Chapter 16 - The Final Gambit
Time seemed to slow down as the digital countdown on the vault’s external panel ticked relentlessly downward. 1:45... 1:44... 1:43...
Dante surveyed the room with clinical detachment. He knew every blueprint of this building. He had personally designed its security architecture five years ago during the European expansion. Every vault, every reinforced wall, every emergency fail-safe.
"Sir, the north wall is solid concrete! We can't blast through it without detonating the entire charge!" a guard yelled over the rising panic in the room.
"We aren't going through the wall," Dante said evenly.
He holstered his weapon and walked directly toward an ornate, floor-to-ceiling marble fireplace built into the rear of the archive room—a decorative relic from the 18th century that most people assumed was purely aesthetic.
"Boss, that’s just a facade!" a guard protested.
Dante reached behind the heavy iron fire grate, his fingers finding a hidden mechanical latch beneath the soot-covered stonework. With a sharp twist of his wrist, a loud pneumatic hiss echoed through the room as the entire marble hearth slowly pivoted inward on a hidden hydraulic axis, revealing a narrow, dust-filled escape shaft plunging straight down into the ancient Roman sewer network beneath Milan.
"Thirty seconds!" Elena’s voice screamed through the radio.
"Move!" Dante ordered, shoving his men into the dark opening one by one before diving in himself just as the heavy stone hearth clicked back into place.
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Ten seconds... five... four... three... two... one.
A cataclysmic roar shook the earth beneath Milan. The entire historic palazzo collapsed inward in a blinding flash of fire, smoke, and shattered stone, sending a massive plume of dark smoke billowing into the stormy European sky.
