Chapter 7 - The Wrath of Hale
Emma froze.
Her breath hitched in her throat. The barrel of the gun was so cold against her skin that it felt like a brand of ice.
Standing in the shadows of the concrete stairwell was a man in a tactical vest, blood smeared across his cheek, a suppressed automatic pistol clutched in his right hand. He wasn't one of Adrian’s security guards. The patch on his vest bore the jagged insignia of Moretti’s strike team.
"How’d you get out of the gas room?" the gunman sneered, his finger tightening slightly on the trigger. "Doesn't matter. The boss said nobody leaves this house alive once the vault codes are locked."
Emma’s mind raced. Panic was a luxury she didn't have. She remembered her brothers teaching her dirty street fighting on the asphalt of the South Side when she was twelve years old.
If someone has a gun on you, you don't bargain. You disrupt.
She didn't beg. She didn't scream.
She took a half-step forward—directly into the barrel of the gun—and slammed the heel of her hand upward into the base of the man's wrist with every ounce of strength she had left in her trembling arms.
Crack!
The gunman’s wrist snapped backward at an unnatural angle. A sharp cry of pain escaped his lips as the pistol slipped from his broken fingers, clattering loudly down the concrete steps.
Before he could recover, Emma threw her full plus-size weight forward, driving her shoulder square into his chest.
The gunman staggered backward, tripped over his own tactical boots, and tumbled backward down the remaining flight of concrete stairs, hitting the landing with a sickening, heavy thud.
He didn't move.
Emma stood at the top of the stairs, panting heavily, her wet hair plastered to her face, blood trickling from the cut on her forearm.
"Emma?"
A voice echoed from the bottom of the stairs.
Adrian Hale stood in the open doorway of the subterranean panic room. He didn't have his pistol drawn now. He held an assault rifle in a low, ready position, his gray eyes scanning the stairwell with lethal focus.
When he saw Emma standing there—drenched, bleeding, shivering violently, with the unconscious Moretti enforcer lying broken at the bottom of the steps—the absolute, terrifying stillness in Adrian’s face broke.
"Emma," he breathed, dropping the rifle to the concrete floor with a metallic clatter.
He vaulted up the stairs three at a time, grabbed her by the shoulders, and pulled her straight into his chest.
It wasn't a polite embrace. It was the desperate, crushing hold of a man who had just watched his entire world nearly burn to the ground and found one survivor standing in the ashes.
"You're bleeding," Adrian muttered, his hands moving frantically over her arms, checking for wounds, his voice shaking in a way Emma had never heard before. "What the hell were you thinking? I told you to stay in your room!"
"The... the gas," Emma managed to choke out through chattering teeth, her face buried against the warm wool of his sweater. "They burned the door. I had to cross the ledge."
Adrian’s arms tightened around her so hard it bruised her ribs, but she didn't care. She could feel the violent, rapid thumping of his heart against hers—proof that the cold, untouchable mafia kingpin of Chicago was just as terrified of losing her as she had been of losing him.
Walter stepped out of the panic room behind Adrian, leaning heavily on his cane, looking at the unconscious gunman and then at Emma with a look of profound, stunned respect.
"Well, I'll be damned," the old man muttered, shaking his head. "Adrian, if you don't marry this girl right now, I'm cutting you out of the will and leaving the shipping yards to her."
Adrian didn't laugh. He slowly pulled back, his hands cupping Emma’s face, his thumb gently wiping a smear of rain and soot from her cheekbone.
His gray eyes burned with a dark, terrifying promise.
"Moretti thinks he can wage war in my house," Adrian whispered, his voice dropping into a register that made the concrete walls seem to vibrate. "He thinks he can touch the people I care about."
He looked down at the broken gunman on the stairs, then back at Emma.
"Marcus!" Adrian bellowed toward the lower vault.
May you like
"Boss!" Marcus’s voice crackled over the intercom system.
"Clean out the estate. Leave nobody standing. And tell our teams in Cicero to take Moretti’s primary shipping terminal apart brick by brick until there's nothing left of his empire but dust."
