Chapter 4 - The Traitor Within
The words hung in the electrified air of the panic room like a dropped blade.
Someone inside my own organization tipped them off.
My breath caught. I stared at Dominic, watching the way his jaw tightened as he watched Viktor on the monitor manage to drag himself behind a heavy oak console, returning fire with one hand while clutching his bleeding shoulder with the other.
"An internal leak?" I whispered, the reality of our situation sinking its claws into my chest. "You mean one of your own men... one of the guards out there?"
"A guard doesn't sell out the boss for pocket change," Dominic replied coldly, his eyes flicking from monitor to monitor as the three intruders advanced methodically down the main hallway toward the east wing. "This was planned. Someone watched the kitchen today. Someone saw the boy laugh. Someone realized that the invisible wall around this house was starting to crack, and they decided to use it against me."
On screen, one of the intruders raised a heavy breaching charge, planting it directly onto the reinforced mahogany door of the east wing study—the very room we had been sitting in moments before.
Leo whimpered, curling himself into a tight ball against Lily’s lap. Lily, astonishingly calm for a three-year-old caught in the middle of a mafia shootout, reached out and gently patted the six-year-old's hair, whispering something I couldn't hear.
Dominic didn't hesitate. He tapped a sequence of keys on the control console beside the workbench. A section of the wall behind us hissed open, revealing a narrow, concrete escape tunnel lit by dim emergency bulbs, sloping downward into the pitch-black subterranean depths beneath the estate.
"Take the children through that tunnel," Dominic instructed, handing me a heavy, specialized keycard and a small, compact flashlight. "It leads out to the old boathouse on the river half a mile away. There's a boat waiting. Get them across the county line."
I stared at the gun in his hand, then back at his face. "And you? You're staying?"
"If I walk out that tunnel with you, they hunt us down before we hit the highway," Dominic said, his voice hard as iron. "I have to draw them away. I have to find out which one of my men made the call."
"I'm not leaving you here to die," I blurted out, the words escaping my mouth before my brain could stop them.
Dominic paused, his slate-grey eyes locking onto mine with a fierce, burning intensity that caught me completely off guard. For a second, the mafia boss, the feared underworld king, vanished, leaving only a desperate father trying to keep his world from burning down.
"You aren't leaving for me, Ms. Carter," he said quietly, reaching out to gently touch Lily’s curly hair one last time before turning away. "You're leaving for them."
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Before I could answer, the heavy mahogany door of the study outside our panic room blew outward with a deafening, thunderous roar that shook the very foundation of the house.
Dominic slammed the hydraulic control button, sealing the heavy steel wall shut between us and the study just as heavy boots began stomping across the rug outside. The green glow of the monitors flickered and died, plunging us into absolute darkness, save for the faint, yellow beam of the flashlight in my trembling hand.
