Chapter 20 - The Unholy Alliance
The vault exploded into sheer chaos. The remaining two mercenaries swung their weapons toward Vincent, but Vincent was already a whirlwind of lethal fury. He closed the twenty-foot gap in two blinding strides, firing on the move.
The second contractor took two rounds to the chest and collapsed. The third lunged with a combat knife, but Vincent caught his wrist, snapped the bone with an audible *crack*, and drove his own tactical blade directly beneath the man's ribcage, twisting once before dropping the lifeless body to the floor.
Angelo backed away, his face turning gray with absolute terror. He raised his ivory cane, attempting to bring it down, but Vincent caught the cane mid-air, ripped it from the old man's grasp, and shattered it across his knee.
Vincent grabbed Angelo by the throat with one hand, lifting the seventy-year-old Consigliere clean off his feet and slamming him against the reinforced steel vault door.
"Caterina wanted to run?" Vincent snarled, his face inches from Angelo’s, his eyes glowing with unadulterated savagery. "Caterina loved this family more than her own soul. I know my wife, Angelo. She would never leave Ruby behind. *Never.*"
Angelo choked, his feet dangling in the air, his face turning purple. He clawed weakly at Vincent’s iron grip.
"She... she didn't want... to run with me..." Angelo gasped, a desperate, mocking smirk cracking through his bloody lips. "She... she was taken, Vincent... By someone... bigger than you..."
Vincent tightened his grip, crushing the old man's windpipe. "Who took her?!"
Angelo reached into his coat pocket with trembling fingers, dropping a sleek, black metallic transponder onto the floor. It activated on impact, casting a blue holographic projection into the smoky air of the vault.
A man's face flickered to life in the hologram—a man with ice-blue eyes, a scar running across his mouth, and a Russian crest pinned to his military collar. Behind him, bound to a chair in an opulent room surrounded by armed men, was Caterina Falcone. She was alive, battered, but her eyes burned with the same fierce pride as her daughter’s.
The man in the hologram spoke in flawless, chilling English:
*"Good evening, Don Falcone. Angelo was merely my delivery boy. You have forty-eight hours to step down from the Commission, sign over the Eastern Seaboard shipping corridors, and deliver Donna Ruby to the port of Murmansk. If you do not... your wife will die first. And your daughter will be raised by the Vor v Zakone."*
The projection cut out.
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Vincent stood frozen in the vault, his hand still wrapped around Angelo’s dying neck. Behind him, Ruby slowly picked herself up from the floor, clutching her bloodstained swallow comb, looking at her father with eyes that demanded retribution.
The phone in Vincent's tactical vest began to vibrate with an unknown international frequency.
