Chapter 6 - The Dragon Awakes
When the phone rang in Luca Moretti’s private office at the Riviera Casino, he answered on the first ring.
"Boss," Vic’s raspy, blood-choked voice came through the speaker, accompanied by the distant wail of police sirens. "They got her... Vance’s crew... ambush near the medical center... dump truck..."
Luca didn't scream. He didn't break the phone in his hand. He didn't hurl furniture across the room.
Instead, every drop of blood in his body seemed to turn to pure, liquid ice. The cold, lethal authority that had kept Atlantic City under his heel for fifteen years descended over him with terrifying finality.
"Is she injured, Vic?" Luca asked, his voice deathly quiet.
"I... I don't think so," Vic coughed. "She was conscious when they took her. Vance ran the op himself."
"Stay where you are. My medics are on the way to you," Luca said smoothly.
He hung up the phone, stood up, and walked over to the tall steel safe embedded in the wall behind his leather armchair. He punched in a six-digit code and swung the heavy door open.
Inside lay two custom-built black handguns, three tactical knives, and a satellite tracking terminal.
Luca picked up the satellite terminal, pressing a sequence of keys.
Four weeks ago, anticipating that Dominic Vance might attempt a desperate play, Luca had discreetly instructed Maria to sew a microscopic, military-grade GPS tracking chip into the inner lining of Claire’s favorite maternity coat.
A small, pulsating red dot instantly materialized on the terminal’s digital map.
The dot was moving north along Route 9, heading toward an abandoned meatpacking plant in the marshlands near Absecon Inlet—a notorious stronghold used by Philadelphia mobsters in the 1980s.
Luca picked up his phone and dialed a three-digit private speed dial.
"Tony," Luca spoke into the receiver, his voice dropping into a register that sounded like grinding steel. "Assemble thirty men. Full tactical gear. Heavy weapons. Meet me at the Absecon marshlands in twenty minutes."
"Boss?" Tony’s voice sounded surprised. "What about the police? What about the federal prosecutors?"
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Luca strapped a shoulder holster across his chest, sliding a heavy firearm into place with a crisp click.
"The police aren't coming to this, Tony," Luca said, his gray eyes burning with an incandescent, lethal fury. "Dominic Vance made a fatal mistake. He thought I was a businessman. Today, I am going to remind Philadelphia why my father named me after the dragon."
