Chapter 4 - The Hunter’s Reckoning
The speedometer of Dominic’s black armored SUV passed ninety-five miles per hour as he cleared the ramp onto the Schuylkill Expressway. The twin-turbo engine roared beneath the reinforced hood, hydroplaning through inches of standing water, throwing towering rooster tails of spray into the night.
Dominic held the leather-wrapped steering wheel with a grip so violent his knuckles were bone-white. The dashboard displays glowed red in sport mode, the GPS estimating twelve minutes to the estate.
*Twelve minutes.*
In twelve minutes, an entire world could burn to ash.
"Pick up," Dominic snarled into the hands-free console. "Pick up the damn phone, Frank!"
A static-heavy click came through the speakers, followed immediately by the staccato *crack-crack-crack* of nine-millimeter gunfire and the sound of shattering glass.
"Boss!" Frank’s voice was gasping, wet with exertion. "We dropped three of them on the terrace! But they had thermite charges! They blew the conservatory doors completely off the hinges! The east wing is on fire!"
"Where is she, Frank?" Dominic bellowed, weaving the three-ton SUV through two terrified semi-trucks on the highway, the tires screaming against the asphalt. "Where is Claire?"
"She's in the second-floor library!" Frank yelled over another burst of gunfire. "The safe room mechanism jammed when the power grid took a hit from the blast! Mrs. Keller took a piece of shrapnel to the thigh—she's down in the hallway! Claire dragged her into the library and barricaded the oak doors with the grandfather clock! Vance’s point man is working a sledge against the hinges right now!"
"Hold them!" Dominic roared. "Do not let them cross that threshold, Frank! I am four minutes out! I will skin every man on that lawn alive!"
"We're trying, Boss—*argh!*"
The line erupted into a chorus of shouted curses, the heavy *thump* of a shotgun discharge, and then dead, hollow static.
Dominic slammed his fist against the steering wheel, leaving a crack across the plastic casing. He reached down to the floorboard beside his seat and unlocked the steel lockbox bolted between the consoles.
He pulled out a customized Remington 870 short-barreled shotgun, racked the slide to chamber a three-inch magnum slug, and checked the side-saddle for extra shells. Next to it lay his customized Kimber .45 1911—the heavy, unyielding iron he had sworn to leave behind when he took Claire Bennett down the aisle of St. Patrick’s.
*Respectability was a suit you put on.*
Well, the suit was shredded now. The blood was back on the waterfront, and Dominic Vale was going home.
He took the exit off the river drive at seventy miles an hour, the rear tires fishtailing on the slick autumn leaves before biting into the asphalt. He smashed through the bent wrought-iron wreckage of the estate’s south gates without tapping the brakes, sending mangled metal spinning into the shrubbery.
The estate looked like a war zone.
The glass conservatory where Claire had arranged her white roses five hours earlier was a blackened, smoking crater. Bright orange flames licked out of the ground-floor library windows, casting demonic, dancing shadows across the wet lawn. Two black sedans sat idling near the circular fountain, their doors hanging open. Three bodies lay motionless in the mud beside the boxwood hedges.
Dominic didn't stop the SUV. He rammed the front bumper directly into the side of the first enemy sedan, spinning it two hundred degrees into the stone fountain with a deafening screech of crushing sheet metal.
Dominic kicked his door open before the SUV had even come to a complete halt.
A man in tactical black stepped out from behind the burning portico, raising an MP5 submachine gun toward the driver's side.
Dominic didn't blink. He raised the Remington with one arm and pulled the trigger.
The three-inch magnum slug hit the gunman square in the chest plate, lifting him clean off his boots and throwing him backward through the shattered glass of the entrance foyer.
Dominic racked the slide with a brutal, mechanical rhythm. *Clack-clack.*
He charged through the front doors into the smoke-filled foyer. The grand crystal chandelier that Claire had spent three weeks cleaning for the Christmas relief drive was swinging wildly, several of its crystal pendants smashed on the marble floor. Smoke hung thick and yellow in the air, smelling of burning plaster, gasoline, and cordite.
At the foot of the sweeping staircase lay one of Dominic’s security guards, unconscious, his arm broken.
From the second-floor gallery came the heavy, rhythmic *boom... boom... boom* of an iron sledgehammer striking the reinforced oak doors of the master library.
Dominic bounded up the stairs three at a time, moving with an impossible speed for a man of his size. The sheer, primal fury pulsing through his veins deadened all fatigue, all hesitation.
At the end of the long portrait gallery stood two men.
One was a thick-necked mercenary holding a twelve-pound sledge, bringing it down against the cracked center panel of the library door. The other was standing guard with a suppressed tactical pistol, shouting encouragement.
The guard turned his head just as Dominic cleared the top of the stairs.
The guard’s eyes went wide with sudden, sickening realization. He raised his pistol, but he was already too late.
Dominic fired the shotgun from the hip. The blast caught the guard across the shoulder, spinning him violently into the wall, where he left a bloody smear before collapsing onto the runner rug.
The man with the sledgehammer dropped the tool, reaching frantically for a sidearm strapped to his thigh.
Dominic didn't waste another shell. He closed the twenty-foot distance in three strides, grabbed the mercenary by his tactical vest, and drove his two-hundred-and-thirty-pound frame directly into the man, slamming him against the burning banister.
The wood groaned. Dominic drove his Kimber .45’s heavy steel slide into the man’s nose, shattering cartilage.
"Who sent you?" Dominic growled, his face inches from the bleeding mercenary's eyes. "Did Vance come himself?"
"Go to hell, Vale," the man spat, blood bubbling over his lips. "She's already dead inside that smoke."
