Chapter 10 - In the Lions' Den
Green-tinted phosphor bloomed across my field of view as I snapped the night-vision goggles over my eyes. The familiar layout of Villa Moretti resolved into a landscape of eerie emerald and sharp gray edges.
Through the floorboards, we could track their progress by the faint vibration of tactical combat boots moving across marble. Two men sweeping the dining room. Two advancing up the curved double staircase. Two holding the rear terrace as an extraction security element.
“They’re using thermal optics,” Marco warned in a hushed murmur. “Our body heat will light up down these long corridors like road flares.”
“Then we don't give them a corridor,” I said.
I led Marco through the narrow servants' passage hidden behind the library bookcase—a tight, plaster-lined corridor constructed in the 1920s that ran parallel to the main hallway, completely insulated with thick horsehair and heavy lathe. It was cold, damp, and invisible to standard thermal sweeps.
Through the peepholes drilled into the ornamental molding, I saw them.
Two contractors dressed in sterile grey-camo tactical gear, wearing four-tube panoramic night-vision goggles. They moved with textbook military precision, carbines tucked tight into their shoulders, sweeping their muzzle arcs across every doorway on the second-floor landing.
One carried a heavy ballistic breaching hammer; the other held an aluminum containment cradle designed for rapid extraction of infants.
Seeing that cage in my home snapped something fundamental inside my chest.
I didn't signal Marco to set up a crossfire. I didn't wait for a tactical advantage.
I kicked through the decorative lath-and-plaster paneling directly beside the lead contractor.
The wall exploded into chalky dust and wooden splinters. Before the point man could pivot his carbine toward the sudden breach, I grabbed the barrel of his weapon with my left hand, shoving it violently toward the ceiling. His suppressed shot tore harmlessly into the crown molding.
With my right hand, I drove the butt of my heavy steel automatic directly into the bridge of his tactical goggles.
The plastic lenses shattered inward into his eye sockets. The man shrieked, stumbling backward as blood erupted from beneath the smashed frame. I stepped forward, hooked my leg behind his knee, and drove him into the marble floor, driving my combat knife through the gap beneath his tactical vest right into the femoral junction. He convulsed once and went limp.
The second contractor reacted instantly, dropping his breaching hammer and leveling his short-barreled rifle at my face.
Thump. Thump.
Two suppressed rounds punched through the wall behind him. Marco emerged from the shadows of the secret passage, his submachine gun smoking. The second intruder collapsed forward onto his face, his weapon skidding across the Persian runner.
Silence returned to the gallery, broken only by the hum of the night-vision optics and the sound of my own ragged breathing.
“Two down,” Marco breathed, stepping over the corpses and checking their tactical vests for identification. “No insignia. Sterile uniforms. Clean serial numbers on the weapons. High-tier private security out of Eastern Europe.”
“They’re communicating on an encrypted local loop,” I noted, plucking the earpiece from the dead point man’s ear and pressing it into my own.
A harsh, Russian-accented voice crackled through the speaker, speaking broken English:
“Team One, report. Have you secured the packages in the nursery? Team Two is at the ground-floor pantry. We found the housekeeper and the little girl. Awaiting orders to eliminate.”
The world seemed to tilt on its axis.
Elena. Sophie.
The child who had crawled beneath my babies' cribs to save them from acoustic torture was currently staring down the barrel of a mercenary’s rifle.
I snatched the radio from the dead man’s chest, keyed the push-to-talk button, and spoke in a voice that was pure, unfiltered ice:
“If you touch a single hair on that little girl’s head, you will not leave this valley in pieces large enough for your mothers to bury.”
A short pause followed. Then, a low, arrogant laugh crackled through the earpiece.
May you like
“Ah, the master of the house. We have the girl, Moretti. Drop your weapons and walk down to the kitchen. You have ninety seconds. If we don't see your empty hands on the counter by the count of ninety, we take her fingers first, then her mother’s.”
The line went dead.
