Chapter 9
He stepped over the fallen men and out into the torrential rain, the water plastering his dark hair across his forehead. Across the muddy yard, standing behind the armored door of an SUV, Marcus Vance stood clutching a smoking submachine gun.
“You always were too sentimental about the help, Dante!” Marcus yelled over the roar of the downpour, his scar gleaming pale in the moonlight. “Your father understood that people are just numbers on a balance sheet! You let a maid ruin an empire!”
“My father died an old, paranoid coward who trusted snakes like you,” Dante called back, walking steadily forward through the mud without breaking stride. “You stole from our family, you murdered an innocent man, and you threatened a five-year-old child under my roof.”
“That child has ledgers that could put me away for three lifetimes!” Marcus sneered, leveling his weapon directly at Dante’s chest. “Do you really think a court cares who owns the bullet that ends this? You’re just another body in the docks tonight!”
Marcus pulled the trigger, but Dante dove behind an abandoned iron anchor winch, the rounds pinging harmlessly off the solid cast iron. From the river slipway below, the sudden roar of a high-powered twin-diesel marine engine split the night air like thunder.
Julian had secured the harbor patrol interceptor craft that Dante kept docked at the pier for emergency evacuations. The massive searchlight on the vessel snapped on, bathing Marcus and his surviving two men in blinding white illumination from the water.
“Barnaby did his job,” Dante said, the faintest ghost of a genuine smile touching the corners of his hard lips. “He stood guard the entire time. He’s the toughest rabbit I have ever met in my entire life, Lily.”
Dante used the blinding distraction to pivot around the winch, firing two precise shots that took out the remaining two mercenaries instantly. Marcus stumbled backward, dropping his empty weapon as he slipped in the slick river mud near the rotting pier’s edge.
Dante stepped forward until the barrel of his smoking automatic was resting directly against the center of Marcus’s forehead. The older man breathed heavily, clutching his bleeding shoulder, his eyes wide with the realization that his grand ambition was completely over.
“Please, Dante... we built this city together,” Marcus gasped, his voice trembling as the rain washed over his scarred chin. “Take the accounts. Take the money. Just let me get on a freighter to South America. You'll never see me again.”