic locks sealed shut with a heavy thud.
Darkness enveloped us inside the shaft, lit only by dim amber emergency strips along the brick walls.
I set Mia gently down into Elena’s arms and grabbed the manual steel cable pulley to lower the elevator platform down toward the sub-basement tunnel.
"Is everyone unhurt?" I asked quietly in the cramped space, my eyes scanning my mother, Sister Agnes, and Elena.
"We're okay," Elena whispered, pressing a hand to her racing heart while holding Mia close. "Mr. Duca... your shoulder."
I glanced down at my left shoulder. One of the .50-caliber fragments had grazed my bicep before the door sealed, soaking my charcoal suit sleeve in warm, dark blood.
Before I could brush it off, Mia reached out from her mother’s arms and pressed her tiny, soft palm over the torn fabric of my sleeve, her big brown eyes brimming with tears.
"Uncle Lorenzo hurt," she whimpered, trying to hold the tear in my jacket closed with her tiny fingers. "Mia fix it."
My chest tightened with an emotion I hadn't felt since I was a boy. In a world full of sharks, traitors, and killers who wanted my blood for profit, this little girl was crying because my arm was scratched.
I knelt down on one knee despite the burning pain in my bicep and smiled warmly at her, wiping a tear from her cheek with my clean thumb.
"It doesn't even hurt anymore, Mia," I promised softly. "Because you're my good luck charm, remember? You saved my life yesterday."
Elena looked at me in the dim amber glow, her eyes shining with a fierce, unspoken gratitude that made the gunshot wound feel like nothing at all.
Suddenly, the elevator platform jolted to a halt at the bottom of the sub-basement shaft.
When I slid the iron grate open to lead them into the underground panic room corridor, I froze.
May you like
The heavy blast door to the wine cellar fifty feet down the tunnel had been blown wide open from the inside—and standing in the corridor over the unconscious body of one of my guards was Arthur Vance, my father’s seventy-year-old lawyer, holding a shotgun aimed straight at my mother’s gurney.
---
