Chapter 6 - The Lakefront Incursion
The glass of the main conservatory shattered into ten thousand glittering spears as three men in black tactical gear pushed through the broken frame. They weren't street soldiers from Cicero; they were hired professionals from the eastern seaboard, their weapons equipped with heavy suppressors that turned the lethal cracks of the bullets into soft, rhythmic hisses against the limestone walls.
Marcus Hale was already down on one knee behind the marble kitchen island, his service weapon firing three rapid, precise shots that caught the lead invader in the chest, dropping him onto the broken glass. "Get them out!" Marcus roared toward the study corridor. "Dominic! The south wing! Now!"
Inside the study, Dominic didn't panic. His silver-gray eyes cleared instantly, the cold, mathematical processor in his brain executing a survival matrix in fractions of a second. He toggled his joystick, his chair moving with a sudden, violent velocity that slammed open the study doors.
"Elena, get the boys!" Dominic shouted, his chair flying down the hallway toward the south wing steel door.
Elena was already running. She burst into the south wing living room, where Leo and Lucas had crawled beneath the heavy mahogany sofa, their small faces pale with terror as the strange, muffled popping sounds echoed through the walls.
"Mommy!" Lucas cried, reaching his small hands out.
"Stay down, sweetie! Stay right there!" Elena gasped, grabbing both boys by their waists and pulling them into her chest as she turned back toward the corridor.
A man in a black mask stepped through the broken hallway door, his weapon tracking toward Elena’s back.
Before he could pull the trigger, Dominic’s carbon-fiber chair slammed into his knees at twenty miles an hour. The sheer momentum of the three-hundred-pound motorized vehicle fractured the man's patella with a sickening crack, throwing him backward against the limestone wall. Dominic didn't stop. He reached out with his left hand, his powerful, leather-gloved fingers catching the invader’s throat and slamming his head into the stone until the man went entirely limp.
"Inside!" Dominic roared, his chair blocking the entire width of the doorway as Elena scrambled past him into the steel-lined sanctuary of the south wing.
She hit the heavy emergency button on the interior wall. With a deep, definitive metallic crunch, the four-inch ballistic door slid into place, sealing them inside the safe zone just as three bullets hissed against the outer wood veneer.
The room was completely quiet now, the thick insulation absorbing the sound of the battle outside. Elena collapsed onto the floor, her arms wrapped tightly around Leo and Lucas, who were sobbing against her neck.
Dominic sat in the center of the room, his chest heaving with the exertion, his white linen shirt stained with gray soot and a spray of blood from the man in the hallway. He looked down at his useless legs, then at his hands, which were still slick with the grease of the invader’s uniform. He was the king of the waterfront, the man who controlled half the shipping lanes in the Great Lakes, and he was trapped in a box with his family while his enforcers died thirty feet away.
"They came from the lake," Dominic whispered, his silver eyes fixed on the blank steel wall. "Anthony Valenti didn't send them. He doesn't have the logistics for a maritime approach. This was the Chicago board. They found out about the trust transfers. They wanted the keys before the Munich money cleared the clearinghouse."
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Elena looked up from her sons, her dark eyes flashing with a sudden, brilliant clarity that completely erased her fear. "The trust isn't cleared yet, Dominic?"
"The final validation code is on the server in the main study," Dominic said, his voice flat with a terrible, fatalistic certainty. "Without it, the London accounts remain locked under my personal encryption. If they take that server, they don't just take my money, Elena. They take the twins' future."
