Chapter 2 - Blood and Blueprint
The glass partition overlooking the Manhattan skyline shuddered violently as pressure waves rippled through the elevator shaft.
Dante didn’t waste a second. Instinct honed over fifteen years of turf wars and underworld survivals took over: he drove Clara down behind the mahogany desk just as a burst of suppressed automatic gunfire pulverized the plate glass where his head had been half a second earlier.
The storm of diamond-hard glass shards showered the Persian rug.
"Marco!" Dante roared into his lapel radio, drawing his matte-black SIG Sauer from his shoulder holster.
Static hissed. Then, a gargling wheeze through the channel: *"...compromised... floor sixty-three... Dante, they’re not street muscle..."* The line died with the heavy drop of a body.
Dante cursed, racking the slide. "Voss had a backup team."
"Voss didn't bring them," Clara said coldly. She was crouched on her knees beside him, her skirt split up the side to allow movement. From the inner holster secured beneath her desk drawer, she pulled a compact, custom-machined weapon Dante had never seen in his armory: an integrally suppressed B&T Station SIX.
Dante turned his gun barrel toward her temple. "Where the hell did you get that?"
"Under the third drawer. I told you, Dante, focus on the people shooting *at* us, not the person who kept your calendar clean." Clara didn't even look at the muzzle pressed near her ear. She dropped the magazine, checked the spring tension with her thumb, slammed it home, and leaned out around the edge of the desk.
*Pfft. Pfft.*
Two controlled taps. Out in the hallway, through the billowing drywall dust, two bodies clad in dark gray tactical gear hit the floor with heavy, metallic clatters.
Dante stared at her. The secretary who used to apologize if his almond milk wasn't chilled to forty degrees had just put two rounds through the ocular cavities of professional mercenaries at forty feet in the dark.
"Who are they?" he demanded, staying low as another sweep of automatic fire ripped through the paintings along the wall.
"The Directorate," she said, her voice dropping into an icy cadence that sent a strange, electric heat down Dante’s spine. "They don't leave witnesses. And they certainly don't leave people who know how their rings are cut."
"Voss?"
"Nikolai is bait. He always was." Clara grabbed Dante’s arm. Her grip was startlingly strong, the grip of someone trained in systema and joint manipulation. "They used him to draw you down to the cellar so they could sweep the penthouse for the master shipping ledgers. They don't just want your territory, Dante. They want the offshore manifests."
"Those ledgers are in my head."
"No," she said, glancing sideways at him through the gloom, the smell of cordite filling the air. "They’re on that drive they took from West 49th. Which means we have roughly twelve minutes before they realize the drive has a three-layer dead-man encryption that requires a biometric scan from my hand to decrypt."
Dante froze. He seized her lapel, pulling her flush against his chest. His thumb pressed hard into the tendon beneath her jawline.
"You encrypted my drive?"
"I built your system, Dante. You hired an agency to overhaul your digital security thirty months ago. Did you really think you were dealing with a third-party cybersecurity firm from Queens?" Her breath was warm against his neck, defying the violence around them. "I designed the vault you've been sleeping inside."
A grenade rolled across the carpet—a flashbang.
Dante didn’t think. He wrapped his coat around Clara, threw his weight over her, and buried her face into the crook of his shoulder as the world erupted in blinding white fury and deafening percussive force.
The blast rattled his teeth in their sockets. Ears ringing with a high-pitched scream, Dante surged up through the smoke, firing blind into the corridor. A mercenary rounded the corner; Dante’s third shot punched through the intruder’s throat, splashing dark crimson across the shattered portrait of Dante’s grandfather.
Clara was already moving. She snatched a leather travel bag hidden behind the bookcase—a go-bag she had kept hidden three feet from his desk for three years—and threw it over her shoulder.
"The service lift," she shouted over the ringing in their ears. "They will have cut the mains, but the manual override counterweight can drop us to the garage if we trip the brake."
"I don't take orders in my own building, Bennett," Dante snarled, grabbing her by the waist and hauling her toward the secondary emergency exit.
May you like
"You do if you want to see tomorrow night, Mr. Romano," she shot back, but she let him drag her, her body pressing instinctively into his side as another volley of bullets chewed through the doorframe behind them.
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