Chapter 5 - The Mountain Ambush
I didn't pick up the phone. My entire world had tilted on its axis, spinning into a sickening vortex of betrayal.
“Answer me!” I screamed, grabbing his bicep through the dark wool of his coat. “Did you kill my father? Did you kill your own father?!”
“Aurora, let go of my arm!” Lorenzo barked, his voice cracking like a whip.
A deafening CRACK shattered the morning silence.
The driver’s side mirror disintegrated into a cloud of plastic shards and silver glass. A high-caliber bullet struck the reinforced B-pillar right beside Lorenzo’s temple with the force of a sledgehammer, leaving a deep, spider-webbed crater in the ballistic steel.
The truck lurched as Lorenzo slammed his foot on the accelerator. The heavy diesel engine screamed, the twin turbos spooling with a violent hiss as the truck rocketed around an icy hairpin turn at seventy miles per hour.
In the passenger side mirror, two slate-gray Dodge Rams materialized out of the thick mountain fog, running without headlights.
“Get down!” Lorenzo roared, shoving my head toward the floorboards with his right hand while wrestling the steering wheel with his left.
Another volley of automatic gunfire chewed into the tailgate. The truck shuddered, sparks raining past the rear window. The smell of burning rubber and hot oil flooded through the vents.
“Did you do it?!” I sobbed from the footwell, my hands over my head, tears streaming down my face. “Elena said you murdered them!”
“Elena was reading a script with a gun barrel pressed against her skull!” Lorenzo shouted over the roar of the engine, his jaw clenched tight enough to splinter bone. “Morales wants you to run from me! If you run, you’re dead within ten minutes!”
He yanked the wheel hard to the right.
The massive F-250 swerved across the double yellow line, side-swiping the lead Dodge Ram as it attempted to box us against the sheer rock face of the mountain. Metal screamed against metal in an explosion of white-hot sparks. The impact threw me against the transmission tunnel, bruising my hip.
The lead Ram lost traction on the black ice, spun out violently across both lanes, flipped twice, and sailed over the concrete barrier into the two-thousand-foot abyss of the ravine below.
A fireball erupted from the canyon, lighting the fog with a sickening orange glow.
The second Ram stayed glued to our bumper.
A masked shooter leaned out of the passenger window, leveling a black grenade launcher at our rear axle.
“Hang on!” Lorenzo bellowed.
He didn't brake. He slammed the truck into four-wheel drive, yanked the emergency brake, and whipped the steering wheel hard into a decommissioned logging trail off the shoulder.
The heavy truck barreled through the rusted metal chain-link gate, splintering pine saplings, bouncing violently over deep mud ruts and exposed boulders. Branches whipped against the armored windshield like skeletal hands.
Behind us, a 40mm high-explosive round detonated on the asphalt where we had been two seconds prior, blasting a crater into the road and sending a shockwave that rattled our teeth.
The second Ram lunged down the logging road after us, four-wheel drive grinding through the mud, closing the distance.
“Take the wheel!” Lorenzo ordered.
“What?!” I shrieked.
“Take the goddamn wheel, Aurora!”
He pulled me up from the footwell by my sweater collar, shoving my hands onto the leather-wrapped steering wheel while his heavy boot remained pinned to the throttle.
Before I could panic, Lorenzo drew a compact, suppressed submachine gun from beneath the center console. He lowered his side window two inches, kicked open the truck’s customized rear cab-sliding glass, and leaned halfway into the bed.
THWIP-THWIP-THWIP-THWIP.
The weapon hissed with lethal, rhythmic precision.
Through the rear glass, I saw the Ram’s front tires blow out in twin geysers of shredded rubber. The driver lost control, the front bumper digging into a massive cedar stump. The rear end of the Ram launched into the air, twisting violently before crashing upside down against a boulder, fuel igniting in a catastrophic secondary explosion.
The logging road fell eerily quiet, save for the thrum of our diesel engine and the pounding rain on the roof.
Lorenzo slid back into the driver’s seat, sealed the cab window, and took the wheel from my trembling hands.
His breathing was heavy, sweat sheening on his forehead. A cut above his left eyebrow dripped blood down his cheek, mingling with the dark stubble along his jawline.
I shrank back against the passenger door, staring at him as if he were an alien creature.
“You’re a monster,” I whispered, shivering uncontrollably.
Lorenzo slowed the truck to a crawl, navigating through the deep forest trail until we reached an overgrown clearing dominated by an abandoned forestry service cabin.
He put the truck in park, killed the engine, and engaged the emergency brake.
The sudden silence was deafening.
Lorenzo turned to face me. He didn't look angry; he looked exhausted, a dark, fathomless sorrow haunting the edges of his lethal eyes.
“My father was a cruel, ruthless bastard, Aurora,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, raw gravel. “He built an empire on blood, extortion, and fear. But he raised me by one rule: The family does not eat its own.”
He leaned forward, unbuttoning his tactical vest and tossing it onto the floor.
“Seven years ago, when your father came to our house with the toxicology results, he didn't just come as an examiner. He came as an old friend. David Hayes and Antonio Costa grew up on the same block in Little Italy before your father went to medical school and mine went to prison.”
The words struck me like a physical blow. “They… they knew each other?”
“Your father begged Antonio to step down, to let me take over before the poison finished him off,” Lorenzo continued, his gaze unrelenting. “Someone in our inner circle—someone close to Morales—realized your father had the evidence. They detonated that lab to silence him. And three days later, they put two bullets in my father’s chest while he was lying in a hospital bed at Swedish Medical.”
Tears ran hot down my face. “Then why did Elena say you killed them?”
“Because Morales has Elena’s eight-year-old daughter locked in a warehouse in Tacoma,” Lorenzo said quietly. “She told you whatever she had to tell you to make you run from me. Because if you run, Morales catches you. And if Morales catches you, he gets the drive, he gets the offshore accounts, and he burns what’s left of my family to the ground.”
I buried my face in my hands, sobbing from the sheer, crushing weight of it all.
No heroes. No clean hands. Just wolves tearing at each other in the dark, and my family caught in the middle of their jaws.
Suddenly, I felt large, calloused hands wrap around my wrists, gently pulling my hands away from my face.
Lorenzo drew me toward him across the center console.
“I didn't kill your father, Aurora,” he murmured against my temple, his deep voice vibrating through my skull. “I swore an oath on his grave that I would find the men who burned his lab. And I will burn them to ash before I let them touch you.”
I looked up into his dark eyes, searching for deceit, searching for the monster.
All I saw was a man bleeding, scarred, and hopelessly determined to keep me alive.
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When his lips crashed onto mine, I didn't fight him.
The terror, the adrenaline, the desperate need to feel something other than the cold grip of death detonated between us. I grabbed his shirt, pulling him hard against me, opening my mouth to his as the rain washed over the armored glass, sealing us in our own violent, desperate world.
