Chapter 7 - The Line of Fire
A bloodcurdling scream tore from Marco's throat as the knife severed his grip. His pistol slipped from his fingers, clattering uselessly against the stone floor just as the metal struck home. He staggered backward, clutching his bleeding arm, his face contorting into an expression of pure, unadulterated shock and agony.
"Kill them! Kill them all!" Marco shrieked, stumbling toward the shadows of the altar as blood poured between his trembling fingers.
The cathedral instantly erupted into pure, unadulterated chaos.
From the side chapels and the ruined choir lofts, a dozen hidden Bellini gunmen emerged, their automatic weapons rising to level at the center aisle. But Luciano’s men weren't standing still. The elite security detail that had poured out of the SUVs dropped to one knee, returning fire with suppressors that spat deadly, muffled flashes of orange light into the gloom.
"Chloe, down!"
Luciano’s voice roared over the deafening crack of gunfire and the shattering of ancient stained glass windows high above us.
Before I could even process what was happening, a heavy arm wrapped around my waist, yanking me violently off my feet and hurling me behind the solid stone bulk of a baptismal font. Bullets chewed through the wooden pews behind us, sending splinters and stone shrapnel raining down like deadly confetti.
I curled into a tight ball against the cold marble floor, my hands clamped over my ears as the air filled with the acrid, choking stench of cordite and burning gunpowder. The world dissolved into flashes of white light, echoing gunshots, and shouted orders in code that I couldn't understand.
Through a gap in the stone barricade, I saw my mother.
The two thugs guarding her had been caught in the crossfire; one was slumped motionless against the pillar, while the other was scrambling for cover. My mother was kneeling on the damp floor, terrified, her frail hands clutching her head as stray rounds ricocheted off the pillars inches from where she crouched.
"Mom!" I screamed, the sound swallowed whole by the roar of a submachine gun firing from the gallery above.
Without thinking—driven by that primal, irrational instinct that overrides self-preservation—I shoved myself up from behind the font and bolted across the open aisle.
"Chloe, no! Stay down!" Luciano yelled from somewhere to my left, his voice cracking with a rare, desperate panic.
I didn't listen. I scrambled on hands and knees across the debris-littered floor, ignoring the burning ache in my muscles and the whistling sound of bullets cutting through the air around me. I reached my mother just as a heavy chunk of masonry, dislodged by a stray round, crashed down dangerously close to her head.
I threw my arms around her frail shoulders, dragging her backward into the relative shelter of a massive marble pillar.
"I've got you," I gasped, burying my face in her silver-streaked hair, tears hot and frantic mixing with the soot on my cheeks. "I've got you, Mom. We're getting out of here."
She clutched my jacket with surprising strength, her breath coming in ragged, wheezing gasps. "You shouldn't... you shouldn't have come, Chloe. They're monsters... Dante's people... they don't stop."
"They stop today," a cold voice said from above us.
I looked up. Standing over us, silhouetted against the pale moonlight pouring through a blown-out window, was one of Marco's top enforcers—a hulking brute with a jagged scar running down his cheek and a 9mm pistol pointed directly down at my chest.
"End of the line, little bird," the man sneered, his finger tightening on the trigger.
My heart stopped. There was no escape. No witty comeback, no clever trick. Just the cold, final certainty of death.
Then, a sharp thump echoed through the stone chamber, followed instantly by the heavy thud of a body hitting the floor.
The enforcer's eyes widened in shock. A clean, round hole appeared squarely between his eyes, and he pitched forward, collapsing heavily onto the stone floor right beside us.
I turned my head.
Twenty feet away, Luciano stood with his smoking Beretta gripped in both hands, his dark eyes locked on the fallen gunman. Smoke curled lazily from the barrel. He looked over at me, his chest heaving, the terrifying mask of the mob boss momentarily slipping to reveal the raw, desperate human being underneath.
Before he could take a step toward us, the heavy oak doors at the back of the cathedral began to groan.
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Sirens wailed in the distance, cutting through the night air, growing louder by the second. The police—or someone else's private army—were arriving. And we were sitting ducks in the middle of a war zone.
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