Chapter 9 - The Siege of the Moretti Compound
The explosion threw Norah backward against the wall, plaster dust filling her lungs.
Ears ringing with a high, agonized whine, she shook the debris from her eyes. The room was illuminated only by the orange flicker of burning draperies. Gunfire erupted immediately—chaotic, blind, deafening bursts of automatic fire tearing through the smoke.
Through the haze, she saw Marcone’s men opening fire on the other Commission members. It wasn't a hit on the Morettis; it was a coup. Marcone was wiping out the entire leadership of the New York underworld in a single stroke.
Norah scrambled across the shattered parquet floor, coughing violently. "Vincenzo!"
The old man was on the floor. His chair had been blown sideways by the shockwave. He was struggling, pinned beneath a fallen section of heavy oak molding, his right leg trapped.
Norah reached him, hauling the heavy timber off his chest with a desperate surge of strength. "Vincenzo! Can you hear me?"
His eyes opened, clouded with dust but conscious. "Leo..." he choked out.
Across the room, Leo was waging a one-man war.
Using an overturned marble console as cover, he fired his Sig Sauer with surgical, terrifying precision, dropping two of Marcone’s shooters as they tried to breach the main doors. But he was pinned. Three assault rifles were chewing through the marble barrier, sending chunks of stone flying into his flesh.
"Service exit!" Leo roared through the din, catching Norah’s eye through the smoke. "Get him out! *Now!*"
Norah grabbed Vincenzo beneath his shoulders. "On your feet! We move or we die!"
The old man groggily pushed with his good arm. Norah bore his weight, hauling him up. But his right leg—weakened by the trauma of the blast—buckled completely. The knee gave way.
They crashed against the service door, tumbling out into a narrow, concrete stairwell that led down toward the loading dock.
Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs below them.
Norah froze, pulling Vincenzo behind a metal trash hopper. A shooter in a tactical mask rounded the landing, weapon raised.
Norah didn't think. She grabbed a heavy, industrial fire extinguisher mounted to the wall, unhooked it, and swung it with all the force of her torso.
The heavy cylinder caught the shooter square under the chin with a sickening *crunch*. The man’s head snapped back, his helmet flying off, and he tumbled backward down the entire flight of concrete stairs, landing motionless at the bottom.
Norah stood on the landing, gasping, her hands stinging from the impact.
Behind her, Vincenzo let out a low, ragged chuckle. "Good... girl."
Suddenly, the door at the top of the stairs blew open.
Marcone stepped through, an automatic pistol in his hand, his suit ripped, his face smeared with black soot. He saw Vincenzo and Norah huddled on the landing.
A cruel, triumphant grin split his butcher’s face. "End of the line, Vincenzo. Your boy is dead upstairs. The city belongs to me."
Marcone raised the weapon, leveling the barrel straight at Norah’s forehead.
Norah backed against the wall, her arms instinctively spreading wide to shield the paralyzed man behind her. Her heart slammed against her ribs. This was it.
"Move, little nurse," Marcone snarled, his finger tightening on the trigger. "Or you go first."
"No," Norah whispered, holding his gaze with absolute, unyielding defiance.
Then, a sound behind her made Marcone’s eyes widen.
Vincenzo Moretti wasn't leaning on the wall anymore.
The Don—stripped of his cane, his suit shredded, bleeding from a gash on his temple—stood completely upright.
He didn't use the handrail. He didn't use Norah.
Driven by an ancestral, primordial rage that defied all medical science, the damaged pathways in his brain ignited in a blinding neurological fury. Vincenzo lunged forward, his paralyzed right hand shooting out like a vice grip.
He caught Marcone’s gun wrist, twisting it upward just as the weapon discharged.
*BANG.*
The round embedded itself in the concrete ceiling.
Marcone shrieked in shock, but Vincenzo didn't stop. With his functioning left hand, the old mob boss drove the heavy obsidian handle of his recovered cane straight into Marcone’s throat.
Marcone choked, stumbling backward toward the edge of the stairwell.
A shadow dropped from the top landing.
Leo.
Drenched in blood, his shirt torn to ribbons, Leo arrived like the angel of death. He didn't use a firearm. He grabbed Marcone by the collar and belt, hoisted the two-hundred-pound mobster into the air, and hurled him over the concrete railing.
Marcone plummeted three stories down the stairwell shaft, his body striking the concrete basement floor with a final, wet, sickening thud.
Silence rushed back into the stairwell.
Leo stood on the landing, his chest heaving, his weapon lowered. He looked down at the dead rival boss, then turned his gaze up.
Vincenzo stood on the concrete step, his chest rising and falling, his right arm still raised in a striking posture. He looked at his son.
"It... is... done," Vincenzo said clearly.
Then, his strength finally depleted, the old king began to fall.
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Leo lunged forward, catching his father in his arms before he could hit the concrete. At the same moment, his other arm reached out, pulling Norah into the embrace, crushing both of them against his chest as the distant sirens of the New York Police Department began to wail through the night.
***
