Chapter 10 - THE AMBUSH AT OAK BROOK
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The quiet peace of November shattered on a Tuesday afternoon during a routine medical follow-up in the western suburbs.
Dr. Rossi had scheduled a comprehensive pediatric allergy panel for Maisie at an upscale, private medical pavilion near Oak Brook.
Dominic had wanted to accompany us, but an emergency fire at the southern rail terminal had pulled him downtown with his senior lieutenants.
He had refused to let us leave the estate without a full security convoy: two armored black Suburbans, six tactical guards, and Marco driving our reinforced Mercedes sedan.
The appointment had gone smoothly.
Maisie had received her clean bill of health, clutched a gold star sticker on her velvet coat, and was humming a song she had learned in nursery school.
As our three-car motorcade turned onto the secluded two-lane access road leading toward the Interstate, the autumn woods suddenly exploded.
A heavy commercial dump truck barreled out of an abandoned logging trail on our right, smashing violently into the lead Suburban at fifty miles per hour.
The deafening screech of crushing steel and shattering safety glass echoed across the forest.
The lead vehicle flipped onto its roof, skidding across the wet asphalt in a shower of sparks before crashing into the drainage ditch.
“Ambush!” Marco roared, slamming the brakes and throwing the Mercedes into a tactical slide across both lanes.
Before Marco could hit reverse, a second black truck roared out from behind us, ramming our rear bumper and wedging our vehicle between the ditch and the trees.
“Stay down on the floorboard!” Marco commanded, drawing his automatic pistol and kicking his door open.
Automatic gunfire erupted from the tree line like a hailstorm of lead.
High-caliber rifle rounds slammed into the bulletproof glass of our windows, spiderwebbing the reinforced polycarbonate with dense white fractures.
Maisie began screaming in pure, unadulterated terror, curling into a ball on the floor of the back seat.
I threw my entire body over her, pressing my face into her dark curls, using my own back as a human shield against the raining glass fragments.
“Mommy! Mommy!” Maisie sobbed frantically against my ribs.
“I've got you, baby!” I screamed over the deafening roar of automatic weapons.
“Keep your head down! Don't move!”
Through the cracked front windshield, I saw Marco and the two surviving guards from the rear Suburban returning fire with lethal precision.
Three masked shooters in tactical gear dropped onto the wet leaves, but more men were pouring out of the woods.
These were not street thugs.
They were professional mercenaries moving in bounding pairs, carrying military-grade assault rifles.
Suddenly, a heavy iron crowbar smashed through the driver’s side window of our car.
A gloved hand reached inside, unlocking the electronic deadbolts with a hydraulic click.
The rear door was ripped open into the cold autumn air.
Standing on the asphalt, wearing a black wool coat, leather gloves, and a face twisted into a feral, psychotic sneer, was Vanessa Bellini.
In her right hand, she held a compact nine-millimeter pistol leveled directly at my forehead.
“Get out of the car, Claire,” Vanessa hissed, her eyes wild with madness and narcotics.
“Get out before I paint this leather with your brains.”
Marco spun around from behind the engine block to fire, but a sniper round from the tree line struck him in the shoulder, knocking him hard against the front tire.
I slowly sat up, keeping my arms wrapped tightly around Maisie, refusing to let her go.
“Vanessa, stop this,” I pleaded, my voice shaking with adrenaline.
“The Commission exiled you!”
“If you do this, Dominic will hunt you to the ends of the earth!”
“Dominic is already dead!” Vanessa shrieked with a hysterical, manic laugh.
“My father’s men set the fire at the rail yard to draw him into an open trap!”
“By now, his car is at the bottom of the Chicago River!”
My heart seized in absolute, suffocating agony.
No.
Not Dominic.
He was too smart, too powerful, too fierce to fall to a coward’s ambush.
“Now give me that child!” Vanessa screamed, lunging forward and grabbing Maisie’s arm with brutal force.
Maisie shrieked in agony as Vanessa tried to yank her from my grip.
The maternal fury that had carried me through four years of poverty and fear erupted inside my soul like a volcano.
I didn't care about the gun.
I didn't care about the mercenaries in the woods.
With a ferocious, primal scream, I drove my left elbow into Vanessa’s face.
The cartilage of her nose broke with a sickening crunch.
Vanessa stumbled backward onto the wet leaves, screaming in pain, blood spurting from her nostrils across her black designer coat.
Her pistol clattered onto the asphalt near the rear tire.
Before she could recover, the thunderous roar of approaching high-horsepower engines shook the forest floor.
Four matte-black tactical trucks smashed through the brush from the southern highway, obliterating the mercenaries’ perimeter in a hail of heavy machine-gun fire.
Leading the convoy was a customized armored Ram truck with steel battering rams mounted to the chassis.
The truck slammed directly into the mercenaries’ dump truck, shoving the thirty-ton vehicle ten feet across the road like an empty toy box.
The driver’s door was kicked open before the vehicle had even stopped rolling.
Dominic Moretti leaped out into the firefight, wielding a tactical assault rifle, his dark eyes blazing with a fury that could incinerate hell itself.
He was alive.
May you like
He had survived the rail yard.
And he had arrived to claim his vengeance.
