Chapter 7 - The Lioness at the Door
"Well, well," Vincenzo sneered, stepping into the beam of a tactical flashlight held by one of his men. His face was twisted into a malicious, arrogant grin as his eyes swept over Meline and the four terrified children cowering behind her. "The broken merchandise. Look at you, playing happy house with Dominic Romano's brats."
Meline immediately shifted her body, placing herself directly between Vincenzo's gun and the children. She held her arms out wide, shielding all four of them behind her back.
"Vincenzo," Meline spoke, her voice echoing coldly off the damp concrete walls of the basement corridor. "If you step one foot closer, Dominic will hunt you to the ends of the earth and skin you alive."
Vincenzo laughed—a harsh, grating sound. "Dominic is stuck thirty miles away in lower Manhattan, dealing with a federal port raid my men orchestrated. By the time he gets here, his four precious heirs will be at the bottom of the Long Island Sound, and you will be coming with me to pay off the rest of your father's debt."
Behind Meline, little Bianca sobbed softly, hiding her face in Meline's wool sweater. Luca stepped up beside Meline, his small fists clenched, his teeth gritted in fury. "Don't you touch her!"
"Get back, Luca," Meline commanded firmly without breaking eye contact with Vincenzo. She slowly reached into her dark jacket pocket.
When she had moved into the estate, Dominic had quietly placed a compact, high-caliber snub-nosed revolver into her nightstand drawer, instructing her on how to use it in case of an extreme emergency. She had carried it in her pocket every single day since her father's death.
"You always were an arrogant bastard, Vincenzo," Meline said, her tone dripping with venom. "You called me defective because I couldn't bear children. But you forgot one very important thing about women like me."
Vincenzo frowned, stepping closer, raising his gun. "What are you talking about?"
"A woman who cannot have her own children," Meline said, her fingers curling around the grip of the revolver inside her pocket, "will kill twice as hard to protect the ones she was given."
With blinding speed, Meline drew the revolver from her coat and fired three shots directly through the fabric of her coat.
The heavy hollow-point rounds struck Vincenzo square in the chest at point-blank range. The force of the impact slammed him backward into his mercenaries, his gun clattering onto the concrete floor as he collapsed in a pool of his own blood.
"Run!" Meline screamed to the children, grabbing Vincenzo's fallen gun from the floor with her free hand. "Into the safe room! Code 4-4-9-1!"
The three mercenaries, shocked by the sudden execution of their leader, raised their weapons to fire, but Meline fired two more rounds down the narrow corridor, forcing them to dive behind a concrete pillar for cover.
Luca grabbed Matteo, Sophia, and Bianca, shoving them through the heavy reinforced steel door of the panic room at the end of the hall. He stood at the threshold, holding the heavy door open, screaming at the top of his lungs: "Meline! Get in! Hurry!"
Meline backed down the corridor, firing her final two rounds to suppress the gunmen, then lunged through the steel door just as a hail of submachine-gun fire ripped through the wooden frames behind her.
Luca slammed the foot-thick vault door shut, and Meline shoved the heavy mechanical locking bar into place. The steel bolts clicked into the concrete frame with a massive, echoing thud.
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They were safe inside the impenetrable fortress vault.
Outside the door, the muffled sounds of gunfire were suddenly overwhelmed by a massive, terrifying roar of heavy engine noise and shattering glass from the upper floor. Dominic Romano had arrived.
