Chapter 38 - The Ambush on Lake Como
My blood ran instantly cold.
"Alessandro," I breathed, my fingernails biting into the leather cover of the ledger.
"Did you really think prison could hold a Vance, Bella?" Alessandro’s voice floated down the staircase, dripping with smooth, venomous triumph. "Lorenzo’s legal team had me transferred to a private medical facility in Switzerland two weeks ago. When the Visconti syndicate cut him off, he realized he needed someone with Vance credentials to access the domestic accounts. So... we formed an alliance."
"He's stalling," Julian whispered in my ear, his voice barely audible over the hum of the auxiliary ventilation. In the total darkness, his hand found mine, pressing a small, cold metal cylinder into my palm—a tactical flare. "There’s an emergency drainage tunnel behind the plinth that empties into the lake. When I throw the flashbang, you run for that grate. Do not look back."
"Julian, no—"
"Bella, he didn't come alone," Julian hissed. "Listen."
Above us, the heavy, coordinated stomping of combat boots echoed against the stone. At least eight men. Heavily armed mercenaries hired with the remnants of Alessandro’s hidden Swiss reserves.
"Throw down the ledger and step out with your hands up!" Alessandro shouted down the shaft. "Or I drop three canisters of CS gas down these stairs and seal the vent! You have thirty seconds, little sister-in-law!"
"Alessandro!" I shouted back, stepping toward the base of the stairs, buying Julian precious seconds as I heard the faint, metallic scrape of him unscrewing the iron grate behind the plinth. "You’re making a mistake! That ledger contains the evidence of every illegal payoff the Vance family ever made to the Rossi syndicate! If that book goes public, your family name is worthless! You won't have an empire to rule!"
"I don't care about the empire anymore, Bella!" Alessandro snarled, his voice cracking with the unhinged madness of a man who had lost everything: his pride, his mistress, his freedom, and his seat in Manhattan society. "You destroyed my life! You humiliated me in front of the entire world! I don't want the money. I want to see you bleed on this cold Italian stone!"
"Now, Bella!" Julian roared.
Julian tossed an M84 stun grenade straight up the spiral staircase.
A split second later, a blinding, apocalyptic flash of light tore through the subterranean gloom, accompanied by a deafening, 170-decibel shockwave that shook the bedrock beneath our feet.
Screams of agony and blinded curses erupted from the mercenaries above.
Julian grabbed my wrist, pulling me toward the opened drainage grate. "Go! Now!"
I scrambled through the narrow, damp opening, clutching the heavy ledger against my chest. The tunnel was slick with moss and cold lake water, sloping steeply downward toward the sound of crashing waves.
Behind us, automatic gunfire erupted down the spiral stairs, ricocheting wildly off the granite walls with high-pitched, lethal whines.
Julian fired back three controlled bursts, covering our retreat, before sliding into the tunnel behind me.
"They're coming down!" Julian shouted over the roar of gunfire.
We tumbled out of the drainage pipe onto a rocky, secluded cove at the base of the cliff. The freezing spray of Lake Como hit my face like needles. Waiting fifty yards out on the churning water was a black tactical speed boat—not Julian’s men.
Alessandro’s extraction boat.
Two armed guards on the boat immediately spotted us, leveling rifles toward the shoreline.
We were pinned. Behind us was a sheer hundred-foot cliff with mercenaries descending the drainage pipe; ahead was an open lake guarded by heavily armed killers.
Julian didn't hesitate. He pulled the tactical flare from my hand, struck the ignition cap against the stone, and hurled the blinding, spitting magnesium torch directly into the fuel vent of an abandoned wooden skiff moored to the private dock beside us.
"Get down!" he yelled, throwing his entire body over mine as we dove behind a massive granite boulder.
The explosion was deafening.
The wooden skiff detonated into a massive fireball of burning lacquer and gasoline, sending a wall of flame and black smoke billowing across the cove, blinding the shooters on the speed boat.
Julian rose through the smoke like an avenging demon. He raised his sidearm, firing with inhuman precision through the blazing haze. Two shots cracked across the water. The two gunmen on the boat collapsed over the railing into the dark, freezing lake.
Julian grabbed my hand, pulling me onto the private dock. "Can you drive a twin-engine cigarette boat?"
"I grew up in the Hamptons, Julian," I said, adrenaline surging through my veins like liquid fire. "Get in!"
We vaulted onto the speed boat just as Alessandro and four surviving mercenaries burst out of the drainage pipe onto the rocks.
"Kill them!" Alessandro shrieked, pointing wildly. "Shoot them!"
A hail of bullets tore into the fiberglass hull of the boat.
I smashed the twin ignition throttles forward. The 800-horsepower engines roared to life with a ferocious, guttural scream, churning the water into white foam as the boat rocketed forward, tearing away from the cove at fifty knots.
A bullet shattered the windshield inches from my head, showering my hair in crystalline safety glass. Julian leaned over the stern, firing his final magazine with deadly accuracy. One of the mercenaries on the rocks crumpled; the others scrambled for cover behind the boulders.
Alessandro stood on the shoreline, screaming silently into the wind, his fists clenched as the distance between us stretched into an insurmountable chasm of churning water.
As the boat carved through the misty dawn across Lake Como toward the Swiss border, the roar of the engines settled into a steady, powerful hum.
I looked down at the leather-bound ledger resting securely on the dashboard beside me.
Beside it lay the cassette tape: *FOR ISABELLA.*
Julian collapsed onto the passenger seat beside me, his breathing heavy, his face streaked with soot and lake water. He looked at me, a slow, battered, triumphant smile breaking across his lips.
"You're a terrifying woman, Isabella Rossi," he said, catching his breath.
May you like
"You haven't seen anything yet, Julian," I replied, pressing the cassette into the boat’s vintage auxiliary deck. "Let’s hear what my father died to tell me."
***
