Chapter 8 - The Shadow of Retaliation
Three weeks after the arrests, the quiet life Dante had promised me faced its first major fracture.
I was staying at a secure corporate safehouse in Hoboken, accompanied by two of Dante’s vetted security guards, awaiting the formal grand jury indictment. The city was settling into the cold gray grip of late November.
It was just after ten o'clock at night when the phone in the living room rang. Marcus answered it, his expression darkening within seconds.
"Understood," Marcus said, hanging up. He turned to me, his hand already resting on the butt of his sidearm. "Pack a bag. We're moving."
"What happened?" I asked, my heart jumping.
"Vanessa’s family," Marcus said tightly. "Her maiden name is Costello. Her older brother, Dominic, runs the northern teamsters' union out of Providence. He doesn't care that his sister tried to murder Dante. He cares that the Moretti shipping contracts were supposed to fund their trucking expansion. He knows the indictment drops on Friday, and he knows Vanessa’s defense collapses without your testimony."
"How did he find out who I was?" I demanded, rushing to grab my coat. "Dante said my name was sealed!"
"The clerk’s office had a leak," Marcus muttered, opening the door and checking the hallway. "Dominic put a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on the police deposition list. A deputy clerk in Essex County couldn't resist the payout. Let's go."
We took the service elevator down to the basement parking garage. The air was damp and smelled of exhaust fumes.
As we stepped out toward the armored sedan parked in stall 14, the overhead fluorescent lights suddenly flickered and died, plunging the underground garage into near-total darkness.
"Down!" Marcus hissed, shoving me behind a heavy concrete pillar.
Gunfire shattered the silence.
The muzzle flashes were blinding staccato bursts echoing off the concrete walls. Bullets sparked off the asphalt, punching holes into the side panels of the parked vehicles.
The two guards with Marcus immediately returned fire, their weapons roaring with deafening intensity.
"Cara, stay low! Crawl toward the boiler room access!" Marcus yelled over the gunshots, firing three controlled shots down the center aisle.
Fear tried to paralyze me, but the memory of the mountain ridge rushed back. I didn't survive a burning car to die in a concrete basement.
I dropped to my hands and knees, scrambling across the oil-stained floor toward the heavy steel fire door twenty feet away. Behind me, glass shattered, and a man cursed loudly in pain.
A figure stepped out from behind a silver van directly in my path—a broad-shouldered man holding a tactical shotgun.
"Found her!" he shouted, raising the barrel toward me.
Before he could pull the trigger, the squeal of burning rubber tore through the garage.
A heavy black SUV smashed through the parking gate arm, drifting sideways across the oil slick, its reinforced front bumper slamming directly into the silver van. The impact launched the gunman sideways, sending his shotgun skidding across the concrete floor.
The driver’s door of the SUV kicked open.
Dante stepped out, wearing a tactical vest over his dark shirt, a heavy automatic pistol in his right hand. He didn't hesitate. With three precise, deafening shots, he neutralized the remaining two shooters pinned behind the support columns.
"Clear!" Dante’s voice cut through the smoke and ringing silence.
Marcus emerged from behind the pillar, his left arm bleeding from a graze, but his weapon still up. "Boss! You shouldn't be here!"
"You think I was going to sit in an estate while Dominic Costello sends his animals after my witness?" Dante snapped.
He walked over to me, extending a hand to pull me up from the concrete. His grip was just as iron-strong as it had been on the mountain slope.
"Are you hit?" he demanded, his eyes scanning me from head to toe.
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"No," I breathed, my heart pounding in my throat. "I'm okay."
"Dominic just made the biggest mistake of his life," Dante said, his voice dropping into a register of icy, absolute menace. "He wanted a war. Now he has one."
