Chapter 58 - Unfinished Business
The silence in the penthouse was heavier than the gunfire had been.
I dropped to my knees beside the empty bed, clutching Maya’s discarded stuffed rabbit to my chest. The scent of her baby shampoo still lingered on the fabric. Tears blurred my vision, hot and suffocating. Five years of hiding in cramped apartments, working double shifts, skipping meals so she could have fresh fruit, running through train stations in the dead of night—all of it undone in a single heartbeat.
"Elena," Vincent’s voice was steady, but beneath it lay a tremor of absolute devastation.
He walked over, his boots stepping over the shattered glass of a framed photograph on the floor. He knelt down beside me, wrapping his arm around my shaking shoulders, pulling me firmly against his chest.
"They won't hurt her," Vincent said, his voice dropping to a gravelly, lethal certainty. "She is the key to two billion dollars. Until they have your signature on the proxy documents, Maya is the most valuable living creature on this planet."
"They took her, Vincent!" I sobbed into his collar, gripping his suit jacket. "They took my baby!"
"They took *our* daughter," he corrected fiercely, forcing me to look up into his dark, unwavering eyes. "And they made the fatal mistake of leaving me alive to hunt them."
Vincent pulled the radio earpiece from his pocket, switching channels to the emergency syndicate frequency.
"Salvatore," Vincent commanded into the mic. "Assemble the Capos in the inner courtyard. Bring Antonio from the cells. If anyone hesitates, shoot them on sight."
"Vincent?" Salvatore’s panicked voice crackled back. "What happened? The power grid—"
"The New York families have breached the perimeter," Vincent cut him off with razor-sharp authority. "They took Maya. And the war Cesare delayed twenty-five years ago begins tonight."
Vincent stood, extending his hand to help me up. I took it, wiping the tears from my cheeks with the back of my bruised hand. The fear inside me was burning away, replaced by an icy, merciless resolve.
May you like
"What do we do?" I asked, my voice steadying.
"We find the rat who opened the service gates," Vincent said, chambering a fresh magazine into his sidearm. "Then we burn New York to the ground."
