Chapter 4 - The Crimson Envelope
"What do you mean, I'm not safe?" I asked, standing up from the armchair. The exhaustion of the last twenty-four hours was catching up with me, making my knees wobble.
"The men who took Lily from Vermont aren't ghosts," Dante explained, his tone flat and unyielding. "They are part of an internal faction within the syndicate—led by a man named Viktor Cruz. He wants my throne, and he thought using my daughter as leverage would force me to step down. When my extraction teams hit his safehouses last night, half his crew vanished into the city."
Dante stepped around the desk, closing the distance between us until I had to tilt my head back to look into his eyes.
"Cruz knows the girl was recovered," Dante continued. "And my security feeds show one of his scouts was parked two blocks from that warehouse forty minutes before my tactical units arrived. They saw you go in. They saw you walk out with her."
My stomach plummeted. "They saw me."
"Which means Viktor Cruz now believes you are either my new accomplice or a key witness who can identify his operatives," Dante said bluntly. "If you walk out those front gates right now, you won't make it two miles before his cleaners pick you up."
Before I could process the terrifying weight of his words, a loud, urgent crash echoed from downstairs.
Bang! Bang!
The sharp, concussive sound of gunfire shattered the quiet of the mansion. Alarms began to wail—a shrill, electronic shriek that instantly turned the estate from a luxurious home into a besieged fortress.
Dante’s reaction was instantaneous. He drew a suppressed Sig Sauer from a concealed holster beneath his suit jacket with blinding speed.
"Stay behind me," Dante ordered, grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the reinforced steel panic room hidden behind a sliding bookshelf in the corner of the study.
"What's happening?!" I screamed over the wailing alarms.
"Cruz didn't wait," Dante growled, his eyes scanning the corridor through the half-open study door as the sound of boots rushed up the grand staircase. "He launched a suicide squad to finish what he started."
The heavy oak door of the study exploded inward in a shower of splinters.
Two men in black tactical gear burst through the opening, their submachine guns raised, their faces covered in black balaclavas.
Dante pushed me hard behind the heavy oak desk, pivoting on his heel. Two muffled thwips echoed through the room with terrifying precision. Both mercenaries jerked violently and collapsed onto the Persian rug before they could even pull their triggers.
Dante didn't hesitate. He grabbed my hand, yanking me toward the panic room. "Move!"
As we dived inside the steel-reinforced chamber just as the automatic hydraulic door hissed shut, something heavy scraped against the outer wall. A moment later, a red-painted envelope slid through the mail slot at the bottom of the panic room door.
Dante crouched down, picked up the envelope, and ripped it open. He pulled out a single sheet of heavy cardstock with words cut from a newspaper headline:
GIVE US THE GIRL AND THE WITNESS BY NOON, OR THE ENTIRE ESTATE BURNS.
Dante stared at the note, his face draining of all color, replaced by an expression so terrifyingly dark that even the hardened mafia boss looked like a man standing on the edge of an abyss.
May you like
He looked up at me, his chest heaving with suppressed fury.
"They think they can back me into a corner," Dante whispered, his voice dangerously low. "They have no idea what happens when you wake a sleeping dog."