Dominic didn't argue. He shoved the man over the broken banister.
The mercenary fell twenty feet down into the marble foyer, landing with a sickening, wet crack that signaled the end of his fighting days.
Dominic turned to the library door.
The center panel was cracked wide enough to see through. Thick, black smoke was billowing out of the gap, accompanied by the bright, terrifying crackle of flames eating through the antique pine paneling inside.
"Claire!" Dominic roared, throwing his shoulder against the oak frame. "Claire, open the door! It’s Dominic!"
Inside, there was a muffled crash. Then, a ragged, coughing voice: "Dominic?"
"Get down!" Dominic yelled.
He stepped back, raised his boot, and kicked the lock mechanism with everything he had. The heavy brass deadbolt tore free from the splintered doorjamb with a violent snap, and the doors flew inward.
The library was an inferno.
The velvet drapes had caught fire, sending waves of suffocating heat rolling across the ceiling. Books were burning on the lower shelves, their leather bindings sizzling.
On the floor, huddled in the far corner beneath the massive oak desk, was Claire.
She had wrapped a wet wool blanket around Mrs. Keller, who was pale, clutching a tourniquet around her thigh. In Claire’s right hand was a heavy bronze statue of an eagle—her knuckles white, her face covered in black soot, her hair singed at the temples.
She had been prepared to fight whoever walked through that door with a six-pound piece of metal.
When she saw Dominic standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the gallery fire with a smoking shotgun in his hand and tears carving clean tracks through the soot on his cheeks, the bronze eagle slipped from her fingers, thumping heavily onto the Persian rug.
"Dominic," she whispered, her voice choking on the smoke.
Dominic dropped the shotgun. He fell to his knees in the burning room, lunging across the floor and gathering her into his arms with an intensity that took the remaining air from her lungs.
He buried his face in her soot-covered neck, kissing her hair, her forehead, her cheeks, his large hands frantically checking her shoulders, her arms, her ribs.
"Are you hit?" he demanded, his voice shaking with a terror he had never felt in any alley or boardroom. "Did they shoot you? Claire, look at me! Did they hurt you?"
"No," she sobbed, throwing her arms around his neck, burying her face into his wet leather coat. "No, I'm okay. Mrs. Keller... she was bleeding, Dominic. I had to stop the bleeding."
"I have you," Dominic wept, lifting her up off the floor as if she weighed nothing at all. "I have you, sweetheart. You're safe. You're never going to burn again."
He turned to Mrs. Keller. "Can you hold onto my shoulder, Martha?"
The sixty-year-old housekeeper gave a weak, defiant nod. "I’ve survived thirty years of your cooking, Dominic. I can survive an alderman’s hit squad."
Dominic scooped Mrs. Keller up under his left arm, kept Claire locked securely against his right side, and carried them both out of the burning room, down the grand staircase, and through the shattered foyer out onto the rain-swept lawn.
Marcus and Frank were waiting with two ambulances, the red and white emergency lights painting the burning mansion in violent, rhythmic pulses.
Medics rushed forward, taking Mrs. Keller onto a stretcher.
Dominic refused to let go of Claire. He sat on the tailgate of Marcus’s SUV in the pouring rain, holding his wife in his lap, wrapping her in a dry thermal blanket. He ignored the EMT who tried to bandage the cut across his own forehead.
"Dominic," Marcus said, stepping through the rain. His face was gray. "The dock terminal. Terminal Four."
Dominic slowly lifted his head. His eyes were no longer those of a man who had been terrified for his wife. They were the eyes of an executioner who had run out of patience with the world.
"What about Terminal Four?"
"Vance didn't just send the hit squad here as an assassination," Marcus said quietly. "It was a diversion. While we were pulled out to protect the estate, Vance’s main force took the logistics control tower at the deep-water berth. He has four fuel barges wired to the loading cranes. He sent a message via the harbor radio."
Marcus held out a handheld receiver.
Dominic clicked the button.
A raspy, arrogant voice crackled through the speaker: *"Vale. You survived the house. Good for you. You always were a hard dog to put down. But your little empire ends tonight. If you don't surrender the deed to Terminal Four and clear the river for my tankers by dawn, I am going to detonate sixty thousand gallons of industrial diesel right next to your relief ships. Half the waterfront will burn to the waterline. Let’s see what your precious foundation thinks of you then."*
Claire leaned against Dominic's chest, her hand reaching up to touch his jaw. She looked into his eyes—the eyes that the entire city feared—and she saw the terrible choice he was facing.
Save the docks. Or stay with her.
"Dominic," Claire whispered softly, her voice steady despite the soot on her lips. "He tried to kill you on Pier Twelve. He tried to burn us alive in our home tonight. He will never stop coming for you. And he will never stop coming for the people who depend on you."
She reached down, took his large, calloused right hand, and pressed it against her right flank—firmly, directly over the scar on her back.
She didn't flinch. She leaned into the pressure of his palm.
"I took that round so you could finish building what you started," she said, her eyes blazing with fierce, unbreakable devotion. "Don't let him burn our city, Dominic. Go down to that river and finish it."
Dominic looked at his wife. In that moment, sitting in the cold rain beside the smoking ruins of his house, he knew he was looking at the only queen who could ever rule beside him.
He leaned down and kissed her with a fierce, possessive passion that tasted of smoke, rain, and iron.
"I will be back before sunrise," Dominic swore against her lips. "And when I return, Claire, there will not be a single ghost left on that river."
He stood up, placed her safely into the hands of Elena Ramos inside the armored medical transport, turned to Marcus, and racked the slide of his Kimber .45.
May you like
"Get the boat," Dominic said. "We're going to Pier Twelve."
***
