Chapter 8 - Smoke and SteelThe thick, acrid smoke of the breaching charge flooded the master study, stinging the eyes and choking the throat.
Through the grey haze, a dark tactical figure stepped across the splintered threshold, raising a suppressed carbine toward the center of the room.
He didn't get a chance to pull the trigger.
Crack!
Vincent Moretti, despite his seventy-something years and recent illness, fired with the deadly, unhesitating accuracy of a man who had survived a dozen turf wars. The bullet caught the mercenary squarely in the shoulder armor, spinning him backward against the hallway wall where Harlon was waiting to deliver a brutal, bone-cracking sweep that sent the intruder crashing to the floor unconscious.
"Clear!" Harlon roared, stepping over the fallen body and returning fire down the corridor as two more tactical figures advanced from the stairwell.
"Clara! Stay down!" Vincent shouted over the deafening rattle of suppressed gunfire echoing through the stone hallways.
Clara shielded Lily with her own body behind the heavy mahogany desk, tears streaming down her face as the plaster above them rained down in a fine white powder. She closed her eyes and prayed—not for money, not for power, just for her little girl to see the sunrise.
Suddenly, a heavy boot kicked open the shattered frame of the study door.
A man stepped through the smoke, not wearing a tactical mask, but dressed in an expensive, mud-stained cashmere overcoat.
Julian Moretti.
His face was flushed, his hair disheveled, and his eyes wild with a mixture of frantic desperation and psychotic triumph. In his right hand, he held a sleek, chrome-plated automatic pistol, pointed directly at his father.
"It's over, old man," Julian snarled, his voice cracking with hysteria. "You should have stayed in bed. You should have let the poison do its job."
Vincent lowered his pistol just an inch, his eyes narrowing as he stared at his eldest son. "You sent mercenaries to murder your own father over a shipping portfolio?"
"You were going to give it away!" Julian screamed, his finger twitching on the trigger. "To a maid! To a bastard child who doesn't even share our blood! You ruined everything I built! Everything I sacrificed for!"
"You didn't build a damn thing, Julian," Vincent said, his voice terrifyingly calm, cutting through the ringing in the air like a razor. "You inherited a kingdom and gambled it away on horse races and offshore accounts. You're not a Moretti. You're a parasite."
Julian's face contorted into a mask of pure rage. "Then die with them!"
He swung the barrel of his pistol away from Vincent and pointed it directly at Clara and the trembling child cowering behind the desk.
"No!" Vincent roared.
Before Julian’s finger could squeeze the trigger, a dark blur launched from the corner of the room. Harlon Pike, ignoring a graze wound on his shoulder, tackled Julian full-force mid-air.
The two men crashed violently onto the Persian rug, the chrome pistol flying from Julian's grip and sliding across the polished floorboards until it bumped gently against Lily’s small red shoe.
Lily blinked down at the shiny metal gun, then looked up at Julian, who was currently struggling beneath Harlon’s crushing weight.
"That's a dangerous toy," Lily piped up in her small, innocent voice.
May you like
Vincent walked forward, stepped over the struggling forms, and picked up the chrome pistol with a steady, unyielding hand. He clicked the safety on and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
Sirens—faint at first, then growing rapidly louder and more numerous—began to wail up the coastal highway, cutting through the night air with flashing red and blue lights that painted the shattered windows of the Moretti mansion in streaks of alarm.
