Chapter 3 - Blood on the Asphalt
Dante did not wait for Bianca to answer.
He hurled her phone across the foyer; it shattered against the marble wall, bursting into plastic and silicon fragments. In a single, fluid motion, he shoved Bianca away from him, leaving her gasping on the floor, and tore open the door to his study.
"Leo!" Dante roared.
Within five seconds, Leo Varga, Dante’s head of security and a veteran of two decades on the Boston docks, appeared from the basement corridor, his service weapon already drawn.
"Boss?"
"Lock her in the wine cellar," Dante snarled, pointing a trembling finger at Bianca, who was scrambling backward on her knees, clutching her throat. "Strip her of every device, every hairpin, every scrap of jewelry. If she makes a sound, gag her. If she tries to leave, shoot her in the leg."
Leo didn't blink. He grabbed Bianca by the arm, hauling her to her feet with zero ceremony despite her sudden, hysterical wails. "Dante, please! You don't understand! They made me do it! They have everything on you—"
Her screams were cut off as Leo hauled her down the corridor.
Dante didn't listen. He grabbed his heavy leather jacket from the coat rack, pulled his customized Colt .45 from the concealed drawer beneath the console table, and bolted out the front door into the freezing downpour.
The engine of his matte-gray Dodge Charger roared to life with a guttural scream that echoed off the stone facade of the estate. The tires shrieked against the wet driveway pavers, leaving black rubber tracks as he launched the vehicle through the iron security gates at eighty miles per hour.
Route 127 was pitch-black. The rain had intensified into a blinding squall, the wind hurling dead branches across the asphalt. Dante drove like a demon possessed, his foot pinned to the floorboards, drifting through hairpin turns that hung over the jagged Atlantic cliffs.
His mind was a burning room.
*She wins.*
Elena’s final words echoed in his skull with the force of physical blows. The look in her eyes hadn't been jealousy; it had been heartbreak. She had looked at him as if he were a monster—not because of what he did for a living, but because she believed he had betrayed her heart.
*I didn't touch her, Elena,* he thought desperately, his knuckles turning bloodless against the wheel. *The hotel room was a trap. The manifest was a trap. I was trying to keep you away from the fire.*
He had kept her in the dark to protect her from the monsters at the gate, never realizing that by blinding her, he had made her walk straight into their jaws.
Four miles down Route 127, near the turnoff for Black Rock Beach, Dante saw the skid marks.
They were fresh—glowing black against the wet road, cutting diagonally across the yellow center line toward the edge of the hemlock grove. A section of the historic granite retaining wall was pulverized, its ancient stones scattered like dice across the grass.
"No," Dante choked out. "No, no, God, no."
He slammed the brakes, throwing the Charger into a violent slide, stopping broadside across the two-lane road. Leaving the engine idling and the headlights cutting through the woods, Dante kicked his door open and ran into the rain.
The green sedan was crushed against the trunk of a massive hemlock, twenty feet down the embankment.
Dante scrambled down the slick mud, losing his footing and sliding on his knees, tearing through the fabric of his trousers. He didn't feel the pain. He lunged at the wreckage.
"Elena!"
The driver-side door was wrenched open, hanging on broken hinges. The windshield was spider-webbed with cracks, and the deployed airbag was deflated, smeared with a sickening streak of crimson.
The car was empty.
Dante thrust his upper body into the cabin, frantically searching the floorboards, beneath the seats, his hands trembling violently. "Elena! Elena!"
Nothing. Only the smell of copper, ozone, and wet upholstery.
On the passenger seat lay a shattered side-view mirror that didn't belong to the sedan—it was black, heavy-duty, with a fragment of an aftermarket steel mounting bracket. On the floor mat, half-buried in glass, was Elena’s phone, cracked down the center, and a single silver hair clip she wore when she worked late at her desk.
Dante picked up the hair clip, pressing it to his lips. It smelled of vanilla and rain.
He climbed back up the embankment like a wounded beast. His breathing was ragged, his chest heaving as the icy water soaked through his leather jacket, plastering his dark hair to his forehead.
He knelt in the mud at the edge of the asphalt.
The heavy tire tracks of the second vehicle were clearly visible in the soft shoulder. Dual rear wheels. Commercial truck chassis. They had backed up, loaded her in, and turned south toward the commercial piers.
Dante pulled his satellite phone from his pocket and hit speed dial.
"Leo," he barked before the man could speak.
"Boss, Bianca is locked down. She’s not talking, but—"
"Get Luca, Marco, and the entire North Shore crew," Dante commanded, his voice deadly, stripped of every ounce of humanity. "Shut down the harbor. I want every bridge out of Essex County blocked. Call our people at Massport. If a single commercial vessel moves from Pier Ten to Pier Twenty without my personal clearance, sink it at the dock."
"Boss, what happened?"
Dante looked down at the blood on his hands—Elena’s blood from the steering wheel.
May you like
"They took her," Dante whispered, and the quiet fury in his voice made Leo freeze on the other end of the line. "They took my wife. And if a single hair on her head is harmed, I will burn this entire city to the ground with everyone in it."
***
