Chapter 5
Dante crossed to the communications console as if he had done it a hundred times, which he probably had. He lifted a satellite radio the size of a brick, and his voice changed — the warm baritone that had spoken of her father’s cannoli was gone, replaced by something flat and cold and absolute.
“Echo Team, this is Actual.” A pause. “We have traitors in the ballroom. You are cleared to engage. Take no prisoners.”
He switched channels without waiting for an answer.
“Strike Team Alpha. Civilian hostage at La Dolce Farina, Hanover Street, North End. Basement office. Name is Marco Santoro, twenty-three, guarded by at least one armed man.” His eyes found Emilia, and something in his face softened, just a fraction. “Primary objective: bring him out alive. Secondary: if you see Ferrara, bring him to me. Lethal force authorized on anyone else.”
She watched him, back against the wall, heart still hammering. She had watched him fake his death, kill a traitor in cold blood, and command an army in under ten minutes. She should have been terrified of him. She was. She was also, for the first time since that door had been torn from its hinges, not entirely alone.
“The tunnels,” he said, setting the radio down. “There’s a Prohibition-era route under the delicatessen next door. It runs beneath the whole block. My men will be inside your bakery before the guard hears the door open.” He crouched in front of her, close enough that she could smell cordite and cedar and sweat. “He’s going to be all right.”
“You don’t know that.” Her voice was scraped and raw.
“No,” he agreed. “I don’t.” He said it so plainly, without a shred of false comfort, that she believed him when he went on: “But I know this. You walked into a slaughterhouse tonight, looked the devil in the eye, and chose mercy. You emptied the vial. You wrote the note. You handed me the men who would have buried me in my own house.” He took her face in his hands — big hands, rough hands, the hands of a boy who had once been too thin for an Italian boy. “You saved my life, Emilia Santoro. Nobody touches what belongs to me.”
“Ferrara will kill Marco.” Her eyes were wet again. “He said if you survived, they’d skin him alive.”
“Ferrara is already a dead man. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
The certainty in his voice was absolute, and it should have terrified her, and instead it was the only warm thing in the room.
Two floors below the bakery, in a windowless room that smelled of flour and mildew, Marco Santoro counted the drips from a pipe above his head. He had stopped trying to guess the hour. He had stopped hoping, mostly. The guard sat with his back to the wall, cleaning his nails with a knife, and the only sound was the rain and the soft hiss of Marco’s own breathing.
Then, beneath the rain, another sound. A scrape. Like a chair being dragged across a floor — from behind the stack of flour sacks in the corner.
The guard heard it too. He stood up, knife out.
The flour sacks erupted.
The radio crackled, and a different voice came through, tight with exertion. “Boss. Strike Team Alpha. We’ve got him.” A pause. “Santoro is secured. Beat up, but breathing. Ferrara tried to run out through the rear alley — we’ve got him in cuffs.”
May you like
Emilia made a sound she didn’t recognize, a sob torn out of her by the roots. She doubled forward and pressed her forehead against Dante’s chest, and his arms came around her immediately, steady and heavy and warm, and he held her while the last of the adrenaline finally broke her open.
“Bring Ferrara to the warehouse,” he said into the radio, over her shoulder, and his voice dropped into something dark and quiet and merciless — the voice of the man whose name made the docks go silent. “I’ll handle him personally.”
