Chapter 28 - Blood for Blood
I hoisted Clara onto my back, locking her limp arms around my neck, and charged through the trailer doors into the stormy chaos of the yard.
The world outside had turned into an inferno.
Two shipping containers were burning furiously, casting massive orange shadows across the rail lines. Luca’s operators had eliminated the perimeter guards, but the heavy fire from the crane tower had ceased.
Because Mateo was no longer in the tower.
He had rappelled down to the ground level and was standing twenty yards away, blocking the only pathway to our extraction skiff. He held an automatic shotgun at his hip, rain pouring off the brim of his tactical cap.
"You really are a persistent little roach, aren't you, Sophie?" Mateo sneered, leveling the barrel straight at my chest. "Put the girl down. She belongs to the Council."
Before he could pull the trigger, a black shadow descended upon him from the top of an adjacent rail car.
It was Luca.
Luca slammed into Mateo with the kinetic force of a freight train, knocking the shotgun wild as it discharged a blast into the empty sky. Both men crashed into the muddy gravel, rolling and trading savage, bone-crushing blows.
"Traitor!" Luca snarled, mounting Mateo and driving a vicious left hook into the side of his skull. "I gave you my father's ring! I gave you my mother's protection!"
Mateo countered with a brutal knee to Luca's injured ribs, throwing him off. Mateo scrambled to his feet, pulling a serrated combat knife from his belt, blood streaming from his split brow. "Your father was a butcher! He built your precious empire on the corpses of men ten times better than him! And you... you threw it all away for a maid!"
Luca rose slowly, his breath ragged, his eyes glowing with an unholy, lethal calm. He drew his own blade. "She isn't my maid, Mateo. She’s the woman who keeps you from dying quickly."
Mateo lunged forward, thrusting the knife toward Luca’s throat in a blinding arc.
Luca didn't dodge backward. He stepped *into* the strike, trapping Mateo’s wrist with his left hand, absorbing a shallow slice across his own cheek without blinking. In the same fluid, horrifying motion, Luca drove his blade upward into Mateo’s armpit, bypassing the Kevlar armor and severing the axillary artery.
Mateo let out a wet, strangled gasp, his knife slipping from limp fingers.
Luca twisted the blade, stepped behind him, and forced Mateo to his knees in the mud. He leaned close to the dying man's ear, his voice deadly quiet above the falling rain.
"Tell the devils in hell that Luca Moretti sent you."
Luca drew the blade across Mateo’s throat with one clean, surgical pull.
Mateo slumped forward into the black, rain-soaked mud, his blood pooling into the river runoff.
Luca stood over him for a second, his chest heaving, rain washing the blood from his blade. Then, he turned to me and Clara.
May you like
"The skiff," Luca gasped, running toward us and scooping Clara effortlessly into his arms so I could keep my weapon ready. "We have to move. Now!"
***
