THE CEO MAFIA BOSS WAS DINING ALONE… UNTIL HE SAW HIS EX WITH THREE IDENTICAL CHILDREN!

By 8:00 PM, the Red Hook warehouse was completely dark from the outside. The massive steel plates had slid down over every window, turning the building into a featureless brick box against the black river.

Inside, the only light came from the small green tactical lamps the soldiers had placed at the corners of the main hallway.

The boys were asleep in the interior pantry, the safest room in the building, protected by four layers of reinforced concrete. I had given them three doses of children’s allergy syrup to keep them under, their small bodies stacked on a pile of wool blankets between cases of bottled water and canned tomatoes.

I stood in the kitchen, a small silver revolver—Dominic’s first gift to me when we were twenty-two—heavy in my hand.

The sound came from the river side.

It wasn't a gunshot. It was the low, rhythmic thrum of an industrial barge engine slowing down as it approached the old wooden pier behind the warehouse.

"They're coming by water," I whispered into the tactical radio Dominic had left on the counter.

"I know," Dominic’s voice cracked back through the speaker. "They think the river side is the weak point because of the loading doors. Stay in the kitchen, Elena. If the steel gives way, you take the boys through the sewer line behind the boiler."

The first explosion shook the building’s foundation.

The masonry over the stove cracked, a shower of white dust falling into the copper pans. The sound of automatic fire erupted from the pier—a steady, deafening roar that sounded like a jackhammer tearing up the concrete outside.

I didn't run to the boiler room.

I ran to the main monitor room. The cameras on the river side were still live, showing three black zodiac boats docked against our pier. Twenty men in dark rain jackets were pouring onto the wooden deck, their rifles spitting yellow flame against the warehouse’s rear steel door.

Dominic was standing behind a low stack of industrial wood pallets near the entrance, the Benelli shotgun in his hand firing with a rhythmic, thunderous BOOM... BOOM... BOOM.

Every time the shotgun flared, a man on the pier went down into the dark water.

But there were too many of them.

A man in a yellow slicker—Alberto Rosetti himself—stepped out of the largest zodiac boat, a heavy grenade launcher cradled in his arms. He didn't look at the soldiers; he looked up at the upper windows where the children had been sleeping an hour before.

"Verano!" Rosetti’s voice boomed over the sound of the rain, amplified by a megaphone. "You’ve got three minutes to bring the bastards out to the dock! If you give me the bloodline, you keep the shipping terminals! If you don't, I’ll blow this brick pile into the river with you inside!"

Dominic didn't answer with words. He stood up from behind the pallets, his face covered in soot and blood, and fired his last three shells directly into the yellow slicker’s chest.

The rounds hit Rosetti’s body armor with a heavy thwack, throwing him back into the boat, but he didn't go under. He scrambled back up, his face twisted into a demonic, screaming mask, and raised the launcher toward the warehouse door.

"Fire!" Rosetti shrieked.

I didn't look at the screen anymore. I hit the master override switch on the console—the one Margaret Chen had explained to me when she gave me the security fob for the sub-basement elevators.

It wasn't a lock switch.

It was the control for the commercial water intake pumps that fed the building’s old industrial cooling systems from the river.

The massive steel valves beneath the pier groaned as they flew open. Ten thousand gallons of freezing harbor water were pulled into the secondary drainage pipes every second, creating a violent, artificial whirlpool directly beneath the three zodiac boats.

The pier didn't give way. The boats did.

The largest zodiac was sucked into the concrete intake grate with a horrific sound of tearing rubber and twisting metal. The men inside were thrown into the churning, black vortex of the river, their weapons lost in the silt before they could clear their holsters.

Rosetti screamed as his yellow slicker was caught in the iron gears of the main valve, his body pulled down into the dark water until the megaphone went silent with a wet, gurgling pop.