Chapter 6 - Siege on the Soriano Estate
Rain fell in blinding sheets as Matteo’s convoy tore through the streets of Chicago at ninety miles an hour, running red lights, tires screaming against wet asphalt.
Matteo sat in the back of the lead SUV, his hands gripping his rifle so tightly his knuckles were stark white. His heart was hammering against his ribs—not with fear for himself, but with a terrifying, primal desperation for Nora and Gracie.
“If anything happens to them,” Matteo swore silently to the dark sky outside the window, “I will burn this city to ash.”
Three miles away, the Soriano estate was under heavy fire.
The main iron gates had been breached by a heavy armored ram. Valenti’s mercenaries had cut the main power grid, plunging the estate into darkness, save for the flashing tactical lights and the muzzle flashes of gunfire.
Inside the master suite, Bruno and two loyal Soriano guards were holding the top landing of the staircase, exchanging heavy fire with dozens of attackers flooding the foyer below.
In the third-floor panic room—a reinforced steel vault hidden behind the library wall—Nora held Gracie tight against her chest. The little girl was crying softly into her mother's neck, her small shoulders trembling as the sound of explosions vibrated through the concrete walls.
"It’s okay, baby," Nora whispered, tears streaming down her own face, though her voice remained steady. "Mr. Soriano will come back. He promised us."
Suddenly, a loud bang echoed against the heavy vault door.
"Nora!" a voice called through the internal intercom—a voice slick, familiar, and dripping with desperate hatred. "Open the door, Nora! It’s Felix!"
Nora stiffened, clutching Gracie tighter. She didn't answer.
"I know you’re in there!" Felix shouted from outside the vault. "My men are cutting through the secondary security locks right now! Matteo is dead at the docks! He’s gone! If you open this door now and give me the access codes to his private servers, I’ll let you and the kid walk away!"
"He’s lying, Mama," Gracie whispered, looking up at her mother with pale, tear-streaked eyes. "Mr. Soriano isn't dead."
Nora looked down at her daughter, then at the heavy steel door. A sudden, fierce courage ignited in her chest—the same iron strength that had kept her going through years of poverty and fear.
She set Gracie down behind a row of heavy supply crates. "Stay here, Gracie. Don't come out no matter what."
Nora walked to the control console near the door. She looked at the internal surveillance monitors, powered by the vault’s independent battery backup.
On the screen, she saw Felix standing in the library holding a blowtorch, surrounded by four heavily armed mercenaries trying to cut through the door hinges. But on the secondary camera monitor tracking the long driveway outside—
Nora’s heart leaped.
Three black SUVs came smashing through the ruined front gates at full speed, flipping one of the attacker's parked vehicles into a ball of fire.
Matteo had returned.
On the library monitor, Felix’s mercenaries heard the explosion outside and panicked. "Boss! They’re back! Soriano is here!"
Felix’s face turned into a mask of pure terror. "Blow the vault door! Use the thermal charges! We take the girl as a hostage!"
Nora saw the mercenary slap a magnetic thermite charge onto the steel door frame.
"No," Nora muttered.
She reached for the console, located the manual fire-suppression control for the library, and slammed her hand down on the emergency release button.
High-pressure carbon-dioxide snow and freezing fire-retardant foam blasted from the library ceiling vents in a deafening roar. The sudden displacement of oxygen extinguished the thermite charge before it could ignite, blinding Felix and his men in a swirling vortex of white freezing fog.
Coughed and sputtering, Felix’s men stumbled backward, completely disoriented.
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And then, the heavy mahogany library doors were kicked off their hinges.
Through the thick white fog stepped Matteo Soriano.
