Chapter 6 - The Alchemist of the Kitchen
The mudroom door didn't give way slowly. It blew inward with the deafening crack of a hydraulic breaching ram, showering the narrow corridor with splinters of oak and twisted steel.
Six men in black tactical gear and Kevlar vests poured through the breach, their weapon lights cutting through the darkness of the service hall in sharp, blinding beams. They moved with military precision—Moretti’s top tier, men who had spent a decade enforcing territorial boundaries from Brooklyn to the Jersey docks.
"Check the corners!" the lead shooter barked in a rough Queens accent. "The brother is bleeding out in here somewhere! Take Gabriel’s hands, but leave him breathing! The boss wants both of them on their knees when Roman breaks!"
They hit the swinging doors of the kitchen in a tight two-man stack.
The doors flew open.
The kitchen was pitch black, illuminated only by the faint, eerie blue glow of eight gas burners roaring under the massive stainless-steel ventilation hoods. The exhaust fans were off. The air inside the room was heavy, dense, shimmering with heat.
In the center of the room, perched on the heavy butcher block, was a massive thirty-quart copper stockpot. It was boiling furiously, foaming with a murky, pale yellow liquid that gave off a faint, greenish vapor.
"What the hell is that?" the second shooter muttered, his weapon light hitting the bubbling pot.
"Trap! Back out—"
A shadow dropped from the top of the industrial shelving unit behind the door.
Gabriel landed like a panther, wearing a black rubber gas mask that made him look like an insect from a nightmare. He didn't fire a gun. He held a high-pressure fire extinguisher filled not with retardant, but with five gallons of boiling cooking grease mixed with coarse salt.
He pulled the pin and squeezed the lever.
A high-pressure jet of screaming hot oil hit the first two men directly in their faces.
Their screams were inhuman. The pressurized fat tore through their protective goggles, melting the plastic into their skin, incinerating their flesh on contact. They collapsed to the floor, thrashing in the boiling liquid, their weapons clattering uselessly against the tile.
The remaining four men raised their rifles, but Maeve was already moving.
From behind the industrial dishwasher, wearing the second gas mask, she kicked over two five-gallon plastic buckets that had been sitting directly beneath the heat lamps.
One contained pure sodium hypochlorite bleach.
The other contained industrial ammonia.
The two liquids collided on the heated tile floor, instantly reacting in a violent, bubbling froth that released a massive, billowing cloud of thick, white chloramine gas.
In an unventilated room, chloramine gas doesn't just make you cough; it turns into hydrochloric acid the second it touches the moisture in your eyes, throat, and lungs.
The third and fourth shooters fired wild bursts into the fog, their bullets chewing through the copper pots and shattering the glass cabinets, but within three seconds, they dropped their weapons.
They grabbed their throats, clawing at their own skin as the acid began to dissolve their mucous membranes. Blood poured from their noses. They fell to their knees, vomiting violently, their lungs drowning in their own fluids.
Through the toxic fog, Gabriel moved like an executioner.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Three suppressed shots from his pistol ended the thrashing on the floor.
The fifth shooter managed to scramble backward into the service corridor, his hands over his face, weeping blood.
He didn't make it to the broken door.
Declan was waiting for him in the hallway.
He was pale as a ghost, leaning his massive shoulder against the doorframe, the silver duct tape on his chest gleaming with fresh blood from his reopened wound. But in his right hand was a twenty-inch iron meat cleaver he had pulled from the drying rack.
The cleaver came down with a dull, sickening thwack.
The screaming stopped.
Declan let the cleaver drop into the bloody slush at his feet. He looked through the shattered doorway into the fog-filled kitchen, his chest heaving, his teeth bared in a terrifying grin.
"Good... good seasoning, Maeve," Declan wheezed, before his knees gave out and he slumped against the wall.
Gabriel ripped his mask off, coughing slightly as he stepped through the mudroom breach into the freezing ocean air. He grabbed a fresh radio from the vest of the dead squad leader on the floor and turned the dial to the tactical channel.
Static hissed. Then a voice came through—smooth, arrogant, and unmistakably cruel.
"Team One, report. Have you secured the house?"
Vincenzo Moretti.
Gabriel pressed the talk button. His voice was low, musical, and dripping with pure, unadulterated poison.
"Vincenzo," Gabriel whispered.
The radio went dead silent on the other end.
"Gabriel?" Moretti’s voice lost its arrogance, replaced by sudden, sharp tension. "Where are my men?"
"They're decorating the breakfast nook," Gabriel replied, watching Maeve step out into the rain, pulling her gas mask off to suck in the freezing Atlantic wind. Her face was smeared with black soot and sweat, but her green eyes were wide, clear, and utterly lethal.
"Tell Roman to hold his breath," Gabriel said into the mic. "Because the maid is coming for him. And she hates when people interrupt her prep work."
Gabriel let the radio drop onto the corpse’s chest and looked at Maeve.
"Can you drive an armored Suburban?" Gabriel asked.
May you like
Maeve looked at the dead men in the snow. Then she reached into her coat pocket, checked that her two hundred-dollar bills were still dry, and wiped her bloody hands on her apron.
"I learned to drive on the Mass Pike in a stolen Buick," Maeve said. "Get Declan in the back seat. We have thirty minutes before your brother’s timer runs out."
