Chapter 6 - The Weight of a Falling Sky
The concussive shockwave of the basement explosion slammed upward through the floorboards, turning the second-floor landing into a churning vortex of pulverized drywall and choking gray ash.
Dust coated Dominic’s eyelashes, blinding him for a critical fraction of a second, but his muscle memory as a syndicate boss—honed through two decades of street wars and rival ambushes—kept his finger locked on the trigger.
Click-clack.
His Sig Sauer barked twice through the smoke. The muffled, heavy thud of a body collapsing against the wainscoting told him the rappelling intruder had taken the rounds, but the momentum of the falling operative carried his assault rifle forward. The weapon clattered across the slick hardwood floor, spinning directly toward Nora’s small pink sneakers.
"Nora! Down!" Grace screamed.
Despite having an empty weapon, Grace lunged forward through the particulate haze, tackling the five-year-old flat against the floor just as a burst of automatic gunfire chewed a ragged line across the nursery doorframe. Wood splinters exploded like shrapnel, showering them with debris.
Olivia didn't cringed. Seven years old, silent for fourteen months, and she stood like a small stone statue at the threshold, her small fingers tightening around the iron fireplace poker. As another masked gunman dropped through the shattered skylight, his boots hitting the landing with a heavy thud, Olivia swung the iron rod with all the savage, desperate strength she possessed.
The heavy metal connected squarely with the intruder’s knee joint with a sickening crack.
The man howled, his balance failing as his leg buckled beneath him. Before he could recover, Dominic cleared the final three steps, grabbed the back of the operative's tactical vest, and hurled him over the mahogany stair railing. The man plummeted twenty feet into the grand foyer below, landing motionless on the marble floor.
"Clear!" Dominic rasped, coughing as he inhaled a lungful of gypsum dust. He dropped to his knees beside Grace and Nora. "Are you hit?"
Nora buried her face into Grace’s shoulder, her little shoulders shaking silently, but Grace shook her head, her gray eyes burning through the soot smeared across her face. "We’re intact. But the basement detonation—they blew the main circuit vaults. The backup generator is fried."
A sharp, mechanical clank-whir echoed down the corridor.
From the ceiling panels above the east wing, red emergency status lights blinked out. The auxiliary power grid had just flatlined.
"The panic room vault doors," Dominic muttered, his blood turning to ice. "They’re on a timed mechanical fail-safe. Without power, the hydraulic seals drop in three minutes. Vince is locked inside, but if those mercs bring a thermic lance, they can cut through the steel casing like paper."
"Vince isn't our primary target anymore, Dominic," Grace said, grabbing the discarded assault rifle from the floor and expertly checking the breech. "Look at the security console monitor embedded in the wall behind you. The physical override cable was just plugged in from outside the estate."
Dominic spun around. The wall display flickered back to life on a low-draw auxiliary battery, casting an eerie crimson glow over the hallway.
On the screen, a feed from the front gate showed an unmarked black armored van backing directly through the wrought-iron security gates. The doors swung open, and a man stepped out into the rain that had just begun to fall over Long Island. He wasn't wearing a tactical mask. He wore an expensive Brioni trench coat, and he carried a silver-headed cane.
Victor Thorne.
The head of the New York Commission, and the man Dominic had believed was resting comfortably in a luxury estate in Palm Beach.
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"Well, well, Dominic," Thorne’s voice crackled through the intercom speaker by the front door, smooth and chillingly polite. "Did you really think a retired accountant was the biggest snake in your garden? Open the door, my boy. Let’s finish what we started fourteen months ago in Garden City."
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