Domenico Falcone stepped into the atrium and froze at the sight of his daughter on the floor

*“Listen to me carefully, my son,”* Domenico’s transmission continued, the sound of helicopter blades thrumming faintly behind his voice. *“I have forty operators surrounding that bunker. You have no heavy weapons, no extraction, and no food. Bring the comb to the perimeter line. You will take the blame for the Atlantic shipments, as was always intended. Ruby will come with me to Sicily. She possesses the mathematical intellect you lack. She will run the European trust under my tutelage.”*

"She's twelve years old, Domenico," Vincent snarled.

*“I killed my first man at eleven,”* the old man replied coldly. *“You have ten minutes. Then the thermite shells begin.”*

The radio went dead.

Vincent turned to Caterina. "We don't have ten minutes. The moment he lands his strike team, they'll breach the ventilation shafts."

"We aren't surrendering Ruby," Caterina said, racking the slide of her assault rifle. "What's the play, Vincent?"

Ruby stood up from the crate. Her small face was pale, but her eyes possessed the unmistakable, terrifying steel of the Falcone bloodline. She walked over to the bank of auxiliary batteries.

"The radio tower," Ruby said, pointing up toward the ceiling conduit. "The high-voltage lines run directly through the roof array. If we connect the backup batteries in a series loop and short them through the grounding cables on the perimeter fence, the whole exterior grid will become an electrified barrier."

Vincent looked at his daughter, then at Caterina. A slow, lethal smile formed on his lips. "And while they focus on the perimeter, we take the subterranean drainage tunnel that empties onto the fjord."

"Where Domenico's helicopter has to land to stay out of the crosswinds," Caterina finished the thought. "We don't run from him. We hunt him."

Within six minutes, the bunker was rigged. Ruby spliced the heavy copper cables with surgical precision, utilizing the knowledge Vincent had drilled into her since she was seven. As the first team of Domenico’s black-clad mercenaries approached the perimeter fence with breaching cutters, Vincent slammed the master breaker.

A blinding cascade of sparks lit up the arctic night. The perimeter wire flared white-hot, sending hundreds of thousands of stored joules through the mercenaries' metal harnesses. Screams echoed across the permafrost as three operators collapsed in smoking heaps.

"Go!" Vincent commanded, lifting the iron grate in the floor.

They dropped into the drainage tunnel, wading through knee-deep freezing sludge as explosions began to hammer the concrete fortress behind them. Domenico’s men were blowing the front doors, expecting to find the family cowering inside.

Instead, Vincent, Caterina, and Ruby emerged from the coastal outlet three hundred yards away, directly behind the idling black Sikorsky gunship.

The two crew chiefs guarding the landing gear never heard them approach through the gale. Vincent dispatched the first with a silent combat blade strike to the throat; Caterina brought down the second with a suppressed double-tap to the center mass.