Chapter 6
Across the river, in a warehouse in Queens, the air was silent.
Dante Moretti stood over the body of the capo who had sold the safe house.
The man was dead. Justice had been served — the old kind, the kind his father would have recognized — and Dante felt nothing. No satisfaction. No closure.
Only a cold, knowing dread in the pit of his stomach that he could not explain and could not shake.
His phone buzzed.
He pulled it out with a bloodied hand. Unknown number. No text. Two images.
The first was a grainy photograph of Luca, lying dead in the hallway of the Southampton house.
Dante’s jaw tightened. Luca had been his brother in everything but blood. Twenty years. There had never been a moment, in all of it, when Dante had doubted him.
The second image stopped his heart.
It was Arya.
She was tied to a chair in a place that looked like a slaughterhouse. Her head was lolled to the side, and a thin trickle of blood ran from her lip, and her eyes were open.
The sound that came out of Dante Moretti was not human.
It was a guttural roar of pure, unadulterated fury, and it made his own soldiers take a step back — not in respect, but in genuine fear.
Dante was not a man who lost control. He was the ice king. Everyone said so. The ice was the whole point of him.
The ice had just shattered.
“Boss.” His new second, a harsh man named Sal, spoke tentatively. “What is it?”
Dante looked up. His eyes were empty of business, empty of strategy, empty of everything except murder.
“They have her,” he said, and the words sounded like grinding stones. “Rossi has her.”
“It’s a trap, Dante.” Sal was already checking his watch, already planning. “Rossi wants you to come charging in. He’ll have fifty guys in the rafters. We need to plan—”
“Plan.”
Dante said the word like it was an obscenity.
He walked to the trunk of his car and popped it open. Inside was an arsenal — military-grade, the kind of hardware a man keeps for the day the world ends.
He picked up two assault rifles and tossed one to Sal.
“Call everyone,” he said, checking the magazine of a handgun. “Soldiers. Associates. Street runners. Anyone who owes the Moretti name a favor. We’re going to the meatpacking district.”
“And what are the orders?”
Sal racked the slide of the rifle.
Dante turned. His silhouette was framed against the city lights, and his face was the face of something that had stopped being a man about an hour ago.
“Scorched earth,” he said. “We burn it to the ground. No one gets out of that building alive except the girl.”
—
Back in the meatpacking plant, time was running out.
Vinnie held the blade against the skin of Arya’s finger, just above the knuckle. He was sweating now, his patience eroding, his breath coming fast.
“Last chance, Arya. How do I open the ledger?”
Arya closed her eyes. She was trembling so hard the chair creaked.
She tried to retreat into her mind — to find a happy memory to hold on to before the pain started. And what came was not the rented room in Queens, or the dishwater, or the forty-two dollars in her pocket.
What came was a garden in Italy.
A big man with a booming laugh, smelling of espresso, spinning her around and around until the world blurred. Her father. Her real father. A memory so old and so small that she had never been sure it was real.
*What did he used to say about the ring?*
*The wolf. The wolf waits.*
“I’m going to count to three,” Vinnie said. The blade pressed down. A drop of blood welled up.
“One.”
Arya sobbed.
“I don’t know—”
“Two.”
*Boom.*
The heavy reinforced steel doors at the front of the plant did not open. They were blown off their hinges.
A concussive wave of pressure and debris swept through the cavernous room, knocking the knife from Vinnie’s hand and sending him stumbling backward. Gray smoke billowed into the entryway, swirling in the draft.
Through the smoke, a figure emerged.
Dante Moretti stepped into the light, and he looked like the angel of death.
No jacket. White dress shirt rolled to the elbows, revealing forearms taut with lethal intent. An automatic rifle in each hand. And behind him, a wall of shadows — the Moretti army, heavily armed, moving with military precision.
“Rossi!” His voice echoed off the steel girders, louder than the machinery, louder than the ringing in Arya’s ears. “Get away from her before I carve your heart out with a spoon.”
Vinnie scrambled up off the floor, and panic seized him, and he understood too late that he had not angered a rival.
He had woken a monster.
“Kill them!” he screamed to his men on the catwalks. “Kill them all!”
The warehouse erupted.
Muzzle flashes lit the dark corners of the ceiling. Bullets pinged off metal and shattered concrete and tore through flesh, and the noise was deafening — a cacophony of automatic fire and screaming machinery.
Dante did not take cover.
He moved forward.
He fired in short, controlled bursts, dropping Rossi’s men from the railings above, and he was a force of nature, cutting a path straight through the chaos toward the center of the room.
His eyes never left Arya.
Vinnie, realizing his men were falling too fast, made a desperate move. He lunged for her, grabbed her by the hair, hauled her up off the chair, and wrapped his arm around her throat, pulling her body against his as a shield. He snatched the knife up off the floor and pressed it to her jugular.
“You want her, Moretti?” he shrieked, his voice cracking with terror as Dante closed the distance to twenty yards. “Come and get her. But take one more step and I paint the floor with her blood.”
Dante stopped.
He dropped the empty rifles. His hands hovered over the pistols at his waist.
The room went momentarily silent, save for the echoes of gunfire and heavy breathing.
Arya looked across the distance.
She saw Dante’s chest heaving. Saw the blood on his shirt. Saw the absolute terror masked behind his rage.
He had come for her. He had burned the city for her.
May you like
And in that moment, looking at him, Arya realized something.
She could not just be the damsel anymore.
