Chapter 1 - The Blood On The GateThe heavy mahogany dining table felt cold beneath my palm, but the four small faces looking up at me were warm, terrifyingly real, and unmistakably mine.
"Boss!" my security chief’s voice screamed through the radio on my lapel, distorted by static and rising gunfire. "They’re forcing the iron gates! Main entrance security has been breached!"
The distant crunch of heavy steel giving way echoed across the fifty-acre estate, followed by the metallic chatter of automatic weapons.
Elena threw her arms around all four boys, pulling their small bodies against her apron, shielding them beneath her own frame. The smallest one—the boy who had held up Sofia’s photograph—clutched my wife's faded picture against his chest, his brown eyes wide with a quiet, heartbreaking trust as he stared at me.
"Alejandro," Elena rasped, her tears cutting clean tracks through the dust on her cheeks. "If they breach this house, your bloodline dies today. Sofia didn't spend five years living in a windowless basement in Maine just for her boys to be slaughtered in your dining room!"
"Living in a basement...?" The words tasted like ash in my mouth. "Sofia lived for five years after she disappeared?!"
"She lived until four months ago!" Elena wept. "Her heart failed from the infection she caught during her labor! She made me swear on her grave that I would bring the quadruplets to your mansion only when I had the proof of who paid the hitmen!"
"Say his name, Elena!" I roared over the sound of breaking glass near the east wing. "SAY HIS NAME!"
Elena looked toward the grand arched doorway of the dining room, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper that made my blood freeze solid in my veins.
"Dominic," she whispered. "Your brother."
Dominic Moretti. My younger brother. The man who sat on my right at every council meeting, the man who managed our secondary holding companies, the man who had wept on my shoulder at Sofia’s empty casket five years ago.
BOOM!
The double doors of the grand foyer exploded inward. Heavy tactical boots thundered across the Italian marble floorboards toward the dining room.
I didn't hesitate. I reached down, scooped two of my sons under my left arm, grabbed the other two with my right, and shoved them toward the narrow service elevator behind the oak pantry.
"Get them into the panic room beneath the wine cellar, Elena!" I commanded, my storm-gray eyes flashing with an apocalyptic fury that made her instantly obey. "Lock the iron hatch from the inside and don't open it for anyone except me!"
"Alejandro!" she cried, pulling the four boys into the small metal elevator. "Dominic brought thirty men!"
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I pulled a second silver sidearm from my shoulder holster, racking the slide with a clean, heavy CLICK.
"Then thirty men are going to die in my house," I promised.
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